The Real Me

Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast

Episode 26

The Real Me

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Adventures in Sustainable Living Podcast. The is your host Patrick and this is episode # 26 title The Real Me.

What I want to accomplish in this episode is to give my listeners an in-depth background on where I came from and how I got to be where I am today. And at the end of this episode, I want to leave you with an important message that will help you to drive some positive changes in your own life.

Now I have been working on this podcast for about a year now. As you can imagine there was a bit of a learning curve in the beginning and it took me several months to get the podcast off the ground, published, and for me to start producing content on a regular basis. So the podcast has been live for about 7 months. I also have a companion blog called Off Grid Living News which is geared toward giving people all the tools and skills needed to live off the grid. That blog has been live for about 3 years.

If there is one thing I have learned in working on the blog and the podcast, is that people appreciate hearing from someone who actually has the background experience. People enjoy, and perhaps trust in a person who has actually been there done that.

But for me as a blogger and a podcaster, as you can likely imagine I am constantly reading articles and researching topics on living off the grid and sustainability. I do this not only to produce original, in-depth, value added content, but also because I want to find out more about other people’s experiences. This helps me when I am producing content to at least give a broader view of the topic and not just what is limited to my personal experience.

But I have to tell you in all the articles and research that I do, it has become so easy for me to tell if the person who wrote the article is producing that bit of content based on personal experience or just from doing research.

So, the point of this episode is to simply give my listeners a deeper perspective on who I am, where I came from, and how I live on a day-to-day basis. I thought it was perhaps about time that I did something like this so that my listeners would know once and for all that I am the real deal. So when I talk about a zero waste lifestyle, I am actually living it. When I first introduced the concept of a 2000 watt society, I took the time to analyze my own lifestyle to see if I was actually living within that concept. When I published my episode titled How Much Should One Person Be Allowed to Use, you can rest assured that I maximize the use of the resources that I have and I use as little as possible.

But what I want to do is go give my listeners a bit of an in-depth perspective of where I came from and why I choose to live the way I do.

I was born in north Georgia and spent a great deal of my childhood on the farm. There were actually two working farms in my family. Both sets of my grandparents lived through the Great Depression. This of course had a huge impact on how my parents were raised.

Growing up, they seemed to pass that experience along to myself and my siblings. I spent a great deal of my summers working on the one farm or the other. We always had a huge garden, raised chickens, turkeys, rabbits, cattle, horses and pigs.

Then at home, we also had a large garden. Often times, if we could not produce enough food for ourselves, we would then go to the local farmers market and purchase vegetables by the bushel. We would then literally spend days cutting, washing, blanching, steaming and canning vegetables. When it came to meat, I remember my parents would purchase a whole beef from one of my grandparents and this was more than enough to stock the freezer.

Besides this, we went on fishing trips for several days at a time. We would often come back with 50 or more fish and set up an assembly line for processing. Then the fish went into the freezer. But we also went on foraging trips to collect berries and nuts. Wild black berries were abundant. Walnut tress were plentiful. My grandparents also had numerous apple trees so we could harvest apples and can them.

At one point in time, my mother actually worked for a supermarket and would get discount goods. Other than that, I have no memory of actually eating store bought meat until I moved away from home.

I ended up in Colorado in 1979, which was actually a random choice. I wanted to move out of the South and Colorado was a random choice. Initially I worked construction. Then I went in to the computer industry. After 6 years of that, I sent into fire department and search and rescue work as well as some other things. It was 1983 when I bought my first cabin in the mountains above Boulder, Colorado and it was at this point I started making efforts to be as self sufficient as possible.

It was about 6 years later, roughly about 1989, I sold that place and moved to northern Colorado to continue my schooling and eventually into veterinary school.

But, during all of that time, I was constantly outdoors hiking, climbing, back packing, doing survival training and practicing my skills. I started learning as much as possible about home canning, drying fruit, and learning even more about processing my own meat. And all the while looking, looking, and looking for a piece of property I could purchase and build my own cabin.

I had been out of veterinary school for about 6 months or so when a long-term friend of mine called me and said he had just purchased 37 acres of land which he loved. And there was another parcel of land for sale close to his property. It was 46 acres. I was actually working in Arizona at the time. And to make a long story short, I flew back to Colorado to see the property. I did not have near the amount of money the owner wanted up front so he declined my offer. So, I went back to AZ and forgot about it.

Six months later I resigned my position and moved back to CO. I asked my friend Jim if the property was still on the market and he said yes. I met with the owner and made him another offer which he accepted. After giving him the down payment, I had enough money in the bank to make the first payment and then I was tapped out. AND, I had no job at the time and no offers for employment.

However, in less than one week I scored a full time position with a local specialty hospital doing emergency work. I was to start work in 3 weeks, which was perfect. That gave me enough time to figure out how I was going to live on the property. Initially my land payments were kind of steep and I could not afford to pay rent and make the land payment. It was raw land so there were no structures on the property. So, I had to think fast and be very creative. Not only did I have to figure out how to live on the property, I had to start cabin construction right away.

So initially I was living out of my backpacking tent which was set up under a large lean-to type structure. This eventually turned into and 200 square foot wall tent with a wood stove. Meanwhile I started selectively harvesting timber off the property and started construction of the log cabin. This took about 5 months to build the initial portion of the cabin and I moved into the cabin the first part of February in 1997. At this point I had been living in the wall tent for 5 months, at 10,000 elevation, in the winter. Even after moving into the cabin, I had no electricity or running water.

After experimenting with numerous things, I eventually installed propane lights. During my second winter at the cabin, I started excavating a cellar, because I needed to way to refrigerate food, keep it from freezing, and keep it away from the bears. Oh and all the up close and personal encounters with bear and mountain lions is a completely different story.

So the plan was to build the cellar, then put an addition onto the back of the cabin, which was the north side. The addition was to go over the top of the entrance to the cellar so that I could access the cellar from inside the cabin. While cellar construction was underway, I was also harvesting logs, peeling them and stacking them to dry so I could build the addition during good weather. Then about a year later I took me about 3 to 4 months to build the addition to the cabin. Now that was a lot of hard, heavy physical labor. I was eating 6 large meals a day and still loosing weight.

It was shortly after this that I put in my first, albeit very small, solar array. I felt as if I were slowly creeping into the 20th century. Now you have to understand that there were a number of year there at the cabin when my life was very difficult. I would leave sometimes for 6 months in the winter and go work in southern AZ again. Life was much easier for a few months. Also, I did not have a 4 wheel drive vehicle at the time, much less a snow plow, so I was hiking in and out a lot. So, I would take breaks from my lifestyle and go work somewhere warm for a bit and make as much money as I could.

Eventually I purchased a second home in South Carolina. I had gotten licensed in a couple of state in the South and was going down to work on a regular basis and spending time with family. At the time, my parents were aging, having health problems, so I truly wanted to spend as much time with them as possible. My long-time partner Annette eventually moved down with her son.

But, I was also going back and forth to the cabin and constantly working on projects. I think it was about 6 years into having this house, my father had passed away some time ago, and then my mother died as well. It was about this time that Annette finished her undergrad degree, I put the house in SC on the market, and Annette got offered a job in Saint Kitts. About 2 years prior to this, I had already started construction on a second cabin.

But you also have to understand that while in SC, we had a large garden, did a lot of canning, drying of fruit, freezing, and we were raising our own chickens for meat and eggs. But over a period of several years, we had slowly been putting things into place to make huge improvements at the cabin, and to make it much easier for us to live there. And while we were as self sufficient as we could be in SC, we truly wanted to move back to the cabin and be completely off the grid again, and raise as much of our own food as possible.

So, while Annette spent time out of the country, over a period of two year, I finished the new cabin, built a new storage shed, a large woodshed, a chicken barn, and a 600 square foot earth sheltered green house. I also took an extensive hands on class in solar design and installation and installed a 1.7 kilowatt solar array at the cabin. Both cabins had previously been wired and connected together so both structures could be run off the same electrical array.

So, that is the basic story of how we came to live off the grid as a family. We still raise our own chickens and turkeys, the cellar is packed with home canned goods, we have an extensive garden every year. Everything we have is run off of solar energy. Our food, wood, and propane supply is sufficient to last us several years if needed. And we do that so that we are not subject to huge fluctuations in the market and what is going on with the economy, for most recently the pandemic. We can easily sit back and purchase things in bulk at significant discount. We have the ability to produce a significant amount of our own food. And this gives us a lot of personal security as well.

So basically, we produce all of our own electricity. We have a composting septic system, we have direct access to a stream for water. We produce purified water for less the 2 cents per gallon. And we produce, process, can and store a significant amount of our own food.

We literally use 80% less resources than the average American family. I figured out that the greatest environmental impact that we have is our gas consumption due to the amount of commuting that we do. And once I figured that out, I got creative and reduced my commuting by 50% to 60%. Additionally, we make a lot of our own products at home such as laundry detergent, dish soap, personal soap, shampoo bars. And as we learn more, our list keeps getting longer and longer of all the things we no longer purchase at the supermarket.

And the plan for this year is to add a 200 square foot sun room on the south facing side of the new cabin so that we can take advantage of the passive solar and thus reduce our consumption of wood. We are also going add several more solar panels so we have the ability to once again run food dehydrators. So, yet another way to preserve and store food.

But you want to know something interesting? I have been living like this for almost 25 years and I am still learning. Once I started this podcast, I also started reading and researching so many other things that I’d never thought about before. I also leaned that despite how I lived, I still had an impact on the environment. I keep learning more and more ways to reduce my impact and live sustainably.

So, the point here is that living sustainably is a process not an end point. It is a lifestyle that you choose. It is more akin to a journey not a destination. And as you can see, I have been on such a journey for the last 25 years. Now I have no expectation that everyone should live the way I choose to live. But, all you have to do is decide to make one little change at a time. And if you did so, imagine how different your life would be 5 years from now.

Now if you listened to my last episode titled The Keystone Life of Coral, you know that the changes in our oceans and the threat to our environment due to the loss of the world’s coral reefs is real.

But you see, it is not about the coral anymore. It is about the condition of our entire planet. In fact it is about the fate of the next generation. Yet the world hurdles along toward that cliff, passing the sign that says “Danger. Cliff ahead” and we look at each other and say “Well, it hasn’t happened yet.”

You know, Annette and I talked the other day about making some changes in our lives. But this is something we talk about frequently. But we are also in the process of putting together classes and workshops on sustainability, health and wellness. And we are kind of at that tipping point where we are going to force some things to change with our present careers in order to have a lifestyle closer to what and how we want to live.

She said something to me that I thought was really important. And this is the final thought I want to leave you with in this episode. And I hope this will encourage you a make some changes in your life.

So, here is what she said to me. “Nothing changes if nothing changes.”

So, what this means is that the things in your life that you are frustrated about are never going to change unless you take the first step to make some changes. The same is true with sustainability. You are never going to live a more sustainable life unless you take the necessary steps to make some changes. You simply cannot focus on what the rest of the world is doing. You have to take the first steps completely on your own.

At least after this episode you now know that I do in fact practice what I teach. I do not simply research topics on the web that I know nothing about and then try to teach it from the aspect of being an expert. For example, I talked extensively about coral because I am an active scuba diving instructor and I actually see and experience those changes in the coral reefs. I see the impact of trash and human activity. I see the impact of the wasteful lifestyle that most of us have.

So, that is my closing thought here. Nothing changes if nothing changes.

This is your host Patrick signing off until next week. Always remember to live sustainably because this is how we build a better future.

I thought it was perhaps about time that I did something like this so that my listeners would know once and for all that I am the real deal. So when I talk about a zero waste lifestyle, I am actually living it. When I first introduced the concept of a 2000 watt society, I took the time to analyze my own lifestyle to see if I was actually living within that concept. When I published my episode titled How Much Should One Person Be Allowed to Use, you can rest assured that I maximize the use of the resources that I have and I use as little as possible.

But what I want to do is go give my listeners a bit of an in-depth perspective of where I came from and why I choose to live the way I do.

If you gain anything from this episode, please remember this. Nothing changes if nothing changes.

Always live sustainably because this is how we build a better future.

Patrick

Episode Transcript