GrowthBusters / Dave Gardner / 06 December 2018
The conversation in this episode may start you on a course that can set you free and bring you peace of mind. It may be your key to sustainable living. GrowthBusters’ Dave Gardner is joined by Jennifer Cohen and Gina LaRoche, authors of The Seven Laws of Enough: Cultivating a Life of Sustainable Abundance for a discussion of “Sustainable Abundance.”
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Mother Earth News / Kale Roberts / February/March 2014
Throughout the years, MOTHER EARTH NEWS readers have proved to be a clever lot. You’ve shown time and again that you can save a bundle when you apply resourcefulness and a little elbow grease to home economics. Frankly, our consumer culture pressures many of us to live above our means. The good news is that making a personal and household commitment to a more frugal lifestyle can be a fulfilling, healthy choice — and the following tips to save money can start you on that journey. Imagine what your life will be like when you slash your grocery or utility bills in half, or when you’re able to pay down your mortgage.
We’ve assembled the following tips to save money from you, our readers, and from our Amazin’ Archive — 44 years’ worth of articles about living on less and loving it.
After you read our selections, find more details for how to implement the tips that interest you by clicking on the links that follow each tip.
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Happen Films / 20 October 2018
This film tells the story of one small family practicing urban sufficiency. They live on 1/10th of an acre in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. By living more simply and utilizing alternative technologies this household draws 75-80% less electricity from the grid than the Australian average (per capita). At the same time they’re exporting five times that amount in solar energy back into the grid.
Treehugger / Katherine Martinko / 27 September 2018
At first glance, the future looks high-tech and cutting-edge. There’s a sense that we need to move beyond single-use plastics to solutions that only science can give us. But what if we’re heading in the wrong direction? What if the most straightforward answers to our problem lie in the past?
We didn’t always have a plastic pollution problem. Before the mid-20th century, people made do without it and, presumably, as Mark Blackburn put it descriptively in an article for One Brown Planet, they were not lying “in the streets, malnourished and dehydrated, like a scene from some apocalyptic war,” for lack of plastic water bottles. They managed just fine because their lifestyle habits were different.
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Mother Earth News / Charlyn Ellis / 05 August 2015
The Willamette Valley, usually known for it’s darn near perfect summers—dry, breezy, in the eighties with cool nights—has seen two serious heat waves this summer. One came at the end of June, the second at the end of July. Both were problematic for crops, as they came right when many young transplants were settling into the fields. My own small scale fall and winter garden went in about four days before the second heat wave. How could I keep them alive in the blazing afternoon sun when their roots were not reaching deep into the soil? I mulched. First, I worked all of the residual mulch from the early potato crop into the bed. Then I nested each start in a base of straw mulch laid over the ground and soaker hoses. They all came through. Mulch. Straw, leaves, winter cover crops, cardboard or woodshavings … it’s useful stuff. Placed neatly around the base of young plants and later worked into the soil, it has a multitude of benefits.
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Mother Earth News / Andrea Chesman / October/November 2018
Nothing beats the convenience of having homemade broth and stock on hand in your kitchen. Homemade broths and stocks taste better than canned broths, bouillon cubes and pastes, and even expensive boxed broths. In addition, you’ll reduce your kitchen waste if you extract the flavor that remains in bones and vegetable peelings after the other parts are consumed.
But what do you call the simmering mixture in your pot? Is it broth, or is it stock? The two terms are often used interchangeably, and definitions do vary, so it depends on who you ask. But, in a nutshell, stock is the gelatinous result of cooking vegetables and bones in unseasoned water for several hours to extract flavor, while broth is made out of vegetables and meat simmered in a seasoned liquid for a shorter period of time. Either one can serve as a foundation for other dishes, but because broth is typically seasoned, it’s often consumed on its own, while stock is the perfect rich-tasting base onto which you can layer other flavors.
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