Posts by — Juliette Smith

Dry food supplies are a more rational response

From society’s wealthiest and powerful Wall Streeters to rural bug-out types, people are preparing for the worst, and sparing no expense on elaborate underground shelters, buying years’ worth of non-perishable foods and stockpiling fuel and ammunition. Some have embraced the term “preppers,” although precisely what they are preparing for varies. (more…)

Preppers help the canned goods industry

The US Department of Homeland Security recommends every home have, at the bare minimum, these supplies. The reference to a period of three days can be altered depending on what kind of emergency you are anticipating:

Water (1 gallon per person per day)

Nonperishable food for three days

Can opener

Battery-powered weather radio with tone alert (more…)

Warm in the coldest weather

This extraordinary little house was built around 1910 as a Croquet Pavilion by Harold Fowler, an International champion. It has now been renovated as an off-grid holiday cottage, usually by the week.

A local specialist in environmentally sustainable construction, Julian Bishop, was commissioned to design an eco-cottage.  The brief asked that the visual profile and footprint remain as unchanged as possible, allowing the building to maintain, but not increase its position in the landscape.  The materials were environmentally sustainable: energy to come from natural sources and water to be collected from the roof.   The craftsmen involved were locally based and committed environmentally.   The result was that materials used have less environmental impact and are less toxic.  (more…)

Small beginnings There has been a rush of government announcements for loans to bring off-grid power to both rural and urban areas.

The Department of Agriculture has issued two schemes and the Public Health and Welfare section of the United States code calls for the Energy Secretary to favor projects which include “designing a local distributed energy system that incorporates renewable hydrogen production, off- grid electricity production….in industrial or commercial service.” (more…)

Ripped-off Britain

The top six British energy companies are “failing to compete” and some are stockpiling cheap North Sea gas in summer so they can sell it back at twice the price in the winter months.

As a result prices are rising faster in Britain than almost anywhere in Western Europe. Many of the companies holding British gas consumers to ransom are foreign suppliers rationing the country’s own gas, and the reason they can get away with it is that the same companies were never ordered to build large strategic gas storage supplies within the UK. (more…)

Thanks GSK, Pfizer etc.

Drinking tap water in America is unsafe. Associated Press has uncovered a massive scandal over pharmaceuticals in the nation’s drinking water.

“A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans,” AP found. In fact the figure is far higher – this is all they have been able to prove. (more…)

Where’s the car park?

The rulers of UAE know better than most that the world’s oil supplies are running out. That’s why they committed $37 billion to build a city that is totally self sufficient for energy and water, plus a range of other alternative energy projects in the desert outside their capital of Abu Dhabi.

Residents are due to start moving in next year, but is it greenwash? (more…)

Its not just Prime Minister Gordon Brown who is trying to convince Brits there’s money to be made from going green and adopting renewable energy. The Queen recently announced she was installing a ground source heat pump on her Windsor Estate, and she prowls the long corridors at Balmoral switching off lights. Then she changed her mind, because it cost too much. Now Britain’s aristocrats find their mean old ways made newly fashionable by the trends towards ecology and recycling.

Queen: green or just mean?

Frito-Lay’s plan to take its Arizona snack factory off the grid are driven by projected energy savings, plus the marketing advantage of being able to say its snacks are solar powered. In New Hampshire, off-grid householder Jay Flanders built his entire house from wood harvested on his property. All over Britain and America, locals are forming Carbon Reduction Action Groups to impose previously agreed penalties on those who save the least.

“We used to call it make do and mend ” said 91-year-old Edie Churchill who lives on a housing estate in East London, consumes little electricity, still scavenges for wood for her fire, and spends only 10 pounds sterling on her weekly grocery shop. (more…)

Prepare to Survive

In The Guardian today, Guy Grieve describes how he lived for a year in Alaska to escape the stifling clutch of a life commuting and paying a mortgage. Unlike Chris McCandless in Into the Wild , Guy survived to tell the tale in his new book Call of the Wild.

His approach rings very true to others like him who want to leap from a soft consumer lifestyle to a face-off with all-powerful mother nature. He unerstands his own limitations. That’s why he survived.

Tips for surviving the wilderness

1. Be realistic about your capabilities. If you are not able to take physical hardship and a degree of pain, don’t go. (more…)