As a PA native, my ears perked up a few months ago when I heard a segment on NPR about a ‘sustainable housing community’ in PA. After the research I had done on Earthships and Hobbit houses, it seemed like the most efficient places to build these more sustainable structures were in those climates where there wasn’t as much volatility. That being said, my passive solar book from the 70s shows a wide swatch of the globe, between 28 and 56 degrees latitude, that can utilize passive solar. So, it makes sense that a southern-facing hillside outside of Gettysburg, PA would be a suitable place for a more sustainable community. Here’s a picture from the Hundredfold Farm website:
Hundredfold Farm was one of the locations mentioned in the NPR segment. This community seems to be employing a lot of smart, relatively widely-accepted good practices in terms of energy efficiency and lessening human impact on the environment: limited footprint of individual homes, use of solar power, shared community farming, UV water recycling systems, even a greenhouse that acts as a natural marshland to process sewage. However, the Hundredfold mission statement also talks about caring for each other as individuals, and mentions creating a non-individualistic community whereby shared beliefs in efficiency and sustainability can really grow. Perhaps this kind of attitudinal shift is really necessary in today’s world in order to have sustainable ideas really take hold (because after all, if one doesn’t care about the world at large, what’s the point in even bothering to try to lessen one’s own impact?)… but without getting into the larger societal and social questions of this community and their ideals, I instead wondered about the science underpinning the endeavor.
Again, leaving aside the idea of ‘membership’ in a community and the requisite steps to achieve acceptance, what is interesting is that this particular community is a cluster of 15 homes, with some shared space and gardens that all the members interact with, while at the same time providing each member with a private home. It seems like they are striving to achieve a good balance between shared space and personal space; but based strictly on land usage, is 15 the ‘optimal’ number of homes in such a community? Is affording each individual home 2k square feet for personal use too much to be truly sustainable?
This question of balance between what is sustainable and overall population density is an interesting one that I will continue to research. It seems like there must be, from a land-usage, energy efficiency, and ecological impact standpoint kind of a ‘golden mean’ for the number of people that can live on and flourish on a certain amount of land, and how much land is needed to sustain the housing, food, and water needs of the community. That being said, perhaps this is somewhat a false premise, because all the inter-personal factors (like ‘membership’ or ‘shared land’) are taken out of the equation; unless each person on the planet had their own land on which to create their own insular community, this can’t be done in real life of course. But from a simple land use standpoint, does such a golden mean exist? The investigation continues…
