Living Lightly

After 25 years of visiting the BC mountains, last fall my husband and I made a permanent move from a bedroom community outside of Ottawa to Rossland, BC.  Now, I’ll admit, the move was not designed to reduce our carbon footprint on the earth. We just love the mountains and the (mostly self-propelled) recreation opportunities they provide.

Having moved here, though, one of my great – and unexpected – joys is the fact that I almost never get in the car. Our home is within walking distance of downtown. There are skiing/biking trails at the end of our street – one of which leads to the ski hill, 5 km. away. I walk down to “Happy Valley” to get my organic eggs. We’ve gone from driving 2 cars about 40,000 km a year each, to one car driving less than 25,000.

Another is discovering the beauty of ‘living small’. Our house is 1100 sq. ft. Plenty of room for the two of us and the rather frequent guests we have (another joy of moving to a beautiful mountain town). Who knew – when I was cleaning a 2600 sq. ft. house – that I could be happy in my little ‘war-timer’, as they call these 1940’s homes in Rossland.

The joy of discovering happiness – not self-flagellation! – in a smaller footprint make me want to push the boundaries further. As we think about building a new house, I’m wondering just how hard it would be to go “off-grid”. Rossland is an old gold-mining town. Red Mountain is riddled with inactive mine shafts reaching thousands of metres into the earth. Apparently, it’s perfectly suited for community-wide geo-thermal heat. The architect of a local building project is checking that out.

Now that we’re finally getting tuned into the value of clean water, I’m looking at my own consumption. Apparently, Rosslanders use more water per capita than anyone in Canada. And we know what Canadians’ record on that is – abysmal. Okay, some of it is probably due to leaking from our 100-year-old infrastructure, but how may residents have low-flush toilets? We just bought ours. What about a system that re-uses grey water? How hard can that be?

Where else can I take this? Interesting challenge!

Diana
Inspired in Rossland, B.C.