Self Sufficient Living
While no guide to fully living sustainably exists, a basic guide to self sufficient living is designed to give you tips on how to become less dependent on natural resources and, instead, to depend on yourself for nearly every need. This includes a person's basic needs, such as food, shelter, and clothing. All dependency on outside resources, such as the electrical grid and supermarkets, should be reduced as much as possible.
Why go on a path of self sufficient living? Depending on yourself as much as possible helps with reducing pollution, your carbon footprint, and dependence on natural resources. Producing your own food and energy, in fact, is significantly less expensive than purchasing materials over time. Additionally, self sufficient living serves as a guide for emergency preparedness.
The first place to start with living self sufficient is your garden. Growing your own vegetables and grains and planting fruit trees eliminates the need for outside, non-locally grown produce from a supermarket. The scraps from these vegetables and fruits, then, can go into a compost pile, which, over time, can be used as a natural source of mulch and fertilizer for your garden. The seeds from these same fruits and vegetables can also be used for future planting. Storing any rain in a barrel helps with irrigating your garden and plants, as well.
After you've grown enough food, you can even make it last longer through dehydrating, canning, and preserving. Instead of eating a harvest at once, have it last for several months through canned or dried goods.
Aside from creating a garden to grow your own food and other self sufficient methods to tend it, creating your own power decreases - and may even eliminate - your dependence on your area's electrical grid. Homes or buildings can be modified to include solar panels for your general power and for appliances and can be renovated to include energy-efficient windows. Inside your home, you can recycle all paper products and go for manual appliances instead of those that need a motor and traditional electricity to operate.
