In 2009, the idea of building an off-grid homestead turned from dream to reality as I signed the loan agreement on a 22 acre piece of land underneath Montana's Beartooth Mountains.  General ideas about how to develop it became more frequently contemplated, and I vowed to spend the three years I figured it would take to pay off the land to get a more tangible plan together.  In 2012, with the deed in hand, I headed south from Alaska to Montana to dig myself in and get something permanently established.  The plan began to unfold and evolve, and the adventure -- although still only in its infancy -- moved from theory to practice.

I suppose I should take a step back.  There was a rationale behind the concept of a homestead that I had grasped back in 2002, when I bought a large RV to live in, but also to have around for the future.  I had no time frame or agenda for buying land; back then I didn't really give it much thought, but it was the general plan. As the years passed, and the number of places in which I had lived and traveled through had increased,  I began paying attention to realty postings online and in the field, and visiting land for sale. I gained a better idea of which places suited my soul's desires, and which ones were practically realistic and affordable.  The image captions throughout this page help to tell this story, from land shopping to brainstorming, and planning to swinging hammers during the first building phase.

I had looked around extensively in Nevada and Colorado, but found the right lot within a remote Montana subdivision near Red Lodge and a few miles from the Wyoming border. It lies within a prominent rain shadow on the eastern front of the Beartooths and is one of the more arid places in the northern Rockies, providing great potential for both wind and solar generation.  It also has incredible access to big mountains with loads of climbing opportunities, a water table only 150 feet below grade, active farming and ranching within a few miles, no fire danger and no building codes.  Upon learning that the realty could finance it at only 5% down, the decision quickly made itself when I found the right lot.  It was a real gem, bordering BLM land on the south and west sides, and with a ravine running though the lot to add some topographical diversity. The search was over. 

Anyway, in the summer of 2012, the check cleared for the final payment on the land and I was ready to build.  In case you're wondering, it was less than $1,000 an acre and lots are still for sale -- email me if you're interested. I hitched up my trusty 20 year old pickup and flatbed trailer in Fairbanks and hit the road for a two month long trip.  But unlike most development plans, I was to build my outbuilding before the home.  I had looked at all sorts of options, including conventional kit barns, tension fabric structures, and hiring pole barn contractors to build a custom design.  The basic idea was to have lots of indoor storage capacity, plus a shelter to keep the fifth wheel out of the sun, rain and snow.  The building and RV would serve as a medium term home scenario; a comfortable place to stay with solar panels, a generator, and tools with which to work on things when I visit.  I also had running water; in 2011 I had a well drilled and lucked out when I hit perfectly drinkable water at 140 feet and picked up 10 gallons a minute by 210 feet. 

I ended up designing a less conventional, less expensive building that would allow for much more versatility in the long run.  It would suit my planned needs for a temporary residence -- and later, a homestead outbuilding -- but also would be suitable to turn into a solar home someday if economic circumstances prevent me from starting on a whole new structure.  My building was simple and clean -- a 52 x 27 foot lean-to open pole barn with a 28 x 17 foot attached shop space, all with dirt floors.   I built a scaled model and ordered the materials, which clocked in at a little more than $11,000 total -- way less than the $28,000 the contractor had quoted. 

As I pulled away from Fairbanks after months of preparation, planning, and a tool buying spree, I had no idea how difficult it would be to actually build this thing mostly alone and with no heavy equipment aside from the excavation bobcat. After 5,000 miles of driving over the course of two weeks to bring my truck, fifth wheel, camper, flatbed trailer, and several tons of supplies and gear to the land from Alaska, Nevada, and Billings, I was ready to begin the project.  Around 40 days later, without a single rest day, I was mostly finished, but utterly exhausted and physically compromised. Click here to read a short story about this gnarly but fulfilling experience, and here for the full photo collection with detailed captions. I will have to return soon to tie up some lose ends, like sheathing the main roof and barn doors, trim, facia boards, and some other details. The next step will be a wood fired hot tub and a deck/porch for the RV, plus additional walls around the wind-prone sides of the main barn. Ultimately, I can enclose the entire building with straw bales, pour a concrete slab, add a solarium, and turn the barn into a home, but I have other plans too -- as you will see below.

Beyond the pole barn is the real meat of the Homestead. In 2008, the concept of a straw bale passive solar home on a concrete slab entered my mind after seeing and reading the stories of others who had followed that path. For reasons I will articulate later, I knew that this home would have to use little or no fossil fuels and be as thermally and electrically efficient as possible. I began by combining an interesting and unconventional aesthetic with absolute solar functionality, and went to work on making models that would help me visualize the design for later drafting work, if, um, I actually knew how to do drafting work...

Fortunately, my good friend Charlie Baxter -- an architect -- offered to generate some improved schematics based on my original models.  After much deliberation and a first round of test schematics, we had a well crafted and highly functional solar home design that we were both absolutely thrilled about. For me, the result of Charlie's work was unexpected at first but has since come to be fully embraced.  It incorporates a 40 foot shipping container as the backbone of the home.  Not only will the container serve as the partitions for the bedroom, bathroom, mechanical room and kitchen, but it will also be the floor of a plush loft and a structural anchor point for the roof ridge beam supports and other tie-in points.  One of the most important elements of this design is its phasing; it can be fully built, but even just the core components will stand alone as a solar home.  This allows for much greater financial versatility.

This is a passive and active solar home.  Passive means that natural sunlight enters the home, warms up thermal masses (a concrete slab and straw bale walls), and radiates that heat at night when it's cold. Active means that it will have solar photovoltaic panels and a wind turbine to generate electricity for a large battery bank, plus solar thermal water heating panels which can heat water to over 200 degree even when it's freezing outside.   Straw bales provide perhaps the best insulation available of any material (R 60+), are ridiculously cheap, and reduce the need for framing lumber, siding, and drywall.  The outside and inside of the walls will be finished with earth-based stuccos such as natural hydraulic lime; much of the material needed for that will come from sands sifted on site.  Auxiliary heat will be provided by a wood stove, with a generator to recharge batteries during rare extended periods of thick cloud cover but no wind.

The building will be one living space; this way, ducting is not needed and only a small fan can transfer heat around the home.  Summer cooling is achieved using an underground network of air channels (in this case cinder blocks) placed under the north patio.  At night the blocks cool down, then air is drawn into the home through these blocks via a small fan, providing chilled air by mid-day when the home begins to warm up.  All things considered, I'm SUPER stoked about where this all going, and am grateful that Charlie put so much thought into it all. And beyond the buildings, I hope to dedicate the rest of the property to an existence of permaculture (largely self-contained systems of organic food production) in which animals and gardens reign, and to building whatever else I want, like a mountain bike track, fish pond, skateboard ramp, or climbing wall. 

So, above I mentioned that there was a rationale for all of this, and initially it was pretty simple: having a place among the mountains in an amazing region was hugely important to me, and it was worth making some compromises in life to make it happen. But as I shopped for land, other things were going on too.  Gasoline prices were heading up sharply but not for acute geopolitical events, and I knew that this would have a direct impact on the economy.  Foreign policy decisions seemed to be based largely on resource protectionism abroad rather than genuine self defense, water resources in the US were becoming overextended, our national debts and trade deficits were rising quickly, and the global population was approaching 7 billion people while the US population was also skyrocketing.  This, I thought, was not a sustainable trajectory for us, but as a single individual it seemed almost impossible to avoid whatever repercussions may come of it all.  Things began to make me anxious, but that anxiety soon became the very source of motivation to actually do something which could someday detach me -- at least in part, and if need be -- from the urban/industrial infrastructure and support systems I felt were showing signs of weakness.  In other words, I could decouple the basic requirements of my life from the requirements of our growth-based society if we fail to collectively adapt to economic contraction -- a possibility which seemed likely then, and seems even more likely now. 

I figured having some land somewhere with a water source would be a good idea no matter what happens.  It would combine the pleasure of a mountain retreat with the security of having a place to fall back onto in case financial, social, and/or environmental conditions elsewhere deteriorate over the long haul.  It's not paranoia, gloom and doom, or reactionary behavior as some may believe.  It is simply an understanding that at some point growth in the US and abroad will slow down, stop, and contract (negative GDP growth), and that using surplus capital now to build something sustainable seemed like a good thing to do if the contraction begins to occur within my lifetime.  Most people know that a slow down is happening now, but I'd argue that they attribute it to political and regulatory events rather than the most basic idea that industrial civilization has reached its all time peak due to the diminishing returns on investments within the energy sector.  This thinking is based on simple thermodynamics; the idea that net energy inputs determine the fate of any colony of organisms when the colony is viewed as a closed system.  This includes humans. The steady stream of affordable fossil fuels is the determining factor in our case (mineral and food production are limited by them), and as cheap sources deplete and the price floor for the remaining resources rise, economic growth will inevitably suffer and eventually contract to match the energy inputs available to the system. 

I've spent a lot of time studying and writing (here's an example) about petroleum geology, finance, and policy as they relate to each other, and believe I've approached these issues calmly and objectively, absorbing facts and listening to as many experts on "both" sides as I can. But by virtue of simply being an American, I am also exposed to popular media sources that simplify complex issues to mere sound bytes for simple digestion, and believe this is the basis for the widespread belief that all our problems are based on some politician or political party, or some law or regulation.  This is the simple way to justify complicated issues: "it's their fault." Our brains generally don't do well with knowing that our largest problems are deeply systemic and have built up over the last 100 years.  It's not easy to contemplate that there is probably not some magic replacement for oil, which has largely fueled economic expansion for over a hundred years, or that despite all the new gas fracking operations, society as a whole is still hurting financially, with no end in sight. It's not easy to consider that unemployment may hit historic highs, the US debt may never be paid back, mortgage defaults may become far more common, and that the price of food, goods, and services will be on the rise indefinitely.  So, we find someone to blame instead of taking our own steps in what we may think is the "right direction".  This isn't to devalue the role of public policy in the US by any means; civic engagement is extremely important and always will be, but it will not allow the economy to continue growing to keep unemployment low. 

The bottom line is that things just don't work very well in industrialized nations without constant growth and/or the infusion of heavy amounts of debt (see: Greece, Spain). Perpetual economic growth required by debt-based finance systems is not sustainable on a finite planet, and while almost everyone would agree with that statement in abstract theory, many people refuse to acknowledge that it's quite likely we've reached the tipping point as a civilization, where massive debts are colliding with the decreased availability of resources and environmental degradation, causing prices of just about everything to rise sharply.  Virtually every politician out there is habituated by reelection prospects to tell people that we must, and will, return to economic growth regardless of if they actually believe that is a good or realistic goal.  Corporations, by nature, are driven by profit, and public relations professionals working for them simply say what is in the best interest of the company, rather than what may be good, right, or even accurate.  But some of us are under no such constraints. 

The best way to contextualize all of this is by looking at the data, not by absorbing popular media infotainment and the rants of "opinion leaders". So with all this in mind, I went to work on a master list of the 10 most important trends that paint the picture of impending economic contraction so I don’t have to do so through theory, philosophy, or statements that aren't backed up by the facts :

As long as the economy is still growing, times are good, but growth actually began slowing decades ago. And because oil production is closely tied to both GDP and overall energy consumption, it is a limiting or allowing factor for virtually all economic activity. When growth reaches zero, contraction begins.

Conventional crude is defined as “petroleum found in liquid form, flowing naturally or capable of being pumped without further processing or dilution”.  The easy oil is past its global peak of production, which represents the primary limit to continued economic growth.

The left graph is the average EROI for domestic oil and gas, and the right graph indicates that even imported sources of oil have also have seen a steady decrease of EROI.  In the last ten years average global EROI has fallen fast while demand continues to rise, which explains the 3-fold increase in the price of motor fuels during that time. 

A fracked well generally produces large volumes of hydrocarbons within the first year or two of production, and then tapers off exponentially. The gas glut we’re now experiencing was fueled by unprecedented capital investment based on initial production rates, which increased well counts to historic levels and flooded the market. But the fact is that gas production per well nationally has been falling for decades and the new production hasn’t reversed that trend.  It’s the same for oil fracking: despite what is happening in North Dakota, Texas, Montana, and Pennsylvania, total US oil production per well has been declining for decades, and since 2000 has averaged a 17% annual decline rate.  There is no possible way to sustain the “drilling treadmill” for much longer. And since oil is traded on a global market, a slight temporary increase in domestic oil production will not affect prices for American consumers.  

As EROI of oil declines and prices rise, virtually all commodity prices rise as well, making everything more expensive.  While some industries may temporarily benefit from higher prices, society as a whole is harmed. 

While the continued growth of these industries is likely and should be supported, the industry would have to grow over 75-fold to replace fossil fuels, which would require immense amounts of new materials such as copper, rare earth elements, aluminum, lithium, and energy for manufacturing it all. And while we attempt to build the infrastructure, our resources to do so will be constantly shrinking. While we absolutely must scale up renewable energy as fast as possible, it will not allow for economic growth.  

Although this is difficult to quantify globally for each industrial mineral, ore grades are generally in decline worldwide, and exploration and development costs for mines continue to grow as energy prices rise.  Large mines often require as much electricity as medium sized cities, and consume tens of millions of gallons of diesel fuel per year. Below: average world copper grades and Australian ore grades.

The average American consumes more resources and energy than any other nation, so our economy is particularly vulnerable to price shocks. We also have a chronic trade deficit, budget deficit, and a very high debt to GDP ratio that will make it harder to absorb increasing energy and raw material prices. And unlike the post Great Depression debt, we no longer have cheap energy to secure future growth.  With each dollar of new US debt, we are creating less and less GDP, meaning that declining returns on investments not only apply to oil and minerals, but also to the US economy as a whole.

So, with all of that out of the way, where does this leave us now?  I’d suggest that depends on your perspective and expectations.  In my mind, food, water, and health care are the most important things, and I believe Americans are in a good long term position with them.  We have enough arable land and water (in most places) to support our own population, and a large enough built environment to theoretically put a roof over everyone’s head if only we dwelled within, heated, and cooled our spaces differently.  Despite rising health care costs, we have health care infrastructure in place and some of the best medical professionals in the world.  The health care system will no doubt face serious challenges and potentially even revolution, but the equipment, knowledge, and human resources already exist.  And because we possess more manufactured material per person than any other nation, we have great potential to recycle things that already are, or will certainly become useless into things that will serve a real and immediate purpose.  Some refer to this as the "salvage economy."

The end of economic growth does not mean the end of prosperity, but simply the end of material prosperity.  Unfortunately, the modern global economic system’s performance is mostly determined by the inflow and consumption of energy and goods (rather than indicators of personal well being and happiness), so it will contract and unemployment will rise ceaselessly until the system itself is fundamentally transformed.  As GDP decreases, the government tax roles will as well, and it won’t be able to pay for the housing, food, and health care costs of 50 million people who want conventional jobs but can’t find one.  While this may seem dire, it’s really not.  There will be plenty of ways for people to use their time in productive and useful manners even if unemployment is at 50 percent.  Having just returned from two months on my homestead, I can assure you there is always plenty to do.  I realize that my plans require manufactured materials, and therefore money, so I'm not immune to whatever happens economically, but I'm also scaling down, not up, and planning to produce food, which everyone needs and which will always have value.  I'm also not suggesting that my approach is necessarily the only one that could work -- many people have successfully turned 1/4 acre houses into food producing urban homesteads, for example.  Others, such as in Alaska, essentially live off the land, eating wild game, fish, and berries and heating small log cabins with wood. 

A glimpse into the future may only require a look into the most predominant themes throughout our history.  When there was less energy to build and run tractors, people farmed with animals and human power; indeed, most people were farmers.  When there was less GDP per capita, most people had less stuff and smaller houses, and built and rebuilt with local materials by hand.   When people didn’t have enough money to buy a car, they took public transportation, waked or rode a bike, or didn’t travel much.  Though it’s impossible to predict the pace at which these things will become not simply choices but societal realities, one can deduce that we are on a certain trajectory, and planning diligently is the best choice.  The worst that can happen is that we will have prepared appropriately a little before we absolutely had to.  The entire concept of resilience is based on preparation, not reaction.

This is not a “collapse” scenario.  Things happen gradually, but it is foolish to perceive that as a justification to simply ‘see how it goes’.  Watching the world is easy, but acting upon what you perceive is not.   As slow as the economy may contract, implementing mitigation plans on the national, state, local, and personal levels is a process that occurs even more slowly, and for most it has hardly begun.  Sadly, we should have been reorganizing our priorities collectively a long time ago, but since we didn't, it is now more important than ever for individuals, families, and communities to pick up the slack because our political system is asleep at the wheel, and most corporations aren't in this to change the world, but to make money.

Practical decisions made by the individual now will have major implications for one’s future.  For example, if you believe the economy will grow, you’d be likely to buy a bigger house, have another child, or get that new SUV.  But when it doesn’t, and you are in massive debt without enough income, without credit and no game plan, what comes next?  But if you had planned on economic contraction, you could have lowered your expectations.  You could have rented a small place or downsized your house and mortgage, learned how to grow some of your own food, fix things so you don’t have to always buy new stuff, and if you didn’t already, begin to take exceptional care of your body to decrease the chances of expensive future health problems. Managing contraction in the future is all about the decisions we make right now, and that applies to each of us, not just the politicians and regulators.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but one thing is certain: the decades ahead will be a time of great challenge, reorganization, introspection, and adaptation.  But they will also bring the immense satisfaction of individual purpose and vitality – the providing for ourselves in communities and families on the local level, the beauty of finding and meeting challenges through creativity and determination, and the peace of mind that will come when we will no longer blame others for the problems we face, but look towards ourselves to deal with them.