I'd like to introduce--and shamelessly promote--a new Daily Kos group, Living Simply :
A group to explore and share sustainable, simple living skills among fellow progressives. For the urban, rural, or wannabe homesteader, this is a place to share eco-conscious (and frugal!) information to simplify everyday life. Gardening, food production and storage, do-it-yourself projects for the home or farm, backyard chickens and other livestock, etc., etc.
If you are interested, please go here and click on the little heart to "follow" us, and please join me below the fold and in the comments for more information and discussion. I'm looking for ideas and suggestions, as well as victims interested diarists to write diaries to be published under the Living Simply group.
While I intend this group to be a community and not my personal blog, I do imagine that diaries, both my own and others, will often have a personal flavor to them. How could they not, if we're discussing simplifying our everyday lives and taking steps toward living more sustainably? And what better way to learn than to learn by our own successes and failures? So to get the ball rolling, I'd like to introduce myself and explain a bit about why I was interested in creating this particular group.
I've always been a progressive and an advocate for the environment, and so my journey toward living more sustainably has been a natural progression. While I can be outspoken in certain circles, I've never been a very public activist. Instead, I've preferred to think that I'm creating a one-family revolution in my backyard. If I have control over nothing else, I have control over my everyday actions, and I firmly believe that one should never count out the cumulative effects of many people making a few simple changes. When I was 20 years old I moved to the 60-acre farm where I still live, though now with my husband and young son. Living on a farm--and then, much later, having a child--took my environmental awareness to a different (and I'd like to think higher) level. I've always liked to do things myself. I like to break an end result down into the series of its construction. If I can make it from scratch, I want to know how, and I want to know how to do it sustainably (and often as a direct result--bonus!--more frugally).
So over the years I've researched a lot, made some changes, and now continue my ever-evolving quest to simplify my life. I keep chickens and small herd of dairy goats. I have a few raised-bed gardens. I make my own laundry soap and hang clothes out on a line. I can can, I can bake bread, and I generally try to avoid processed food or microwave cooking. We have one television in the house and it doesn't get a lot of use.
But I have a long way to go.
Hence this group. I have an overwhelming urge to live more simply, and so my desire is that this group will allow me to tap into the vast knowledge base that is the Daily Kos community while opening up a place to share that knowledge. And if I can share what little useful knowledge I have along the way, so much the better. If you want to know anything about keeping chickens, how to make your own laundry soap, or cloth diapering your infant, to name a few, I'm your gal; if you want to know how to make homemade fruit wine, well, maybe there's a Kossack who would like to diary a step-by-step tutorial and send me a few bottles and share their knowledge with the rest of us. ;)
The floor is yours, so let's discuss. What would you like to see from a group like this? Do you have any suggestions for regular diary series within the group, specific topics of interest, etc.? Do you want to participate as writer? Remember, if you don't want to write diaries but want to keep tabs on the discussions here and participate in the comments, all you need to do is become "follower" of the group to funnel the group's diaries into your stream.