A Sustainable Living Vision for a Household

As the impact of our current way of living rages on we see a lot of initiatives rolled out and presented to us. Governments try to incentivise our behaviour to tackle carbon emissions. Product companies are redefining and selling sustainable products suggesting we change our habits. Influencers tell us what we should or should not do with an all too familiar overwhelming deluge of content.

What about our vision? Our ideas of sustainable lifestyle and home? What do we see when we imagine our household as a sustainable way of living? Do we even bother to imagine that at all or are we caught up in everything broken? Everything that should or shouldn’t be done?

‘A plan without a vision is drudgery’

Old proverb

When you work toward a vision, change is welcome, exciting and in the right direction.

A vision is not about what is possible now. It is about what we want for the future. It is a guide for navigating change, making decisions, and getting excited about what’s next.

Donella Meadows, a renowned thinker in sustainability, a farmer and a community builder made a group of environmental scientists and activists do a vision exercise in the middle of a conference. We tried it.

Donella Meadows, Down to Earth speech on envisioning a sustainable future. The vision exercise starts at min 24:00. It is well worth a watch in full. Especially if you wish to work on sustainable solutions.

Here is what we came up with so far:

Our Home

Our home is comfortable. Warm in the winter and cool in the summer, it regulates its temperature and humidity with little intervention from us. It takes very little energy to run and the energy it needs is renewably generated on site. Our systems are easy to run, maintain and repair. They are made to last several generations.

Our house is made of materials that have a circular nature, their end-of-life and renewal is clear and easy to achieve. We are surrounded by organic beautiful materials that can be appreciated for generations to come. We respect, repair and replace existing structures to give them longevity beyond us. Especially those that were here before us.

Items in our home are beautifully made and made to last. They give us joy and are heirlooms to be cherished.

The Garden

A source of sustenance to mind body and soul. The garden provides nourishment and flavour to the kitchen. It produces fruit, vegetables and herbs. It fills up the pantry with incredible foods and delivers a variety of fresh produce to the kitchen enough to feed us and our guests all year round. It is fully sustainable requiring no outside input. It is easy to maintain and care for. The garden is resilient and able to cope with sharp changes in weather, pests and disease.

It provides us with a place for mindfulness and rest. Joyful beauty and opportunity to observe the natural world.

The Land

Our land is a variety of healthy ecosystems. Delicately managed and partly wild. It is teaming with biodiversity. It provides a buffer of shelter, forage and life to our garden and home. It is where we find inspiration and learn from the natural systems it supports. The land connects us to our community with a network of trails. We walk across the countryside to share produce, knowledge and skills with our neighbours.

Once we started this vision exercise we found ourselves doing it more and more with a sustainable world unfolding in detail. Now, we can dream up plans. Learn new ways and skills and start our journey with intention.