Happy New Year! What's your plan?

I hope you were able to welcome the new year with friends and family.  I certainly enjoyed celebrating with my little tribe!  We played games, ate good food, and stayed up late!  We were fortunate to spend New Year's Day at Boyce Thompson Arboretum with long-time friends who we see infrequently as a result of the fact that they live in Brussels.  It was a very nice day for a stroll through the Sonoran Desert and it was good reminiscing about our various travels and adventures since our last visit. 

For us 2020 is going to be the year we finish our tiny house at Rancho Status Quo.  While I don't have any ambitious resolutions, I am considering sacrificing travel over the summer in order to make our dream of an sustainable off-grid tiny house a reality.  The writing is on the wall - we have to change our ways.  Australia is on fire literally with almost 10 million acres burned and figuratively in that they are setting summer records for extreme heat.  I expect our summer will bring much of the same as the world blazes ahead consuming record amounts of non-renewable resources and starting new wars over oil.

We need a new path forward.  We need to redefine our economic realities and revise our day-to-day choices.  We can't sit back consuming and polluting and expecting other people to solve these problems for us.  It is clear our leaders are beholden to corporate interests and blind to the will of the people.  We have a plan to move towards self-sufficiency - we've been thinking about it for 20 years as climate change has gotten worse and as our political and economic systems continue to fail us.  We all need to become activists, vote with every dollar we spend, and start becoming the solution instead of being a part of the problem. 

I don't believe a savior will lift us out of the effed up social, climate, and economic problems of today.  I do believe that we all own a piece of the solution inside of ourselves.  There is no grand design that will fix everything, there are many local individuals and communities that are making steps in the right direction.  We can't fault people for doing what they were raised and trained to do (i.e. be great consumers), but knowing what we know now we should all consider the continuum of choices we can make and move towards sustainability.

So that is our plan - figure out how to get the electrical, plumbing, and heating systems in our tiny house fully operational and sustainable.  We may not be able to travel to new National Parks, but we can start to conserve and manage the nearly 80 acres of overgrazed and abused land under our control.