Where is the existing building mass in those pictures? It’s all weird glass pods. I don’t want to live in a glass pod. Did we just blow up all the old brick warehouses, Victorians, old farmhouses that got engulfed by the city, etc etc?
I want to see my little old house from the 1930s that’s been energy retrofitted, with solar panels and a solar water heater and barrels under the gutters, with apple trees and chickens in the backyard and some bicycles in front.
Fascinating read, thanks for sharing. It reminds me a little of the natural historians of the 1800s but with less colonialism.
And reducing food waste! I was surprised to see that individual/household food waste is so significant in terms of agricultural impact.
This is super common though. I mix up my kids’ names on a daily basis, it’s not because I don’t know who they are or can’t tell them apart. They do think it’s hilarious when I mix them up with the chickens.
The common factor is that I am usually saying the same mindless stuff to my kids (and chickens), like “get down from there” or “move out of the way please” or “stop making so much noise”.
Oh God, I swear our local supermarket moves the fresh fish every three weeks. It’s always the fish and it just fills me with rage. I don’t want to do a meter by meter search for a chunk of salmon while my picky children are whining and chewing on my kneecaps.
Not defending this particular wool shop but often those sorts of specialty shops also have an online side. Weird that they would throw customers out though
Also if you spend time with chickens, you realize without a doubt that birds = dinosaurs. Especially if you raise them from chicks, their awkward teenage stage is like half bird, half lizard anyway.
We are from Scandinavia and right now we are in the Alps, later we are going to Italy.
There’s been work on the railways that has changed our itinerary and caused some delays but otherwise it has been ok.
We are not huge travelers but previously we’ve driven in our little car or flown and rented a car (ie Iceland, visiting family in the US). My main concern was changing so many trains with children and luggage but they’ve done really well (they are tweens). They are used to trains though.
Pros:
Cons:
I would do it again but there are still some destinations where I would prefer to drive, such as far out in the countryside or where the public transportation is not great.
We’re on vacation and it’s 100% public transportation from beginning to end, the kids are doing pretty good with schlepping their bags on and off trains.
I think it’s also important to have a diversity of aesthetics and cultural representations to gain a more universal appeal - and also that diversity needs to be understood very broadly. Movements like this seem to typecast themselves relatively quickly, as there are few role models available and people adopt an aesthetic, or mannerisms, or jargon as a sort of identifier that they belong to the group, which ends up being just as exclusionary as it is a marker of inclusion.
There will always be people who see the extreme version as wildly inspiring, and those who see it as ugly or frightening or wildly unrealistic. Ex: earthships - personally I think it’s awesome to have a self-sufficient space with indoor gardens, but they are huge and ugly af. But people renovating and retrofitting their century old houses with natural materials and respect for the original architecture? Yes please.
I guess I’m trying to say that the fantastic needs to have a place under the umbrella alongside the pragmatic, and the vegans alongside the people with turkeys in their backyard, and the DIY permies alongside people who would never ever use an old bathtub as a planter but are willing to xeriscape their front lawn with native perennials, and the people who make their own sandals out of bicycle tubes alongside the people who buy really expensive shoes for life etc etc.
You can definitely take the train from Italy to Sweden. This summer we took the train back and forth from Denmark to Italy, with children.