Mr. Moderate

The real problem with living a healthy and environmentally-friendly lifestyle is that it costs a lot more than a normal lifestyle. Cheap food makes you fat and generally does not do a good job of serving your nutritional needs. But increasingly, people have to live on squeezed budgets, and so healthy eating and environmental friendliness just get tossed aside as unaffordable.

This should really not be the case, and if you shop around, it need not be the case if you can just get a few bucks over a minimal budget. If you are living a low-cost, high-quality, life style in a specialized community, that is no problem. Such a community is designed to lower the cost for all residents while giving them a higher quality of life.

For people who do not live in such a community, I would hope that the ideas generated for that community could be adapted to fit in to some sort of a standard modern existence. For instance, you could rent out a spare bedroom and recruit somebody to live there who might then transition into the community I’ve described above. For a small extra cost in food and utilities, you get an income you can then use to offset the (hopefully temporary) higher cost of living a healthy and environmentally-friendly lifestyle. Overall, you come out ahead, the person you are renting to has a lower cost living arrangement, and the environment is better off because there is a need for one less apartment in the world and because you invest some of your rent income in making environmental improvements to your own home. (Better wall and ceiling insulation; insulated windows and doors; etc.)

The real idea here is that more people live for less total cost even though it might seem that the overall cost goes up for the one homeowner. I might add that having “roomers” was quite common a century ago, and it seems to me that it is only because of our modern mindset of isolation from each other that this habit has gone away. We all need privacy and “personal space,” but isn’t that what bedrooms and bathrooms are good at? I think we can do better, even if we can’t get a large enough group together to actually build the community I’ve envisioned (above).