A safe place to land

By: Katie Saylors

Every day, Kimchi Rylander steps outside on her front porch to observe the weather and see how much sunlight her house received. She then checks her energy converter box to see how much energy from her solar panels is converted to electricity for her home.

"Today it's pretty cloudy, but still very bright," Rylander said, as she looked at the sky from her front yard. "I should have enough energy to plug in my computer, check some e-mails and get on the phone for a little while."

For Rylander, paying attention to nature and her surroundings plays a vital role in how she will go about her day. Rylander lives in a sustainable community at Earthhaven Ecovillage in Black Mountain. This private community of about 70 people has created an off-the-grid lifestyle and sustainable culture.

Rylander, a community coordinator at Earthhaven, said living sustainably takes patience and dedication.

"We all migrated from a mainstream consumer culture that is profit-based," Rylander said. "We have to slow down and re-learn a way of living that is based on caring, sharing and supports the earth and its inhabitants."

At her home in Earthhaven, Rylander produces electricity from solar panels set up in her front yard and on her roof. For heat, she uses a wood-burning stove. Rylander shares her three-story home with three other tenants.

"She's very conscious about fossil fuel use and finding alternatives to that," said Mollie Curry, a friend of Rylander's and former resident at Earthhaven. Curry runs MudStrawLove, a natural building construction company in Asheville. "It's very knowledge and labor intensive to live sustainably," she said.

The home, named the Tribal Condo, was built a few years ago using all natural resources. Trees were milled on the property and non-manufactured or recycled materials were used to build the Tribal Condo.

Aside from living in a natural-built home and using renewable energy sources, Rylander said living sustainably means changing how she thinks about everything.

"Everything I buy is guided by my heart connection to what I purchase," Rylander said. "I have to imagine the people who made these things and where it came from."

Not all of Rylander's food comes from the village, but she makes it her goal to only eat foods from within a 100-mile radius of where she lives. By eating locally, she also forms relationships with the people that grow or raise her food.

"We know that we are never going to be completely self-sufficient, so we build connections with our neighbors down the road and in the bio-region to trade and exchange for things we can't grow," Rylander said.

At Rylander's home, she also focuses on wasting less and throwing out less. Rylander and her roommates compost leftover food and human waste. By composting, the waste is recycled into fertilizer. One of the bathrooms in her home is a humanure composting toilet. The toilet collects human waste and is composted during a year or more and then is used as fertilizer in her garden. Not only is waste recycled, but there is no water or energy needed to transport the waste elsewhere.

Curry said Rylander thinks sustainably, from composting to using a catchment system to water her plants.

"In terms of creating a sustainable culture, she's doing what I would call inner-personal work to create a new culture that's more healthy," Curry said.

Rylander tries to emphasize the importance of community and networking in order to be more sustainable. She cooks meals with others to cut back on energy use and carpools whenever she goes into town. Because Rylander works in her community, she is able to walk to work daily.

"To live sustainably means to be intimately connected with the Earth from which all life springs. It's really powerful to be conscious of this connection and to give back to the Earth by caring and sharing," Rylander said.

Sue Stone, who lives at Earthhaven and works with Rylander, pointed out that Rylander shares almost everything with her community.

"Kimchi has shared housing, shared cooking and shares a car," Stone said.

Stone worked with Rylander at Earthhaven on several committees and they spend time dedicated to the interrelationships in the community.

"We share our skills with each other and that's something that doesn't always happen in mainstream culture," Rylander said. "We're building this road as we travel."