Tales From the Sustainable Underground. Stephen Hren

that’s right? Why should you have to ask permission to build a home out of the materials available right on your own land? Why should you have to ask permission to run your home off sunlight? Who has the right to outlaw compost? Why should you need permission to use an abandoned and decaying building? Who says you can’t make giant sculpture on your property? What ever made people think they can make a plant illegal? What were they thinking when they said you can’t cook food in your own kitchen and feed your neighbor?

      What happened to some of these doers is what happened to us. We got busted. After three years of hard labor, we finished our cob home and moved in. It turned out great, but there was always that nagging feeling that we were living in a home that was illegal. It’s hard to hide a house. It’s not like a quarter-bag of pot that you can squirrel away in your underwear drawer. It’s out there. We were still connected to the utility with a temporary electric pole, but we were working towards an off-grid solar electric system and hoped to get the grid turned off soon. But the world was moving too fast for us. Satellite images of our property unmistakably revealed an odd round building that caught the eye of our county tax assessor. And of course he was obliged to tell the county inspector about our illegal home.

      To anyone who’s ever lived underground (i.e., hiding from the law), there’s always that fear of the dreadful moment of getting caught. Ours happened when I had just got back from work late in the afternoon. I parked at the top of the hill and hopped out of the car to take a leak. My relief was temporary, because I soon noticed a suspicious white truck coming from the direction of our cob home. The man rolled down his window and said, “I’ve got a report of some folks living in an uninspected building on this property. You know anything about it?” Startled out of my urinary reverie, I made a split second decision that would change the course of my life and my former wife’s. I told the truth. “Uh, yeah, that would be me.”

      And then something very unexpected happened. A little sliver of trust developed between me and that public official, the “Man” and the “squatter.” The man in the truck replied, “I need you to come down to my office so we can talk about this matter. Give me a call by the end of the week.” He handed over his card, and then said, “You can go back to taking your piss now,” and drove off.

      Was this the end? Was our beloved cob home about to be bulldozed by men who drove around in white trucks? It turns out there was an alternate ending. The inspector allowed us to prove to him that not only was our cob home strong and safe enough to be legal, but that our solar electric system was legitimate, too. After some improvements, and a year or so of back and forth, we got our Certificate of Occupancy. Our solar cob home was legal! What had started out as revolutionary just five years before was now aboveboard, legit. And that meant we weren’t afraid to show our home to other people and teach them about natural building and solar electricity. They could use our home as a precedent for creating similar systems on their own property.

      It didn’t take long after that to start hearing about lots of other cool stuff going on around North Carolina. A few counties over, crazy folks were huddled over pieced-together piping and antique solar water heaters, turning waste veggie oil into biodiesel and driving ancient Mercedes around. Folks up in the mountains were building an eco-village of small homes built of straw and discarded windows on a dead end road that entered another county and where inspectors rarely roamed. My artist friend Matt had bought property up in the Catskills of New York and was building giant inhabitable sculptures made of twigs, rocks and detritus from nearby New York City. And each person seemed to know about at least one other group or person doing something equally crazy and daring and who were determined to not just drop out of civilization, because that just doesn’t work anymore with globalized everything, especially problems like global climate disruption. They were determined to change the very fabric of society from the bottom up. I wanted to meet them all!

      Of course I haven’t met them all. Hopefully, that’s not even possible because of the sheer number of awesome folks experimenting across the land. But I did meet some amazing and incredibly inspiring people with some fantastic stories. Originally, I thought this book would be about activists dedicated to sustainability who think it’s easier to ask forgiveness than ask permission. To some extent, the varied group of folks I met on my big summertime journey in 2010 did consider themselves activists, but these were in the minority and honestly, almost no one I met seemed the least bit contrite. Mostly they’re just doing what they believe is right to make the world a sane and livable place, and any effect they’ve had, or will have, on the law of the land is accidental. But whether challenging the law is what they set out to do or not, there’s no denying that is what they’re doing, and we all benefit from their courage and hard work.

      There are laws that are worth having and ones that aren’t, and the well-being of our society depends on a constant process of trying to increase the number of good ones and reduce the number of bad ones. When you come across a bad law and want to change it, there are two ways to go about it. There’s the conventional way of going down to city hall or the county commissioners or contacting your representative and trying to get them to sponsor a bill or give them a signed petition of concerned citizens. Which is a great thing to do. But a great deal of what makes for a sustainable life are functioning systems that need to exist in the first place for conventionally minded folks like a representative to understand that they do work. Systems like a home built out of natural materials, or an effective means of composting human waste or a small community-supported kitchen run out of a neighborhood home. Asking for permission to create something that the legislator can’t conceive of — let alone it working properly — is very unlikely to meet with any success. You have to have the thing before it can become legal, but you can’t have it without building it or doing it first. And the folks I met on my journey are doing just that.

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       Detroit

      DETROIT WAS ACTUALLY the last stop I made on my big round-the-country journey looking for some answers — or at least some insightful questions and interesting stories — on what it’s going to take to change the law of the land so that a sustainable life is even potentially legal, much less standard practice. But the more I thought about the place, the more iconic it seemed as a prime example of where we went wrong, and also as a Petri dish of what could change for the better. So it makes sense to start with this most intriguing of metropolises.

      Detroit is dying; Detroit is pulsating with life. Both are true, and the place is, at least on a few levels, undergoing a metamorphosis from a corporate car town to a thriving hub of grassroots artistic and regenerative experimentation. While broad avenues built for massive car traffic now lay barely used with plastic bags caught in dead weeds growing through cracks in the pavement, the residents of the city are reinventing themselves by growing their own food on abandoned land, running vegan restaurants out of their foreclosed homes and elaborately decorating nearby abandoned buildings to preserve them and scare away the crackheads.

      Detroit is corrupt, almost utterly so. While I was there, the specter of ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s felony charges for paying nine million dollars of public funds to police officers to try and cover up an extramarital affair hung over the city, as did a multitude of other scandals including bribery and the embezzlement of educational funds involving a police chief and several former city council members. Over its two-hundred-year existence, the city has a long history of piling up laws on top of laws, many passed with special interests in mind rather than the welfare of the public. It seemed like whoever I spoke with said that what they were doing was illegal for some reason or another, in violation of some relic of a statute that was somewhat contradicted by another statute under a different department.

      Laws can have two different purposes. They can protect the welfare of the less powerful by holding those with more power accountable. Or they can reinforce the privilege, Latin for “private law,” of the elite and keep the little guy from achieving any independence. Often it is the case that laws that start out with the purpose of, or at least the pretense of, promoting the former end up over time turning into the latter. Power, it seems, is the most addictive