Can get fucked up by antiquated patriachal gender roles.
Here’s what happens: A couple arrives in our valley, young, strong, in love, and full of plans to build an ultra-energy-efficient house out of straw bales, rammed earth, adobe bricks, or, heck, used bottlecaps. They set to work with equal enthusiasm, buying land and setting up temporary quarters in a yurt or a tipi. The weather’s good, the views are great, and the new house is humming along.
But at some point, the weather turns, or the project slows. Or a baby arrives, and everything gets more complicated. For whatever reason, their brio fades, NOMWITTH [Not One More Winter In The Tipi, Honey] sets in, and what was once a joint project becomes a battlefield, XX vs. XY. In mild cases, help is hired, the house gets a roof, and all ends well. In more serious cases, one person — inevitably XX — splits town for a fully-furnished condo with central heating, leaving XY alone with the low-carbon dream.
Who knew?
H/T Grist.
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I'm so glad my sister moved to the country back in the 1970s
so that I could learn exactly this thing without having to go through it personally. Cooking on a woodstove is sort of romantic for a week in a rental cabin somewhere- cooking on it when it's 100 degrees outside is why the "summer kitchen" was invented. I realized early on that this was exactly the sort of drudgery my grandmothers wanted to get away from. (When I was a small child in the early 1950s, my paternal grandparents still lived on a farm with a pump in the sink and an outhouse.) My sister came to her senses pretty quickly, too, and by the time the first child was born in 1977, they had hooked up to the grid, bought a propane stove, and an electric water heater, and once she made her husband take the dirty diapers into town to the laundromat once or twice, they got a washer and dryer.
One also wonders about the carbon footprint of having to drive into town for stuff that you need, as opposed to being able to walk to things as one is often able to do in the city.
Antiquated gender roles continue everywhere- city or country- I still have a hard time getting someone to wait on me at the lumberyard, though it's better now than it was back in the 1970s. I sometimes think part of the success of Home Despot is that they don't provide help for ANYBODY, so women who know what they're doing can just get their own stuff and go to the checkout.
Conformists die, but heretics live on forever.
Elbert Hubbard