 Hey everyone, Rob Greenfield here and today I'm going to introduce you to a beautiful family in a beautiful home right here in southern France just outside of the city of Toulouse about a half hour and this is a family of four that is working towards living a more sustainable life. They're already doing a lot but in the next years to come they will be doing a lot more to live sustainably. I'm really excited to share their story with you but this isn't just any family I've actually been staying with them for the last five weeks while I've been on lockdown here in France. So here they are to share their life with you and this is the life that I've been sharing for the last five weeks. We desire to have a wood and to have wood for our home and so it has been designed to be not the most sustainable house you can imagine but I mean the most we can we imagine but the thing is you know first we have all those windows very wide windows and they are on the north of the house so it might be weird to think that we put the big windows on the north but we are in a very very hot region of France so if we had put those big windows and we need light inside if we put these big windows at the first of the house to be so so hot in the summer that would be impossible to stay in the house so we did you know the opposite and which is what most of the people around in the south of France are doing so we move inside and as you see we have also some open windows and the sauce but it's cooked so to create a kind of wind you know to to get free to get the fresh air freeze inside the house no fresh land size or else and so the house is very has been you know designed to be very first very simple house if you look outside and and very useful one I mean if there is three parts of the house over there where my room my wife here is a what we call the room for life where you know we all gather the same house in the same room and we have your open cooking place and over there is the other rooms and it's it has been designed that way because if we if my one of the kids are you know older when they will when they leave the house we just have to close the door and we have the smallest new house smaller place to eat in winter we have also store for the store that is where all the heat come in winter or in cold time and everything is from here we can everything from this stove and it's not only beautiful you know it's very hot really we can have 22 degrees in there are in the home in the winter when it's 10 degrees minus Celsius no outside so it's very efficient and beautiful as they are we like the fight the fact to have there was a fire inside or this is kind of small fire inside the house we have the middle of the day it's 2 2 p.m. to 2 40 p.m. and we have no light on of course and camp we can't stay like this very very late in the day because you know very very good natural lightning thanks to those big windows and it was very important for us to have you know a lot more light we can inside the house the kitchen here it's an open kitchen it has been something very important when we designed the house because you know it's always weird when someone with cooking is separated from the other so now if I'm here or my wife is here cooking we can be all all all the other can be around the table and can speak can you know is a it's our way of living we don't like to separate people like that so we have this kitchen and if we go here and yeah I know what we try to do because you know at all it's not perfect we are in the process of evolving we try to have most food we can in in things like this you know and we have a lot of them and various pasta lentils rice and so on and we try to have a multiple thing a thing is this kind of thing to avoid you know the most we can of course we still have you know box like this we are you know it's not it's not it's just a journey to the to be good and and so you know something important to have a washing machine and dry and dry and dryer it seems weird but you know actually those two machines are 19 years old so it's very important for us to have very very good quality stuff so we are we bought it 2019 years ago and it's still working perfectly and we would like to have things that last most we can and this is true for for our equipment is true for the clothing we have so I have clothing we are quite old for most of them and I keep them as long as we can my shoes has been rippled twice and they are seven or eight years old and so I will keep repairing them as long as I can and we have good quality clothing I think it's better to buy it's a little more expensive to buy good quality clothing but on the long term you are we know because I have some stuff like this Patagonia stuff that are 25 years we don't have that conditioning refuse to have it even if it's could be no 40 degrees Celsius in summer here but we what we do in summer when it's very hot we just close the you know we put some black on the windows you know be sure that the light doesn't come from the south and we put some waters we just you know put some water on the soul actually and the natural evaporation of water you know give us some clean some fresh air and it's important because you know climate air conditioning is very very very you know needs a lot of power one point important is to have electricity in this house we subscribe to alternative distributors we we don't this distributor puts the electricity puts in the system is come from hydro sun and wind so it's really really sustainable electricity that he put in the system and we are subscribing to this to this distributor it cost a little bit more but it was a choice we have to do and if you go outside we can see that we have the wood it's a summer not so we are a little bit short of woods we have been using using it for the whole winter the first part of summer of spring and and so this would come for the moment we are still buying it and we are looking to buy some woods to be able to cut our own wood and so but this will be in a close future I don't know exactly but for the moment we buy from from a seller on a large capacity so we will stock as you know during the summer we will buy for one or two years we have a lot of stock if you have a dryer we almost don't use it because what we do is mainly use a sun which is a natural dryer and in winter time we do it just inside because you know because of the heat that the stove give us you know we we don't need to use a dryer so you will use we have this dryer but we have almost not using stock of water actually we are at the moment we have ability to have something like 3000 liters we we plan to have 7000 liters and I will explain to you why later as I told you we haven't had really rain for almost six weeks now so it's very dry we are hoping for the rain is something very weird you know when we look at the forecast people always say oh it's going to be we are going to have a very nice day for us you know a nice day is not a sunny day we like when it is water we have a pool we have a pool which is a pool with salt water and what we try now is to feel it with you know rain water it's why we need so much water 7000 liters is a lot but we need it because when it's in summer time we need to put water in the in the pool to keep the level of the pool here is a garden so we started it a year ago now we are expanded it a little bit we are doubling almost doubling the size this year and we plan to go even more than that in the next years and the front of the house we are developing new area for gardening and and we have a compost over there we have those I mean two composts that's one of the big one and then we like to compost the more we can and in the garden now we have planted mainly potatoes we have potatoes radish onions salads and things like that and we are developing you know we are preparing the tomatoes which is very important and some other vegetable and what we like to do because you can see the result of place we plan to have some also some grape and some fruit trees so you know but it's a long process because we have been here for three years and the first year was really to finish the house so our vehicles actually we have quite a means see a lot of vehicles but most of them have been about used they are old used car we bought them sometime very long time ago and a motorcycle which is 29 years old and and the four-wheel drive car that we used mainly only when we have to carry heavy stuff because we have often to carry very heavy stuff in what we are doing and we it's a 20 years old car we have an electrical car for daily move and we bought it and this one is a normal car that we had to buy because you know with electrical car you can go over 200 kilometers so we have to because when we come from our family is a thousand kilometers away so when we need we just pack up in this small car and it's what we do and but you know for the short distance movement what we use we use is a bicycle so we have a bicycle here and that's what we use when we have to you know go on short distance because it's easier and it's healthier for us and so but so I think yeah so we are in the process of doing it so it's a it's a journey I always say it's a journey dear friends I hope that you got a lot out of that there's a lot of lessons to learn from them and living more sustainably and transitioning to a lifestyle that walks a little bit more lightly treads a little bit more lightly on the earth of course this isn't the way it's going to work for everybody everybody has different scenarios and there's a lot of people out there who live who are living a far more sustainable life but I love this example because this shows what can be done for people that still live in you know sort of traditional house and who want a lot of comforts of life but this can show that there's still so much that you can do as an individual and as a family to live more sustainably so if you got a lot out of this video there are many more to come make sure to like it and leave a comment to help get this out in the YouTube algorithm and share this with people that you think could learn from it if you're not subscribed make sure to subscribe to this channel where there are a lot more videos to come and there are already quite a few here to learn from so I love you all very much and see you next time