 Hello everyone my name is Rob Greenfield and today I'm going to share with you my experience of living simply and sustainably in a tiny house to share lessons with you and to help you on your journey of living simply and sustainably in a tiny house. So before I get into the lessons and the tips I'm going to share where I'm coming from. I first moved into a tiny house in 2015. I bought a tiny house on Craigslist actually on wheels for $950 it was 50 square feet so very small and I really decided to test out my own limitations with how simple I could live and how sustainably I could live. I'd done activism prior to that in really downsizing and simplifying and really focusing on simple living and moving into a 50 square foot tiny house off the grid in San Diego was my immersion into simple and sustainable living to a to a sort of an extreme and my second tiny house was in Orlando Florida this one was a hundred square feet so twice the size but about twice as tall so maybe about four times as big and this one I built out of 99 second hand materials along with the help of others and it was built for under $1,500 while creating less than 30 pounds of trash in the entire build. I lived in there for about close to two years while I did a year of growing and foraging 100% of my food. Since then I've helped to build a tiny house in France that I ended up living in for a month during lockdown in 2020 and I've visited many tiny houses around the country and other countries around the world and I'm very passionate about living simply and living sustainably so I'm excited to to share this experience with you and share these tips and these lessons to help you down your journey of living more simply and more sustainably in a structure that works with this earth rather than against it. So the first thing I want to talk about is you adapting to you. One of the really important things is that we all live our own unique lives and to look at just what somebody else is doing and either try to mimic it or try to just poke holes in it because it's what you can't do is not really a holistic way of trying to live the life that you're most passionate and purposeful in. So the big lesson to start with is adapting what you learn and what you find to how it's going to fit into your life. For me personally one of my big things it's really about trying to live in a way that is really in alignment with the earth that's really in alignment with my belief system where I'm really focused on living simply to the extreme for many people and also living sustainably to the extreme compared to many people and so I'm I might take things to another level but it's all about adapting to you. So for example maybe you have a family maybe you have a family of five you're going to need a bigger house you might live in a desert or you might live in a tropical climate you might live in a you know a cold place or you might live up on the mountains wherever you are you have to adapt to that environment. So adapting to whatever your situation is in and really critically thinking and problem-solving this is really the key to to to having a highly functioning tiny house really having a highly functioning living situation and really you know having a life that works and the other big part about it is that when you adapt to your environment to the life that you're living and you and you do this in a way where you are living out your belief system this is what I think some people would refer to as the flow state. I look at it as living a life in alignment when you can design your living scenario and you can you you can design your life so that your actions and your beliefs and your thoughts can all be in alignment that's when things will really flow and so I really encourage you to look back at the big picture like zoom out when you're designing your tiny house and you're designing a living situation zoom out and really look at who you are and what you want to be and what you want to become and how you want to be living and incorporate that in your house should reflect your life as a whole if you're going to really love the place that you live. Next I want to talk about simplifying I think simplifying is one of the absolute most important keys to really being able to live in a tiny house and live an alternative lifestyle so one of the big things that I've learned is that the more needs that you have the harder it is to meet those needs and the more you can simplify your needs the less needs you have the easier it is to meet them so the more bills that you can cut back and the more ways that you're tied into the industrial system and to the corporate system the more that you can just pull these things back the easier it is to actually get into a living in a tiny house the less stuff you have the easier it's going to be to function in a tiny house and the easier it is going to be to live simply the more bills and debt and the more you know all of these working parts you have the more struggle that it's going to be so really simplifying is one of the absolute keys and again it's about looking at your situation how simple do you want to go how sustainably do you want to live and really having that honest conversation with yourself about both what you want to do and what you can do but my big suggestion is that it's about this mindset and realizing that again the more needs that you have the harder it is going to be to meet those needs and so if you can if you can cut that back you can get more into that flow state we're living in a tiny house rather than feeling like this burden where you're like well i just don't know how i could possibly have enough space or meet my needs it kind of comes into a state of flow rather than this state of feeling like you're cutting back and resisting living small means more time outside of your house and that's one of the absolutely beautiful things about living in a small house is that it's about getting outside of our comfort zone it's about getting into our community and so one of the really beautiful ways to look at it is that you know we have our house but this earth is our home we have for example our national and state forests that can be our home that is that is the public commons and so the more we get outside of this idea that our house needs to be our everything and we start to realize that we are inhabitants we are citizens we are residents of this earth and of our community that allows us to really be able to get into this simple living and really get into the space of being comfortable in a tiny house so there's a couple really big keys to that and this comes down to the idea of community the idea of communal living and the idea of shared resources when you live in a small space you might not be able to have everything that you might need and that's where sharing resources come into place so when i lived in san diego for example i didn't have a car but i used a car share program you might not even have a bike but you could use a bike share program you might not use a food processor but once a month or a food dehydrator but once every two months shared resources are key so working together with our community to meet our needs rather than having one of everything for each person a big thing to think about is that supposedly the average electric drill is is only used for about a half hour of its entire life so that means that 99.9 percent of the time it's just sitting so instead if you can share these things within your community and you can do this in a very organic way just by connecting with your neighbors and being able to share things or there's the shared economy there's so many things like libraries of things or tool libraries or regular old book libraries you might not have room for thousands of books but you have a library card and that allows you to live tiny while having access to an incredible amount of resources so get involved with your community think about communal living and think about shared resources and that turns a tiny house into really a lot larger of a house and a lifestyle now i want to get into a little bit of the you know actual details of living simply and sustainably and really this is about connecting with the earth this is about learning how the earth cycles work and how we can plug into them and connect with them and utilize them in a way where we're not taking where we can actually be giving that's the idea of regeneration we have sustainability which is the idea of something being able to go on and on and on but regenerating is the idea that we're actually improving this land and so i'm going to talk a little bit about sustainability and a little bit about regeneration now the first one is water water of course without it we no longer cease to exist it's extremely important and not only to just our existence but to our just general happiness so i want to talk a little about rainwater harvesting i see this as one of the big keys to living to living sustainably and to living simply it is one of these simplest ways to attain our water at zero cost and in a way that causes no negative impact so rainwater harvesting some people think as as very complicated but the reality is is all you're doing is diverting the water that's coming off your roof and you're just directing it into something that can store it which could simply be buckets under your under your drip line or setting up gutters and a downspout that goes into some 55 gallon drums or some 275 gallon totes now the really beautiful thing about rainwater harvesting um so for example in my tiny house my shower is runoff rainwater and my sink is runoff of rainwater and when you use rainwater for showering you're not actually using any water you're just slow you're just simply slowing down the the rain that would have made it to the earth utilizing it and then letting it arrive to the earth at a later time so when you're living off rainwater in your shower in your in your sink in your bathroom and so on you're actually able to utilize water in a way that has no negative impact and actually can be a positive thing instead so rainwater is extremely simple a gray water is another little step up still quite simple but a little more complicated now what gray water is is this is the water that's coming out of your shower or out of your sink and it has say food waste in it or soaps and then it's rather than sending it to the sewer gray water is keeping it on site and the idea of keeping your gray water on site is one you're not sending your burden to be someone else's problem to deal with but two you're actually keeping a valuable resource on site gray water is full of nutrients and of course the water that can then be used to water our plants and actually grow food with and improve our landscape so gray water can be done in in somewhat complex ways or it can be done very simply the simplest way for example in my kitchen in in San Diego was simply putting a five gallon bucket under my drain in my sink and then when that fills up using that to water the garden i stepped it up a little bit in my tiny house in Orlando rather than having to dump a bucket out each time i just put a simple drain pipe but it didn't go to a sewer again instead i just directed it to water loving plants so you can have it set up in a way where there's some manual maintenance or in a very direct way and one of the simplest things to do with your gray water is send it directly to your fruit trees not to things like kale and arugula where you're going to be picking near that because there's bacteria in our grain water or our gray water but instead directing it to things like fruit trees and perennial shrubs so one of the big keys to being able to do this is simply using biodegradable soaps and they're readily readily available on the market Dr. Brauners is an example of one that's available across the country and so by doing this the simple part about this is that not not needing plumbing or septic if you have if you get into the plumbing and septic world that's of course another level up in permanent build and and um you know in skills and so gray water is kind of i would consider the ultimate in living simply in a tiny house or or a natural structure so now that leads us into drinking water the essence of life having good water and in many of my living situations i've harvested rainwater as my source of drinking water of course a lot of people they'll just tap into the city utilities in order to do that you could simply run a hose for example to a tiny house or a structure of that sorts but one of the simplest things you can do is is harvest rainwater and then use that as drinking water if you're in a beautiful place if you're in a fortunate place to have a well or a stream to be able to harvest from that is also another option and to me one of the one of the most really beautiful simple tools that i use is called a burky filter so this is a filter that you can purchase and you can using this filter you can you can purify rainwater you can purify water from a body of water but you can also purify water from a city faucet removing things like chlorine and fluoride and heavy metals so this is a filter that sits right on top of a counter it's portable it doesn't need to be connected into any lines and you can actually take it from your house if you're traveling to another place to be able to purify water as well so a lot of people do worry about drinking rainwater because of acid rain and things like that the research that i've done is that in very few circumstances is that something to actually worry about and as far as the legalities of harvesting rainwater you may have seen these you know viral things online about it being illegal to harvest rainwater in different places and i want to say just don't let that discourage you at all because the reality is is that that's only the that's only true in a small fraction of places and if you're harvesting water just for your own drinking needs it's not rarely ever going to be something where you run into a problem with a government or something like that and if you do water is a human right and that is something worth fighting for and if you ever have the government coming after you because you're not because they don't want you to harvest rainwater to drink definitely call me and we will uh i'd love i'd love to have a talk with the government about that and want to try to make a change in your community there now i want to talk to you a little bit about composting i think composting is at the essence of living a sustainable life and it is at the essence of simplicity as well the earth has been composting long before humans ever existed the earth still knows how to compost a lot of people think composting is is quite complex and you can get into the science of composting and make it quite complex but the reality of composting is that it can be done very simply the key is you have your your greens and your browns greens are high in nitrogen browns are high in carbon food waste is greens dried leaves for example is browns and it's just as simple as having about twice the amount of browns or carbon as greens nitrogen so every time you add a bucket of food waste to your compost pile you simply do two buckets of leaves or wood shavings or newspaper brown materials to your green materials so it is it is extremely simple to be able to compost and again don't get worried about it a lot of people kind of over complicate these things but there are simple systems for all of them my two favorite systems are a palette system we're just getting getting a few used palettes and building a little compost bin out of those or chicken wire just building a about a five foot diameter i believe you know five feet across system and then putting your food waste and your carbon materials in there and you can compost a lot more than you think of course you can compost food scraps and plant material and paper but you can also compost your hair your dog hair and next we're going to talk about composting poop for me composting my poop also called humanure was sort of the holy grail of sustainable living it took me about five years to get to that point where i was willing to be the person that deals with my own poop because in our society we are a group of people where we put our poop out of sight out of mind it is someone else's problem i'm not going to think about it it's gone we poop in that flush toilet in the water we hit that little lever and it's gone and to to poop and actually deal with our own poop to compost it to me i see as a great resistance to this throw away mindset society and also it's a great way to just stand up against societal norms and just say hey this is me this is doing what i think is really right for this earth and kind of doing it in a way that it kind of sets you aside sets you set you apart from society so it took me i think about five years before i started to actually use a compost toilet and i know i have used the word simple a lot of times but i just love things that are simple and the compost toilet is absolutely one of those you can have very advanced compost toilets that you can buy for i would probably say there's probably some for over ten thousand dollars but thousands of dollars but one of the simplest systems is just making a box and then cutting a hole in it putting a lid on top and then having a five gallon bucket underneath there you poop in it you cover it with something like sawdust and just like a litter box that's properly functioning has no smell when it's properly functioning the same goes for a compost toilet so composting poop is another level from composting food scraps and yard waste you generally want to compost it for an entire year and the way to really learn about composting poop is a book called the human newer handbook written by joseph jenkins highly recommend that book um another thing is pee so generally the systems that i designed that are the simplest you don't pee into the compost toilet you put poop in there and then you have a separate either you have a urine diverter to divert the pee elsewhere or to collect the pee or just another bucket that you're peeing into now pee is also called liquid gold and it's ironic that what a lot of people are lacking in their gardens is nitrogen and that's what our pee is so high in we're literally flushing away the solution every time that we pee into a flush toilet if we simply utilize our pee or liquid gold in our gardens we can provide our own nitrogen needs which means we don't need those uh you know those fertilizers that are using an incredible amount of fossil fuels and resources so composting our poop and using our pee in the garden are very simple with pee you generally want to dilute it about eight to one to water and so you have about eight times more water than pee and by doing this it also makes it not very smelly at all properly functioning compost toilets and liquid gold systems really don't smell hardly at all it's all about properly functioning systems if you want to take it to the next level you can even grow your own toilet paper in florida i grow plecranthus barbatus also called the blue spur flower and in climates like the carolinas or the you know the great lakes region a good plant is mullin there's also lambs ear there is a natural toilet paper plant growing in most places around the world that are better than what you can buy at the store that are soft that are a deep connection to the earth and that's just to me one of the most beautiful levels of really simple and sustainable living is actually a closed loop compost toilet system where you're growing your own toilet paper you're keeping all of your nutrients on site and you're not putting the problem anywhere else one of the sort of ironic things about living simply is that in a way it's incredibly complex to live simply in the 21st century in this consumeristic globalized industrialized system actually takes a lot of critical thinking it takes a lot of problem solving it takes a lot of self-analyzation and reflection deep analyzation and examination of our lives because today we live in a time where it is an act of resistance to to live simply because most of the actions that we take have been monetized and have been put into these corporate systems the food we eat the cars we drive the gas we pump into that car the water that we drink the products that we buy at the store our waste all of these are multi trillion dollar industries that all have their own desires of the way that we do things so that they can capitalize they can gain on these things and through globalization our lives have become so complex the actions that we take that seem quite simple can be causing a ripple can be affecting somebody else or some other species on the opposite side of the world so the truth about simple living is that it is complex it takes examination and it takes a lot of self-reflection to the point where you can actually get to a place of simple living so just have a heads up for that that at the beginning it it could be hard pooping in a compost toilet at the first at first can you know feel difficult but you get used to it you build these things into your life and as you simplify you step away from the injustice you step away from the corruption you step away from the inequity and you can start to living in a way where your life is actually living in a way that's more just that's more equitable that's more in alignment with lifting up humanity rather than pillaging and destroying this earth humanity and other species at the same time if you are properly living simply and sustainably the idea is that it doesn't cost you money it saves you money but there's a whole spectrum of a way to live sustainably or simply and a lot of people look at sustainable living as having huge solar panels on your roof you know an electric car that might have cost tens of thousands of dollars that you have to be working this big job for that ultimately doesn't allow you to live as simply as you'd like to and for some people they can live simply because they've got endless money that allows them to have other people taking care of their work and not really having to see all the complexities of their life because they can you know pay for it all but when you get down to the essence of living simply and sustainably I believe that comes from a largely demonetized life because again the monetary system is incredibly destructive and it's incredibly complex every time you're spending a dollar where's that money really going so I think demonetizing and reducing the number of ways that you're spending money is very much at the essence of living a truly sustainable and simple life and that also takes time that comes down to looking at all of the ways that you're living and they are interacting with the monetary system and shipping away at those one thing at a time and living in a tiny house is a huge start by doing that you so much can reduce the number of ways that you are involved in a monetary system or not some people live in a tiny house and they are still wrapped up into all of that and that's where you have this you kind of have two very different sides of the tiny house movement you have the people that have credit cards with endless amount of money available to them that are living simply in a tiny house and then you have people who are really going to another level of living simply and are really removing themselves from the whole consumeristic way of existing so some of the big keys to that of course there's food growing your own food is is a way to drastically cut down on your financial needs if you're spending say $6,000 a year on food by growing that food instead that's $6,000 a year that you don't need to earn but this $6,000 worth of food is a whole different story because you're connected to that food and the nutrients in that food are another level another way to get food is by dumpster diving you can meet a hundred percent of your food needs from the waste of our consumeristic society I've done months of living purely on just food from dumpsters and find it to actually be a problem of not having too much food there is such an abundance of it out there as far as transportation goes the least expensive form of transportation is using our own energy so that can come in the form of walking but the bicycle is the real tool because you can bike a very far distance actually exerting a fairly minimal amount of energy and it's a it's very sustainable and simple way of moving around one of the big keys is getting a bike rack and putting panniers or bike bags on it and that allows you to errands and grocery shop another level up from that is having a bicycle trailer one of my bicycle trailers could carry up to 300 pounds which actually allows you to move furniture even on your trailer another big tip for demonetizing your life is exchanges so both of the tiny houses that I've lived in the land I didn't own I did that through a work exchange so in exchange for doing work on their land I was able to put my tiny house there and in that way there was no monetary transaction and that can save tens of thousands of dollars per year potentially between food and your rent if you can cut those two things out through a work exchange growing food dumpster diving and so on you can also do a work exchange for food that those two things are the two biggest keys to to demonetizing in order to be able to simplify so you can do a work exchange but you can do so many exchanges whatever skills that you have think about how you can trade those skills for the skills that you have with others and if you come together with a community I truly believe that we can meet all of our needs as as communities and as humanity without corporations we've done it for 99.9 percent of human existence and we can do it today and in fact today we live in a time where we are surrounded by an incredible number of different skill sets around us so we can work through that we can do that very much in just a community one-to-one basis or you can find systems for example there's time banks or skill share networks in order to be able to plug into that another big one I want to mention in is bills so what I recommend is and what I did is I would continuously look at my bills and I would say okay this bill is say a hundred dollars a month that's $1,200 a year that's $12,000 in 10 years is what I'm getting for that and the work that I have to do for that worth it versus not having that and even more so by removing that from my life what could I open up time for what space would I have by not having that so reducing the number of bills you have can allow you to be in a comfortable state because the more bills you have the less easy it is to live in a state of presence because you know you have to constantly be planning to be able to pay those bills within the month so the more that you can remove yourself from this bill system the more that you're able to get into the state of simple existence keeping money in mind it's really important to realize that you don't need a lot of gadgets and a lot of high tech devices in order to be able to live simply but there is a balance with that having a bicycle for example is one of my greatest keys to living a simple and sustainable life and so it's about taking that balance and and working with that and seeing what items that you really need high quality items that are built to last are the key versus cheap junk that's going to break and you're going to need to keep buying it I want to talk a little bit about living off the grid which before technology everybody lived off the grid today living off the grid is is quite a difficult task to accomplish in my first tiny house in San Diego I did live off the grid in my second tiny house in Orlando I did not live off the grid and the reason I didn't live off the grid the second time is because one I was only going to be there for about a year and a half and the amount of money it would have taken to be off the grid was not worth it for that short term period so instead I simply had an electrical cord running up to my house and just paid that neighbor for using the electricity which is a pretty simple way of having the little bit of electricity that I needed and so to me the dream is living off the grid being disconnected from those public utilities and I've done that with water consistently but electricity was a little bit more difficult one and one of the interesting lessons that I found was as in my second time around my second homestead when I actually unplugged more deeply by growing and foraging 100% of my food for a year now I needed much more storage I was using much more energy in my free my deep chest freezer just the total amount of cooking that I was doing and so because I was doing so much with that I actually didn't find that I was able to to really achieve the the desire to live off the grid in that in that scenario so living off the grid is is very much attainable it can be very challenging and so it really comes down to looking at your situation and seeing whether it's whether it's possible in some scenarios it's very much going to be impossible in other scenarios it's going to be quite difficult however if trying to live off the grid my recommendation is don't be fooled by the green tech solar and wind are certainly much less destructive than fossil fuels but to call them a truly green energy would be ignoring the fact that they require a large amount of extraction from this earth which is ultimately pillaging an area and requires an incredible amount of inequity because it's basically saying this area is less worth it these people that live in this area are less worthwhile and it's the taking and extracting of those resources even to create these technologies that allow us to live off the grid so this is just something that's really important to keep in mind is going deeper and not just allowing yourself to be greenwashed by these green technologies and understand that these energies there's also a price to pay and there are people that are paying for it in order for us to be able to to use them and so that's where the big thing with living off the grid comes in my recommendation comes back to simplifying the more simply you live the less electricity you're going to need which means the smaller solar system that you're going to need so the more we can reduce our needs in a manageable and reasonable way the the smaller the systems are going to need to be and that's going to be more sustainable and it's going to cost us a lot less money the last thing that i want to share is just that i guess i want to burst some of your bubble and just say that it's not going to be easy to live simply and sustainably but life isn't going to be easy no matter what path you choose for me what i've found is that the convenient lifestyle the one where i can buy everything and have everything that i need that's not easy either because that's not in alignment with my belief system and i i basically believe that life is going to be hard no matter what and it's worth it to to fight and to change our lives to live in a way that feels good and for that to be hard rather than being sucked into the consumeristic lifestyle droning away working for somebody else doing something that you're not passionate or purposeful about and worse yet feel horrible about and have that not be easy either so to me my belief is that life is going to be hard no matter what we might as well have a hard life while really striving to live the lives of our dreams to live the lives of our desires and to live in a way that is sustainable that's equitable that's just and to me this really comes down to living a simple and sustainable life in order to be able to do that and i think one way of doing that is living in a tiny house there's many ways to do it tiny houses are just one way you can live in a community you could live in a you know potentially an apartment complex you can live in an intergenerational household with grandparents parents children all living together in many instances that may be even more sustainable than living in a small tiny house by yourself so again that's where this all comes down to critical thinking problem solving looking at the big picture and seeing what's the best scenario so don't get yourself don't get yourself stuck into little labels and you know watch these videos online and say oh well the tiny house is the only way to go it's not there's many ways to live simply and sustainably so i want to thank you for being here and taking the time to learn there are so many different videos in this online online tiny house class that go into so many of the details of like these systems that i started to touch on it is of course at the same time is incredibly simple incredibly complex there's so many moving parts but i i'm i definitely want to encourage you to always keep that simplicity in mind and always think about the sustainability aspect because it's really easy to get away from that when we're potentially building the the house of our dreams so thanks a lot for being here and i look forward to seeing you out in the real world one of these days and enjoy the rest of the classes