Hey everyone, Rob Greenfield here,
and today I am 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.
This is a family of four that is working
towards living a more sustainable life.
They are already doing a lot,
but in the next years to come
they will be doing a lot more
to live sustainably.
I am really excited
to share their story with you.
But, this is not just any family.
I have actually been staying with them
for the last five weeks while I have been
on lockdown here in France.
So here they are to share their life
with you, and this is the life that I have
been sharing for the last five weeks.
[music playing]
It was our desire to have wood
and to have wood for our home.
So it has been designed to be not
the most sustainable house you can imagine
but 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
big windows on the north, but we are in a
very, very hot region of France,
so if we had put big windows
(and we need light inside)
if we had put these big windows
at the south of the house, it would be
so, so hot in the summer that it would be
impossible to stay in the heat.
So we did, you know, the opposite,
which is what most of the people around
in the South of France are doing.
So we move inside...
[music playing]
As you see we also have
some open windows on the south,
but it is to create a kind of wind
to get fresh air inside the house.
The house has been designed, first,
to be a very simple house
if you look outside,
and a very useful one.
There are three parts of the house.
Over there we have my room and my wife's,
here is what we call the room for life,
where we all gather in the same room,
and we have the open cooking place,
and over there are the other rooms.
It has been designed that way because
when the kids are older
and they leave the house, we just have to
close the door and we have
a smaller place to heat in winter.
We have a stove, a heater stove, it is
where all our heat comes from in winter
or in cold times.
Everything is from here, everything
comes from this stove.
And it's not only beautiful, you know,
it is very hot.
It can be twenty-two degrees in the home
in winter when it's
minus ten degrees Celsius outside.
It is very, very efficient and beautiful.
We like the fact that you have
a small fire inside the home.
It is the middle of the day, 2:40 PM,
and we have no lights on of course,
and we can stay like this very very late
in the day because we have very good
natural lighting thanks to the big windows
and it was very important to us to have
as much light as we can inside the house.
We have a kitchen here,
it is an open kitchen, something very
important when we designed the house
because it is always weird when someone
who is cooking is separated
from the others.
So now if I am here, or my wife is
here cooking, all the others can be
around the table, and we can speak.
It is a whole way of living, we do not
like to separate people like that
so we have this kitchen.
And if we go here...
What we try to do,
although we know it is not perfect,
and we are in the process of evolving,
we try to have as much food
as we can in things like this
and we have a lot of them.
Pasta, lentils, rice, and so on,
and we try to have mostly this kind of
thing to avoid waste as much as we can.
Of course, we still have boxes like this,
but it is a journey to be good.
Something important that we have is
a washing machine and dryer.
It seems weird but actually
those two machines are nineteen years old.
It is very important for us to have
very, very good quality stuff.
We bought these nineteen years ago
and they are still working perfectly.
We like to have things that last
as long as we can.
It is true for equipment,
it is true for clothing, so I have
clothes that are quite old, most of them,
and I keep them as long as I can.
My shoes have been repaired twice,
they are seven or eight years old, and I
will keep repairing them as long as I can.
We have good quality clothing.
It is a little more expensive to buy
good quality clothing but in the long term
you are really, really a winner
because I have some stuff like this,
Patagonia stuff,
that I have had for twenty-five years.
We do not have air conditioning,
we refuse to have it, even if it is
forty degrees Celsius in summer here.
What we do in summer when it is very hot
we just close up,
put some black on the windows,
to be sure that
the light does not come from the south,
and we put some water on the floor
and the natural evaporation of the water
gives us some clean, fresh air.
It is important because, as you know
air conditioning needs a lot of power
One important point was to have the
electricity in this house
be subscribed to
alternative distributors.
What this means is the electricity
this distributor puts into the system
comes from hydro, sun, and wind,
so it is really sustainable electricity
that they put in the system and we
subscribe to this distributor.
It costs a little bit more, but it was
a choice that we decided to make.
And if you go outside, we can see that we
have the wood. It is summer now so we are
a little bit short of wood. We have been
using it for the whole winter and the
first part of spring.
For the moment we are still buying it
and we are looking to buy some woods
to be able to cut our own wood
This would be in the close future,
I don't know exactly when, but
for the moment we buy from a seller
in large capacity.
During the summer
we re-buy for one or two years,
so we have a lot of stock.
Even though we have a dryer,
we almost do not use it,
because what we do is mainly
use the sun, which is a natural dryer,
and in wintertime we do it inside
because the heat the stove gives us means
we do not need to use a dryer.
So we have the dryer,
but we almost never use it.
So let's talk about water.
At the moment we have the ability to have
something like three thousand liters.
We plan to have seven thousand liters
and I will explain to you why later.
As I have told you we have not had
real rain for almost six weeks now
so it is very dry. We are hoping for rain.
It is something very weird,
when we look at the forecast
people always say "oh,
we are going to have a very nice day,"
for us a nice day is not a sunny day,
we like when there is water.
We have a pool, a salt water pool.
What we are trying now
is to fill it up with rain water,
which is why we need so much water.
Seven thousand liters is a lot,
but we need it because in summertime
we need to put water in the pool
to keep the level of the pool up.
Here is our garden.
We started it a year ago,
now we are expanding it a bit
We are almost doubling the size this year
and we plan to do even more than that
in the next years.
In the front of the house we are
developing a new area for gardening.
We have a compost over there,
we have two composters,
that is one of the big ones.
We like to compost as much as we can.
In the garden now we have planted mainly
potatoes, radish, onions, salads,
things like that, and we are preparing the
tomatoes, which are very important, and
a lot of other vegetables.
What we would like to do here, because
as you can see there is a lot of space
we plan to also have some grapes here
because it is very difficult soil
but this could be good for grapes,
and some fruit trees.
But it is a long process, you can not do
everything in a very short time.
We have been here for three years and the
first year was really to finish the house.
Here are our vehicles.
Actually we have quite, as you can see,
a lot of vehicles, but all of them have
been bought used, they are all used cars.
We bought some a very long time ago,
a motorcycle which is twenty-nine
years old, and the four-wheel drive car
that we use only when we have to carry
heavy stuff because we often have to carry
very heavy stuff in what we are doing.
It is a twenty-year-old car.
We have an electric car for daily use,
we bought it three years ago.
This one is a normal car
that we had to buy because
with the electric car you can not go over
two hundred kilometers.
So, because we come from families
one thousand kilometers away,
when we need to visit we pack up
in this small car, and that is what we do.
But for all the short distance movement,
what we use is bicycles.
We have several bicycles here,
and that is what we use when
we have to go a short distance because
it is easier and it is healthier for us.
So I think, yeah...
We are in the process of doing it.
It is a journey.
I always like to say, it is a journey.
[music playing]
Dear friends,
I hope that you got a lot out of that.
There are lot of lessons to learn
from them in 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 is not
the way it is going to work for everybody,
everybody has different scenarios,
and there are a lot of people out there
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,
a sort of traditional house, and
who want a lot of the comforts of life,
but this can show that there is still
so much that you can do as an individual,
and as a family, to live more sustainably.
If you got a lot out of this video
there are many more to come.
Make sure to like it and leave a comment
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If you are 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.
I love you all very much
and see you next time!
[music playing]
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