THE APPROACH:
Usually when people think about reducing home energy use, the first thing that comes to mind is buying stuff, such as more efficient appliances or solar panels. Posts on this site describe how one family, while hardly gung ho, still managed to reduce energy use by 30-40%, mostly by retrofitting our habits and our thinking over a period of years.
FRUGALINE:
(Rhymes with "gasoline") A distillate of space and time, Frugaline is the energy of the past, present and future, available in vast deposits anywhere and everywhere. Unlike other renewable sources of energy, which require considerable mining, manufacture and transport of various contraptions for their capture, frugaline is harvest-ready, within us and all around us. It borrows in part from Amory Lovins' concept of the negawatt, a unit of energy saved, which may in turn borrow from Ben Franklin's "A penny saved is a penny earned."
Frugaline involves becoming aware of all the facets of your machine dependency, and using the gifts of nature and human nature to gradually shed as much of that dependency as possible. Frugaline can be found in the sun's warmth pouring in through the window in winter, in a cooling summer's breeze, in the capacity of people to generate their own mobility, heating and cooling, and in using mechanical assist strategically rather than automatically.
