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Steve and Diantha Hodges are Sierra Club members living in Kyles Ford, Tennessee
For 14 years we've lived in a house heated by the sun with a little help from a small woodstove and a pickup truck load of firewood a year, currently cut from one oak that fell in our woods. We're off the grid -- photovoltaic panels provide 12 volt fluorescent lights and a few appliances, including a car radio. Gravity feeds water from a spring whose watershed is completely on our land. We empty our composting toilet every 2 months, and use the dry, odorless powder, after a year, to fertilize our apple, pear, and persimmon trees. A beehive makes sure our organic fruit trees and small garden are well pollinated; they also love our chemical-free front "lawn" of clover and plantain, which Diantha makes into teas and herbal salves.
We drive our Honda Civic to work 9 miles into Sneedville at Jubilee Project, a faith-based community and economic development nonprofit. Steve's work with local farmers from 17 counties includes helping them transition off tobacco by selling produce to local schools and growing for a shared-use kitchen where they can make local produce into jams, salsa, pickles and other products. We've helped start and support the Appalachian Spring Cooperative so that these small food microenterprises can combine efforts to market, including online at www.apspringcoop.com. (we personally buy their jams, honey, salsa, and relish.)
Our long-term commitment to sustainability in our life and work come from our Christian faith, which gives us a passion to care for and defend the beautiful, fragile world God has made.
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