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It is not just the financial savings. We grow more in awe of the tenuous hold our lives have on this small planet, more convinced that the sun renews us, in an almost religious way. It has made us profoundly grateful that the sun is up there, the center of our universe, warming us up and keeping us alive. That atavistic sense of the elements that early man knew and felt has become part of our lives.18

Thus, there was something more fundamentally human about living in a solar house than in a regular house. “Living in a solar house is a whole new awareness, another dimension,” said Karen Terry, another New Mexico homeowner. Terry’s home cost one-third more than she’d planned and the temperature inside the house swung 15 to 20 degrees during the day, but she said, “It’s the morality of the design of the house that’s so important.”19

Of course, when living out in the middle of nowhere, agitating for the kinds of massive social change that had marked the ’50s and ’60s is difficult. But like Thoreau, that the solar home owners could lead by example was certainly possible. Recent scholars have noted that there was a well-established path that could be trodden between various solar residences in the Southwest.20 DeKorne’s homestead received “hundreds of visitors each year.” So many people dropped by that the DeKornes had to request that would-be gawkers request an appointment in writing in advance.21

There was popular appeal to the natural ideal expressed by the Design for a Limited Planet homesteaders; after all, the book sold more than 100,000 copies.22 In a country filled with new, all-electric suburbs, the attitudes of the people in the book were delightfully countercultural without being too militant. Homeowners like Eddy and DeKorne were not trying to change anyone else’s lives but instead choosing their own. In that, the book’s subjects were very much with the time: The 1970s saw a tremendous rise in lifestyle activism. The popular writers of the day, like Thoreau and Amos Alcott before them, provided the philosophical backing for the idea that doing something with your life was more important than traditional organizing or political protest.

Charles Reich, author of The Greening of America, wrote that a lifestyle choice was the most effective form of activism because the rising generation, who he described as having “Consciousness III,” were looking to make deeper change than that attained by traditional politics. Reich wrote,

But if we think of all that is now challenged—the nature of education, the very validity of institutionalism and the legal system, the nature and purposes of work, the course of man’s dealing with the environment, the relationship of self to technology and society—we can see that the present transformation goes beyond anything in modern history. Beside it, a mere revolution, such as the French or the Russian seems inconsequential—a shift in the base of power.23

The mechanism for the change was to be “choosing a new life-style.” Young dropouts out on the roads and in the solar hot tubs of the country were educating themselves, not just messing around. They were being transformed spiritually to prepare them to lead the new society, Reich argued. “A fundamental object of this education we have described is transcendence, or personal liberation. It is liberation that is both personal and communal, as escape from the limits fixed by custom and society, in pursuit of something better and higher,” Reich continued. “It is epitomized in the concept of ‘choosing a life.’”24

Reich, who preached a revolution of the young, might as well have quoted Walden. The just-about-thirty Thoreau of the Walden years thought that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” People might have thought they were choosing their “means of life,” but really they were simply bound by their elders’ prejudices. “What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can.... Practically, the old have no very important advice to give to the young, their own experience has been so partial,” Thoreau observed.