“Community is probably the best investment you can make.” ~ Charles Eisenstein When we hear the word “investing,” most of us think about financial wealth—savings accounts, stock portfolios, or retirement funds. While financial capital is undeniably important, it is far from the only form of wealth that ensures resilience and fulfillment in life. True resilience—what […]
Originally presented by Steve Hardy on January 18, 2025 at the Virtual Tiny Home Show. This presentation was in part inspired by The Herd of Cats 10 years earlier.
Big Calm cofounder Steve Hardy once ran a disaster and emergency management tech startup and would regularly speak at events about black swans, uncertainty, emergence, applied improv, resilience, and antifragility – all subjects that are even more pertinent today and that crossover to permaculture and tiny homesteading. So, rummaging through the archives, here is a […]
The term self-reliance brings to mind a lone homesteader living off-grid in a home built with reclaimed materials. They harvest their rainwater; capture and store energy with a solar panel and a battery; and grow and preserve their own food. They may have a wood stove to cook and heat their home with, and have […]
Join Natalie Brake of Tiny House Listings Canada for a “deep dive” conversation with Big Calm cofounder Steve Hardy. Wide-ranging topics include nature, permaculture, edge space, zones, supply chains, prefab tiny houses, pocket neighbourhoods, Dunbars numbers, resilience, birding, community, and more!
This infinity loop is called the Adaptive Cycle. It was first developed to explain the life cycle of forests, and is the most powerfully simple way to describe resilience. More than just bouncing back from adversity, resilience is a loop – constant and in multitudes. Once you see it this way you’ll see it everywhere […]
The community garden at Big Calm was once a certified organic operation. Untended for a few years, grasses and weeds encroached on increasingly packed ground. Despite rich, black soil with mammoth earthworms, last year’s harvest was underwhelming, so this spring we set out to restore the garden to glory. Here’s a chronicle of the […]
2022 ended much as it began – with a big dump of snow and a deep freeze. Tough reminders that homesteading and tiny house winterization aren’t easy. But in between the extremes this year, we enjoyed a quiet, steadily productive year at Big Calm. We ticked through a lot of core to-do’s – including: Selective […]
2021 wasn’t an easy year in which to build a project like Big Calm. Slow bureaucrats, busy contractors, wildfire evacuation (just as crews mobilized), supply chain hold-ups (from septic field sand and insulation to doors and appliances), and, oh yeah, that persistent pandemic thing. Despite all that, we’ve made good progress on the project. Here […]
When we first contemplated building a tiny home community in the Slocan Valley, we thought a lot about how it would impact, and ideally, benefit both the land and the larger community.
