Act: Inspiration

Home Biogas: Renewable Energy from Food Waste (Part I of Ecological Civilisation – Free Course)

By Samuel Alexander, originally published by Simplicity Institute

February 22, 2022

biogas

This presentation is about making renewable energy in your backyard from food scraps. Dr Alexander provides an introduction to domestic-scale biogas production and provides an independent, four-year review of the Home Biogas system.

This is Part I of the Ecological Civilisation series, written and presented by Samuel Alexander, co-director of the Simplicity Institute.

The introduction is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxC-r…

This series will be grappling with the problems of consumerism and the growth economy; envisioning alternative, post-carbon ways of life; and considering what action can be taken, both personally and politically, to help build an ecological civilisation. New presentations will be added to this playlist over time:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

You can support this channel by purchasing an e-book from the Simplicity Institute, available on a ‘pay what you can’ basis (edit the price as you choose for a donation): https://249897.e-junkie.com

Paperbacks are available here: https://au.permacultureprinciples.com…

The Home Biogas system under review in this video is available here (this is a non-affiliated link):

https://www.homebiogas.com

UPDATE from Dr Alexander: “In the presentation I said that I knew of no national or international standards that regulated household biogas systems. I’ve just discovered that recently international standards have been created: https://www.iso.org/standard/76157.html – This is great news as it shows this technology is gaining acceptance and recognition.”

Samuel Alexander’s work is available here: http://samuelalexander.info

The Simplicity Institute website is here: https://simplicityinstitute.org

We’d like to thank Andrew Doodson, Jordan Osmond, and Antoinette Wilson for offering invaluable production advice.

The opening image is kindly provided by Melissa Davis.

Other image references are available here: http://samuelalexander.info/image-ref…

The music is provided by Mortimer’s Method: https://mortimersmethod.bandcamp.com

 

Teaser photo credit: Biogas production in rural Germany. By Cec-clp – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14914191

Samuel Alexander

Dr. Samuel Alexander, co-director of the Simplicity Institute, is a lecturer at the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne, Australia, teaching a course called ‘Consumerism and the Growth Economy: Critical Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ into the Master of Environment. He is also a Research Fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute. He is author of eighteen books, including Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary (2018), Art Against Empire: Toward an Aesthetics of Degrowth (2017), Just Enough is Plenty: Thoreau’s Alternative Economics (2016), Prosperous Descent: Crisis as Opportunity in an Age of Limits (2015), Sufficiency Economy: Enough, for Everyone, Forever (2015), and Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation (2013), and he is editor of Voluntary Simplicity: The Poetic Alternative to Consumer Culture (2009) and co-editor of Simple Living in History: Pioneers of the Deep Future (2014). A full publication list is available here.

As well as his academic work, in recent years Sam has been working on a ‘simpler way’ demonstration project which became the subject of a documentary, ‘A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity‘. He is also founder of the Simplicity Collective, a website and social network dedicated to exploring the relationships between voluntary simplicity, energy descent, and post-growth / degrowth economics.  Dr. Alexander’s PhD thesis, conducted through Melbourne Law School, is entitled “Property beyond Growth: Toward a Politics of Voluntary Simplicity”.

walled garden and greenhouse

Sustainable gardening in the real world

By Ciarán De Buitléar, Resilience.org

There are many answers, and maybe none are completely right. But some of them are better than others. You find something that works for you and your land because you kept working at it. That is what most advice leaves out, and that is where the real work is.

March 27, 2026

Earthship

Inside the Off-Grid Earthship Community in New Mexico (YouTube film review)

By Frank Kaminski, Mud City Press

Mainstream coverage of off-grid, self-sustaining communities like the one featured in this video tends to be glib and sensational (focusing, for example, on “trash homes”). It’s so much rarer to see in-depth coverage of the full social, technical and ecological aspects of such communities, or intimate glimpses into residents’ daily lives and motivations.

March 27, 2026

wild river

Finding Life in the Flux

By Brian Lloyd, Resilience.org

Since stories serve in every culture as the workshops of meaning, the urge to craft new ones may signal our readiness at long last to face up to what’s coming. All stories have characters. The qualities we attach to the ones in leading roles and the fates that befall them as plots unfold tell us a great deal about what we fear and what we value.

March 27, 2026