Backbone > Life in the Balance

Living Laboratory
By Susan Piperato

The Walker residence is strikingly different from any of the others on its road—or just about anywhere else—but if you don't already know it's there, it's guaranteed you won't look at it twice. Located on a quiet, pretty, well-shaded, and well-populated route linking Routes 9 and 9G in Hyde Park, the Walker place initially stands out only as the token antique farmhouse (built in 1903) on what is now a fairly well-traveled suburban road. When I visited the Walker family at home on one of June’s few sunny mornings I drove right past, even after noting the number on the mailbox. I turned around and backtracked in a state of disbelief that such a huge undertaking as the Walker’s sustainable lifestyle could exist on such a typical suburban street. But as I soon discovered, the Walker house is every bit as antithetical to contemporary American life as it is visually unobtrusive.

Set slightly farther back from the road than its '50s brick and raised-ranch neighbors, the Walker house is tall and narrow, with its original siding painted white and its shutters painted black, and small side porches that could maybe use a makeover. There's a driveway that cuts along the right side of the lawn, edging along a wooden fence, where a red mini-SUV—that standard symbol of family occupancy—is parked. In real estate parlance, the Walker house is a fixer-upper, full of potential and problems, but ideal, due to its 15-acre backyard, for family life and maybe some small-scale farming (thanks to zoning ordinances in place since the property's days as a violet farm, starting in 1835). But to the Walkers, their house is a living laboratory—a so-far successful experiment by a family of nine to live sustainably, ethically, and in environmental harmony by eschewing just about everything that America has to offer. And doing so makes the Walker house a home in the richest sense of the word. By avoiding the uses of refrigeration, television, motors, what most people consider "basic" technological amenities (voicemail, answering machines, and e-mail, to name a few), electricity (except for the water pump and compact fluorescent bulbs for reading), gas, and oil, the family relies upon cool groundwater and winter weather for cold storage, and a woodstove for cooking and heat. Each night, by physical necessity and out of emotional closeness, the Walkers gather together to eat, talk, and make music around their "hearth".

"Our family leads a unique life, I suppose you could say," says Jeff Walker, a Vassar geology professor and the author of the column "Living Unplugged" for the Valley Table (a quarterly magazine of Hudson Valley agriculture and cuisine). Such an understatement is typical of Walker, whose deadpan delivery is accompanied with a twinkle in the eye and a near-grin. Jeff and his wife, Kathy, accompanied by their seven children, are well known for playing music professionally at community dances throughout the Hudson Valley. But at the heart of all the couple does is their family life. As the parents of toddlers through teenagers—Hannah, 15 months; Rachel, age 3; Forrest, 7; Patrick, 9; Mary Claire, 11; Laurel, 14; and Peter, 16?the Walkers believe in homeschooling in order to "allow the children to pursue the things they're really interested in, rather than learn them in an incidental way" and to promote the value of "time together as a family."

Admittedly, the Walkers' nonstop, fully equitable parenting style is not one every adult has the patience (or wherewithal) to practice. The kids and their parents wear identical, gender-specific garb—jeans and button-down shirts for the males, long denim pinafores for the females, and work boots all around—that's part of an overall plan. "You have to remove as much as possible of the power structure," says Walker. "If parents accept their kids as equal partners in every activity, then the kids' taking responsibility is not as onerous as it sounds. You trust the kids to know things. We don't try to force them, but we give them opportunities and examples."

So far, the Walkers' scheme to teach their children, like Thoreau at Walden, "to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms" is working. "They're able to entertain themselves pretty well," Walker says. The barn is also a "shop of sorts," and the kids play music, draw, and read to each other at night. During my visit they were all busy, bright, and cheerful, and everyone got along. "There's very little age consciousness," says Walker. "They don't only want to be with kids their own ages, and they don't feel the awe of older kids or the disdain for younger kids that I sometimes see in other kids. They're with each other all day, and they're all different ages. Through our music they see kids of all ages, and other adults, and they're on equal terms with everybody."

But the Walkers didn't always live this way. A dozen years ago they were like most of us—with two kids, two cars, a suburban house, private-school tuition bills, weekly trips to the grocery store, and the usual afternoon schleps to and from kids' extracurricular activities. Walker describes himself and Kathy as "typical products of 20th-century consumer culture," who believed that "the solution to most problems involved buying something—furniture, appliances, food, entertainment." Walker says that although, as a geologist, he has always been concerned about fossil fuel use, the limits of natural resources, and equitable distribution of wealth, the reasons for his and Kathy's radical changes in lifestyle were motivated mostly by their concerns about social justice. "What probably galvanized us into action was when Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian activist, was executed at the behest of the Shell Oil Company," he says. "That was 1995 or '96, and we realized we're responsible for this guy's death because we use fossil fuel, so that changed a lot of what we thought." Following European ideals about "using spaces around the house to grow food on a small scale" as a model, the Walkers began transforming their suburban lawn into vegetable gardens. In 1997 they made a full commitment to sustainability by moving to the farmhouse and leaving major appliances like the fridge behind for good. (They did, however, hold onto their radio and record player, Walker says.)

Gradually, the family is restoring their farmland to its original pasture and cropland divisions, and attempting complete self-sufficiency through the use of organic methods and "horse, mule, and people power," as Walker puts it. "We're trying to figure out the land's character and what it can be used for most effectively and appropriately." On the farm are ducks, hens, turkeys, rabbits, sheep, goats, and the aforementioned horse and mule, all of which came as gifts from other people, and which the children help raise. Some animals are butchered and canned, others bartered or given away. Rarely is any produce sold, Walker says. Each day the goats yield 3.5 gallons of milk, some of which is stored for immediate use in a small groundwater pool in the basement; the rest Laurel turns into both soft and hard cheese, a skill she is passing on to Mary Claire this summer. Kathy knits and sews. The boys hunt, do carpentry, help plow, and build and repair boats. Everybody oversees a bed of fruit or vegetables, pulls weeds, carries on personal creative projects, and helps out when it's time for pitching hay, turning compost, caring for the animals, or preparing for the next season.

Living by the motto "If we don't absolutely need it, we do without it," the Walkers have achieved their goal of being able to produce all of their own food by using the least amount of electricity possible. ("We're down to half a kilowatt hour a day, about two cents worth," says Walker.) They take buying locally to heart, ordering all their merchandise from mom-and-pop stores even when it's more expensive. (Walker has never entered Home Depot.) By reading farm manuals and swapping ideas, produce, and harvesting help with farmers from the Hudson Valley to the Amish country—and maintaining strong religious faith—Walker says his family has gradually learned how to achieve sustainability. "It is our fervent hope," he recently told the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Poughkeepsie, "that our lifestyle will not remain unique but will instead be embraced by more and more people as they recognize the social advantages, as well as the physical necessities, of some of the choices our family has made." Even so, Walker admits with characteristic humor, sometimes things are so chaotic that, just like the rest of us, they have to order out for pizza.