Fascinating report on our low energy heritage

Here’s an exerpt from their opening pages:

Our Low Energy Heritage is a project which looks at the lives of those in the London Borough of Sutton in times past and records the experiences of the older generation. This generation lived through times of shortage, when energy was less cheap and less available. We can use their knowledge and experiences to help us, and future generations, tackle issues such as climate change and an increasingly expensive, less plentiful energy supply.

Over the past one hundred and fifty years our energy use has increased dramatically. People who lived in times when energy was scarce used a range of skills to do what they needed in their low energy societies. Many of these skills are still useful now and could become essential in the low energy societies of the future. This doesn’t mean we need to go back to living the way we did in 1930, 1910 or 1860. In 2010 we now benefit from modern technology such as solar panels, wind turbines and district heat and power schemes. Technologies like these will help us to create low energy communities in the future with a better standard of living and a quality of life perhaps better than today. However, many of the skills our grandparents and great grandparents used on a daily basis have almost been forgotten and re-learning them might not only help us to create a low energy future but also lead to a greater sense of satisfaction for us all.

Definitely worth taking a closer look at.