A post-petroleum world

On this Andover farm, little worry about fuel or food prices

With gas at $4 per gallon, most people in New Hampshire can feel their wallets draining along with their car tanks. Not Nelson Lebo. He doesn’t have a car. He’s not worried about the cost of home heating oil either. And soaring food prices? Not much of a problem.

Lebo, 40, lives in a 1782 farmhouse in the woods of Andover that he has dubbed Pedal Power Farm. He heats it with wood cut from the property. He gets around on a bicycle. He grows much of his own food and buys locally otherwise. He gets his electricity from solar panels.

Lebo is no typical homesteader, content to stay tucked away in the woods, living off his land. He thinks he has ideas the rest of us could use. And he’s ready to share them.

“I’ve been living in a post-petroleum world for the last 18 years,” he said. “Everyone else is going to start living in a post-petroleum world next year.”

Concord Monitor