About This Site

We built LettheSunWork.com together about six years ago and then proceeded to neglect it as our attention focused instead on our new farm in Elmore County, Alabama and the web site associated with it, LongleafBreeze. You will find a great deal of information here that is out of date, particularly that dealing with the supply and price of petroleum. On the other hand, there’s a great deal of information here that remains accurate to this day, and in fact has become more apparent with the passage of time.

So  when it was time for us to rebuild our websites to escape the obsolete software on which they were built, we decided to go ahead and rescue this site along with the others, as an archive if for no other purpose. Frankly, we thought we would be embarrassed by all of the out of date references, but we’re not. By and large, we’re proud of what we built, and pleased to share it with you.

You may already know about the Triple Threat we humans face in the form of peak oil, catastrophic climate change, and overpopulation of the planet (although we are continually surprised at the otherwise well-informed people who haven’t put them together to understand the extent of the challenge). LettheSunWork is about understanding the challenge and then moving through it to focus on what we humans can do. How can we maintain community and stay human? How can we get the food and water we need? What kinds of shelter will we need, and how can we change the homes and apartments in which we now live so we can be comfortable in them? How can we use less energy, and what new forms of energy can we develop and cultivate? How can we make it all sustainable?

And finally, through what promises to be a brutal adjustment to a harsh new reality, how can we experience and share joy?

Our name addresses these issues on two levels. First, of course, we humans are the beneficiaries of roughly four billion years of golden sunshine and all the riches that flow from it, including about half the world’s total petroleum supply that still remains. Do we really want to be the species, the very generation, that brought that blessing to an abrupt end? Of course not. So in one sense, Let the Sun Work is about helping men and women to live more gently, to get out of the way so the sun can do its work.

On another level, we have built, planned, and lived for about 150 years as if the sun were not there, as if we could supply our own heat, light, shelter, food, and water. The end of that age is arriving. Some of us will welcome it, and some of us will deny it, minimize it, fight it, and eventually lose to it, but it is coming to an end for all of us. In the post-petroleum world, we will rediscover the sun; we will reorient our lives around its rising and setting, its seasons, its light, and its warmth. So LettheSunWork is also about helping us humans to work with the sun, to treat it as a valued friend instead of a tool to be tamed.