In permaculture, one of the site design concepts we talk about is sectors. This is anywhere on a site where something comes in (or comes near enough to be an influence). Could be water, noise, sunlight, wind, streetlights, foot traffic, car traffic what have you. Everything has a use; nothing is ever only bad and there are trade-offs. Design creativity makes all the difference. The willingness to see all incoming elements as the resources that they are. (An organization can be a “site” too BTW.)
At our low-footprint-living laboratory, the sun has two personas:
- a fierce, ruthless, blistering death-star that we must constantly buffer our living spaces from;
and
- a beautiful, clean, free energy source for cooking food, sterilizing tools & cloths, drying laundry, keeping phones charged during outages, and much more! Including of course being the source of food for all the beautiful plants who grow here. Yes, photosynthesis is happening all around us and isn’t that a lovely thing!
See pix here on my DEEP GREEN book by jenny nazak Facebook page.
BTW my solar panel charging experiment yesterday, using the roof of the sea-grape arbor, didn’t work; no matter how i tried tweaking the position it never got up much wattage. Now I’ve plunked it in the middle of the sidewalk and am keeping an eye out to avoid inconveniencing people who need the sidewalk to get from point A to point B.