Re: Conservation psychology - What's it gonna take?

My wife asked the question - if we spent $5k - what could we do to show green values to our neighbours. My answer was nothing. That was the cost of a Solar hot water system - but it would save us perhaps $25/yr (note - we were on natural gas - but the pilot light was $75/yr - heating water was $15/yr - we moved to electric and it costs us slightly less ($20/yr to keep the tank hot - about $50/yr heating water - before we Bullfrogged - but the GHG emissions are now slightly more; even though the energy used is a fraction of what it was - and we'll put it on a timer at night only when we get a smart meter - that'll save us money, but not energy) for an investment of about $4500. Our house is semi-detached and we have the north facing part.
I briefly thought of solar PV until I saw the incremental price of a grid inter-tie inverter! Solar PV, like wind (we very very briefly considered a roof mounted turbine) needs to be done big - >$20k.
Oddly enough in the winter we let the house go down to 15C - and 18C feels cold. This time of year 18C feels tolerable (due to humidity?). I have friends who remember being young, and waking up with the bedpan frozen in the mornings. It's possible to make due with much less heating.
We're considering building a custom straw bale home (about 1,100 sq-ft for a family of 4) and I'm tempted to zone it - so that the upstairs (bedrooms) is simply unheated by default and insulated from the rest of the house. The snag is that no furance will tolerate heating such a small space!
If only our co-housing project would take off - but it seems to be very hard to attract people to such a thing in Canada.
In the end though; we sink or swim together. Nobody builds a fortress and survives by themselves - at least not for several generations.
This summer I'm trying Indian "ornamental" corn. The 'coons will likely not bother with it - and I'll grind the corn to make flour in the winter. There hasn't been much movement to traditional diets yet.
This TED talk by Mark Bittman is interesting - but he called a local food diet (outside of California) a joke:
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/263
The fact is it may soon become a reality.