Hi, I’m Erin Augustine. I’m the Founder of Carbon Free Family.
I live in a 100 year old farm house in downtown Rockford, Michigan with my husband, Robbie, two daughters, ages 8 and 3, two dogs, and five chickens. We love to hike and camp, finding our awe inspiring moments while connecting with the natural world around us. We grow fruits, vegetables, herbs, and eggs (thanks to the chickens!) in our backyard garden and have enjoyed creating a small homestead in our city yard.
We LOVE to ride bikes! I bike to work every day, summer and winter, rain and shine. We’ve intentionally designed our life to be walkable and bike-able. When we moved to Rockford in May 2018 and it was time to buy a new home, we pulled out a map and marked all of the most important places in our new town… work, school, the library, restaurants, and shops. We then drew circles with a 1 and 3-mile radius from these places. One mile represents easy walking distance, three miles an easy bike ride. Where those circles overlapped, we bought a house.
In November 2018, Robbie and I were feeling overwhelmed. I had a new job. We’d just moved into a new town, so we were trying to make friends and find our place in this new community. Our older daughter was navigating a new school. We had just moved into new, bigger house. We were overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with stuff and activities. And we felt ourselves slipping into a place of consuming more than we needed.
One night, after the kids went to bed, we sat down to a “summit of intentionality” and tried to really focus in on our core beliefs so we could build this new life more inline with them.
We believe:
Stuff does not make me happy
Individual citizens have the power to make change
Everything I bring into my life will eventually become waste
Zero is not attainable. So it’s important to enjoy the journey, not the destination.
To be fair, I have a degree in Environmental Engineering and Robbie has a degree in Environmental Studies, so we have generally lived our lives in a relatively sustainable manner. Nonetheless, after having children and growing our careers (and income), we found ourselves slipping out of our sustainable habits.
And so, Carbon Free Family was born as a way to document this current phase of our sustainability journey, our promise to recommit to a simple life, with more time to play, less stuff to clean, and less waste to manage. This is my platform to share our biggest triumphs, utter failures, and everything in between.
Thank you for joining me. I hope you’ll find something within this page to inspire you, wherever you are on your journey, and that you’ll in turn teach me through your questions, comments, and recommendations.