A Rambling, Pre-Coffee article on Ben Wyskida, Pinko Magazine, Geothermal living, Living life fully, and Geothermal Dog Houses.

Pinko Magazine is one of elephantjournal.com’s 10 favorite sites (see sidebar to the left). It’s a site we actually read from time to time, along with Nytimes.com, thedailyshow.com, a few others. Anyways, Ben Wyskida, the force of nature behind Pinko, has a great article up there right now. Read it. (Are you reading it?).

In it, he details his discovery of—get this—a geothermal dog house. Now for those of you who don’t know what geothermal is, it’s this amazing invention whereby some blokes back in the Crustacean age figured out that the earth has a pretty steady temperature in winter and summer alike. So, going back centuries upon eons, we weak nearly hairless helpless humans have been building our homes into the earth, so that said homes are warmed by said earth in the winter, and cooled by said earth come summertime and the living is hot, too damned hot.

Electricity, central air heating, and air conditioning have allowed us to separate ourselves from the seasons almost entirely. That’s not all good. Seasons are, well, what makes the world goes round (or the other way around, but you know what I mean). Celebrating this short precious human life is all about being willing to experience life—with its vivid colors, temperatures, appearances. Spending your life in a temperature-controlled bubble is fine if you’re my grandma in a retiree’s development in Arizona or if you’re my other grandma in a nearly identical retiree’s development in NJ. Both have golf courses and bad food and long carpted hallways and you never have to go outside, ever, if you don’t want to. But if you’ve still got most of your memories to create, then you gotta think about the next seven generations, turn off the AC or heat, learn about passive solar, learn about geothermal.

Geothermal goes way beyond digging some percentage of your home into the earth. You can actually geothermal-up your existing house—a geothermal company can come by, poke a deep hole in the earth, connect it to your house, and lo—your house will be approx 50% cooler in the summer and 50% warmer in the winter. You’ll save a ton of money and be 50% coal free, like >that<.

And if it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for your dog. Click the images below to learn more, over at Ben’s article for Pinko (which also appears on Huff Post).