1.    Fall in Love with Nature
Don’t treat your cottage in the country as an extension of life in the city or suburbs, with its TVs, lawnmowers, cars, cell phones, and power-hungry gadgets. Treat your time at the cottage as time in Nature’s realm, where she has invited us into her home. You may find that your inner clock slows down, and your senses become sharper. All this is necessary if you are to build a lasting relationship.
52 Ways to Fall in Love with the Earth

2.    Give Her R.E.S.P.E.C.T.
R is for Reverence: this place and its habitants have been here far longer than you have. E is for Ecology: pause and learn Nature’s household rules, the rules of ecology. S is for Stewardship: work together to protect what you love. P is for Peace: leave the noise and bustle behind, to hear what is here. E is also for Eco-Living: learning new habits, and rejecting products that harm Nature. C is for Co-existence: with the bears, the loons, and the other creatures whose names you don’t yet know. And T is for Tread softly: so that you don’t unwittingly destroy their home.

3.    Don’t Abuse The Water
Water is Nature’s lifeblood. If you wouldn’t drink it, don’t put it in the water. That means no chemical pesticides, no fabric softeners, no washing soaps that are not 100% biodegradable, and no washing in the lake, where the chemicals in sunscreen, shampoos, and anti-bacterial soap play havoc with the endocrine systems of aquatic creatures. Build a solar shower rig, off in the forest.
Cottage Life Green Cottaging

4.    Leave Your Leavings Safely
What’s the best way to deal with your wastes? A good composting toilet needs no water, creates no smell, and produces top-quality compost. If your cottage has a regular toilet, a faulty septic system can quickly pollute the lake you swim in. So learn about septic maintenance—how often to get it pumped out, how to maintain it, and what chemicals not to use.

5.    Ripple Softly
The edge of the water where it meets the land is known as the riparian zone, and Nature protects it with greenery and root systems that stabilize the soil and protect it from erosion. The suburban mindset sometimes wants to pave the land right to the edge—don’t do it! Create a soft edge to the water, and a buffer zone with native plants such as reeds and cattails.

6.    Boat Gently
It may be thrilling, but for every one who wants to whoop it up with a powerboat or jet ski, there are a hundred who want to hear silence and the occasional loon. Human-powered boats are greenest, followed by an electric boat powered by locally harvested solar energy. Old-fashioned two-stroke engines pollute the water with spilled oil. If you do use a fossil fuelled boat, cut your speed when you are close to shore so as not to create a wake that will erode the shoreline. And don’t clean the hull unless your boat is on land, above a tarp.
Guide to Green Boating, and www.electricboats.ca

7.    Protect The Locals
There are many locals who think of the land and water around your cottage as their home. So don’t cut the trees or tear up the groundcover to lay a lawn—that’s their home you are destroying. If you create rockpiles, logpiles, and brushpiles, and leave rotting trees standing (as long as they are safe), you’ll make them happy. But don’t feed the bears!

8.    Use Nature’s Energy
Could your cottage become ground zero for an experiment in life without fossil fuels? You could make everything super efficient, use LED light bulbs, cook with a solar cooker, and build a power-free super-insulated fridge. You could heat your cottage with a super-efficient wood-stove, pellet stove, or a heat-exchange system that harvests energy from the ground, air or water. For power, you could install solar water and solar PV systems on your roof or a sunny part of your land. Failing that, you could buy green cottage power from Bullfrog Power.

9.    Build Sustainably
Can’t resist a renovation? Nature understands, for every creature needs a home. Could this be your chance to learn about green building? It’s about building small, minimizing your footprint, zero-net energy, non-toxic paints and glues, seeking out re-used timber, and recycling your construction wastes. Maybe it’s a chance to build with cob or straw bales.
The Conserving Cottage

10.    Be A Steward
There’s so much to think about—but maybe other cottagers think the same way? If so, you could form a Lake Stewardship Society. This is what folks in eastern Ontario did when they formed the Kawartha Lake Stewards Association, representing cottager associations on lakes along the Trent Severn Waterway. Together, they are doing water sampling for E coli. and phosphorus, and keeping track of the health of the fish and aquatic plants. All for the love of Nature.

Guy Dauncey is the author of several books, including Cancer: 101 Solutions for a Preventable Epidemic. He is President of the BC Sustainable Energy Association.