In Pasadena, Calif., there lives a family of four beautiful people, in the real sense of the word “beautiful.” The Dervraeses — a father and his three adult children — are urban farmers who are walking the talk of green living.

The Dervraeses have turned their small (66 by 132 feet) suburban property into what they call an “urban homestead.” In a 3,900-square-foot garden they have been growing a whopping three tons of organic produce annually and hope to grow five tons in 2008. Their highly diverse crop includes over 350 types of vegetables, herbs, fruits and berries.

They also raise goats, chickens and ducks on the property. Their tiny farm feeds the entire family and provides food for volunteer gardeners and friends while yielding $25,000 per year in sales of produce to restaurants.

But the Dervraes’ urban homestead is more than a farm; it is an experiment in self-sufficiency. Intense energy-conservation efforts include eliminating almost all electrical appliances and tools. Even clothes washing is done in a hand-powered machine. The homestead produces more electricity than it uses, with a net-metered solar-photovoltaic electric system. The family van, which they use to deliver produce to restaurants, is run on biodiesel fuel processed at the homestead from used cooking oil provided by customers. An outdoor shower drain waters an avocado tree, and gray water and rain water reuse are planned.

The Dervraeses’ fabulous experiment serves as one of the best models on the planet for what is possible. But it also serves as a model for what is impossible, and perhaps not even desirable: self-sufficiency.

On the Resources page of their Web site, the Dervraeses state that the homestead experiment is about becoming independent and self-reliant to help families re-establish control over their daily lives and are striving to be 100 percent self-sufficient.

While most of us are guilty to some extent of only talking the green talk and not walking enough of the walk, I think the Dervraeses might have the opposite problem: They are taking the right actions but sending the wrong message.

“Self sufficiency,” “independence,” and the related concept of “off-grid” living are ideas rooted in the 1960s, when “dropping out” was considered an antidote to living in a hopelessly corrupt, materialistic and environmentally destructive society. Many people did indeed drop out by homesteading in remote areas or moving to rural communes to begin life anew. But the vast majority of the dropouts from the ’60s have long since reintegrated themselves into mainstream society to take advantage of its knowledge base, tools, modern medicine and so on.

The Dervraeses, too, remain connected. They have computers, Internet access, a Web site, a van and even a seldom-used cell phone. They also use city water, in an area that has long since outstripped its local water resources and imports water from great distances. They sell food to restaurants that use energy to prepare it and serve it to customers who arrive by automobile.

Does that mean that the Dervraeses’ experiment has failed? Hardly. But their success would become a more useful model for the rest of us if they recognized that interdependence, not independence, is the path to salvation in our era of environmental degradation.

The Dervraeses have come a long way toward creating a splendid “home ecosystem,” creating “table-to-compost-to-table” cycles and similar nutrient loops to reduce their impact on the wider environment. But ecology is about relationships, and natural ecosystems are always connected to their surrounding environment, exchanging energy, water, nutrients, minerals and gases. Ecosystems, like the Dervraeses’ farm, are productive, and their products are shared with their surroundings and the biosphere as a whole, to the sustainable benefit of all.

They work from sunup to sundown six days a week for their bounty. Yet in many ways they remain as interdependent and vulnerable to environmental collapse as the rest of us. Learn from the Dervraeses, but think carefully about the inescapable relationship between your ecological house and the planet when creating your own home ecosystem.

Philip S. (Skip) Wenz is a freelance writer specializing in ecological design issues. He was a general contractor, residential designer, teacher and writer in the in the San Francisco Bay Area and founded and for 10 years directed the Ecological Design Program at the San Francisco Institute of Architecture.