Notes from the road to sustainability

Build your house out of mud

In the mid-1990's Patrick Hennebery saw an ad in a magazine that proclaimed "build your house with mud." That sounds about right, he thought to himself. Cob (a mix of clay, sand and straw) is one of the most ancient building materials, and cob homes in Britain are still standing hundreds of years after they were built. Pat Hennebery learned this ancient building technique from the Oregon-based Cob Cottage Company, which had placed the ad that inspired him. He is now part of Cobworks, and is a recognized expert in cob, having built 26 houses in the past 9 years. I visited Cobworks and the Cob Cottage Company, and was impressed by the living beauty of cob. Because the entire house is hand-sculpted, it becomes a work of art.

The oldest trees on the planet

A long steep climb from Bishop California left my car over-heating, but after a cooling-off period I drove on towards the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the Inyo National Forest. You don't turn back lightly from the oldest trees on the planet. One of the trees found here was aged at 4789 years old, making it the oldest known tree that is currently living, and the second oldest tree ever found. The sun was setting over the deserted hills, and as the chill and the stillness descended on trees gnarled and weathered by millenia, I felt humbled. Here, at last I had found sustainability. Standing next to a nearly 5000 year old tree, I'm sure that this is the timescale we need to consider before we can ultimately reach sustainability.

Using what you've got

In a Colorado winter there's a lot of cold, but also plenty of sun. This is an opportunity for solar pioneers such as Doug Graybeal and Paul Shippee. Paul Shippee's is the only house I've visited in a cold climate that has no backup heating system other than a tiny woodstove that is rarely needed. The house runs on solar heat gained both directly through the windows and also from solar hot water panels on the roof.

Nebraska Style

While passing through Nebraska I visited the historic roots of straw bale building, including the Martin/Monhart house, which was built in 1925 during the original wave of Nebraska bale building. The invention of straw and hay bale homes in the sandhills of Nebraska was almost inevitable because of a combination of factors. The first was the invention of the horse powered hay press (hay baler) around the 1870's-1880's, which for the first time created the raw material for bale homes. Secondly, the traditional Nebraska sod house didn't work all that well in the sandhills. A sod house is literally built out of strips of cut sod layered like bricks, but the turf in the sandhills tended to fall apart too easily. Nebraska resourcefulness and technological progress met in the sandhills and the bale house was born.

Tiny homes

In California I met with Jay Shafer in his 100 square foot house. Shafer is one of the accidental leaders of the tiny house movement. "It seems like the tiny house movement started surprisingly because I was living in my tiny house, other people were living in their tiny houses, and suddenly it was called a movement," says Shafer. "It was an evolution, but I just didn't notice it coming. I guess its caught on, this idea of living with less." His house is extreme, but one of the most ecological things we can do is live in a smaller house.