housing

Tomorrow you are going to be executed, you have a choice of being shot in the head or burned alive, which would you choose?  Just because one of these choices may be better than the other hardly makes it a "good" choice!  In recent years, we have come to associate "Green" products and choices with "good".  The fact is, in nearly every case where I see th

I like to tell people that the world's most efficient bathroom is one which is in use 24 hours per day, seven days a week, but never has anyone waiting in line.  The fact is that whether you are concerned about your finances / money, housing, global warming, public health care, pollution, environmental degradation, species extinctions, or any one of countless other social and personal issu

I live and work in a seventy square-foot (seven square meter), ten-foot (three meter) tall, round cob house with a loft for sleeping.  Bathroom facilities are in a separate green house. When people ask how I can live in something so small, I like to tell them that my house is actually 40 acres (0.16 square kilometers), it just happens that only parts of it are enclosed.

All houses are ugly. Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder, so this statement is subjective, and you are of course free to disagree, but, all houses are ugly! You will no doubt find this statement ironic given that it comes from someone who, among other things, travels the world teaching workshops on how to build your own house.

Years ago some new "Green" organization was being created by a group of people and, among other things, one of their stated goals included something about making a new generation of "less toxic" houses.  This got me to thinking, if someone offered to sell you a house that was 10% less toxic, would you want to buy it?  My reaction would be "what about the other 90% of the toxins still in the house?".