The city I live in, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has in it 300,000 people (give or take a few thousand) and while we have an amazing market area – a hub – for produce, meats, dairy products, and event flowers in the Strip District much of that food is brought in from far away places. That means that we are food importers and as such, if those trains and trucks stopped tomorrow we’d be screwed. Our lovely market neighborhood would be worthless and we would starve. Please read that again because it’s a fact that is easy to understand but not one that people give much thought to.

Feed Yourself

I think about that quite a bit. If it were not for someone else bringing it to us, we would have no food. None.

It doesn’t matter how much money you make, you would starve. That is unless you have a large enough garden and the know-how to feed yourself. Some readers of the above thought experiment might also point out that you’d also have to be able to defend yourself from those that don’t have trying to steal your bounty but that’s a topic for another day. For now just focus on the fact that nearly all of us don’t and many of us can’t feed ourselves and that probably includes you dear reader.

See we need a certain amount of space to grow enough food to sustain us. The average (healthy) diet is north of 2,000 calories a day. To get even that from an average city lot would be very difficult so we need some help. You might start to think about how urban farms and near-city farms can solve the problem and while that’s true to some extent it won’t solve the problem totally since most of us like exotic foods and even more of us like pre-processed industrial food-stuff that requires incredible amounts of energy to produce and even more to haul around from farm to factory to warehouse to grocery store and so on.

Feed the World

John Jeavons and his followers claim that you can feed 1 person on just under an acre of land (about 4,000 sq. feet). That’s good but not great. The average lot size in Pittsburgh is well under half of that figure. When you take apartment living into account the average person would be lucky to be able to provide 10% of their own food. Even if they use John’s methods or other forms of permaculture. We just can’t feed ourselves everything we need on one city lot.

So what do we do?

Hit the Road

We could all go back to rural living but it’s unlikely that that will happen and besides there are still too many of us for this to be a viable option. We need a way to live in cities or other such communities that will allow us to invent and create and socialize and do all the other amazing things that cities allow us to do but we need to do all those things while finding a way to feed ourselves. So we can hit the road or we can apply permaculture design principals to our streets.

Growing Over the Road

Pittsburgh is an older city (for the US) and many of our streets have 9 foot lanes. We have 1,200 miles of roads inside of the city of Pittsburgh. If we could place arbors and/or fruit and nut trees along all of those roads we’d gather enough food for nearly 25,000 people. Though it wouldn’t be a diverse diet if we could harvest fruit and nuts along with other companion plants from even half of those roads we’d have gone a long way to establishing sustainability as a city. Many city gardeners can’t plant these types of trees in their yards because they’d take up too much space but by growing fruits and nuts over our roads residents without the room to grow these trees themselves could buy these fruits for less than what a grocery store sells them for.

We would reduce our need on shipping these goods to us and could set up public-private partnerships to harvest them. We would need to design the system in a way that the fruit, nuts, and leaf debris does not create a hazard for drivers but the system would also benefit these folks. It would clean their emissions, keep their cars cooler (if deployed over parking spaces as well) and keep the sun out of their eyes.

If we built arbors or other large structures above the road these could be used to support trees and nets to catch their fruit. They also could hold street lamps for night driving and for when the foliage above is too dense and extra light is needed underneath. These lights could even feature small solar panels that share the canopy with the trees and collecting the power they need to run all night.

Fruit and nut trees are not the only items that could be grown on or even in these arches. Planters could be hung in them that grow a wide variety of fruit and/or vegetables. If we combine such techniques with the green roofs we could create sustainable cities. If we were to mandate any new building be built with a green roof and employ processes described in books such as A Patterned Language we could easily feed ourselves and while we might not be 100% individually food independent we would be relying on our neighbors and not a faceless multinational corporation.

By making the structure wider we’ve been able to rearrange some things and can actually put in a second bedroom on the main floor. This will also allow us to slide the washer and dryer over closer to our bedroom and to vent the dryer out beyond the master bathroom or to keep that moist warm air inside in the winter.

One other major change that we’ve made to the design is that we’re not going to berm the north wall (the top of the picture). To do so we’d need to use a large amount of concrete and insulation on that side of the building. It’ll be more cost effective and environmentally friendly to not berm and build a porch to meet the sidewalk. Then we can also build wattle fencing under the porch, add a door, and store things like gardening equipment under the porch. The porch and the greenhouse (for the back of the house) are not included in the above image but they are very much a part of the plan so don’t worry – we didn’t forget them!

Overall – aside from adjustments that an engineer or architect might make to ensure code compliance this is basically the design we want to go with!  There is room for us to have a kid (or two), room for office space in the loft, and the yard space will give us enough room to grow (with luck) 80% or more of our own food. I was even reading today about how to grow wheat and other grain crops in small spaces and am confident that we could be mostly self-sufficient in just a few years.

One minor change that we might make (to this design) is to do a combined sink/toilet that would look something like this:

This would save on space in the second bathroom and allow us to put a small closet in that bedroom. The water from the sink would be used to flush the toilet and any excess would flow down the toilet drain. The tank would be accessible from behind the sink but when not needed you could put all the stuff that women tend to fill a sink-top with right on top of it (just keep the lid closed if you plan to do so).

As always be sure to let us know what you think of the plans or if you’re interested in helping out and as always thanks for reading!

To that end (and because the PVC frames have been broken) we designed the following:

This hamper rack will hold 3 mesh or canvas bags. We need to make new bags since Dobby not only broke the old rack but also cut the mesh bags all up. We’ve decided to use 2×4′s for the frame. The back of the rack, (closest to the wall), will have taller 2×4′s with a dowel running near the top and a rack on either side to hold clothes that are worn more than once, robes, and so on.

All sides will be wrapped with sisal rope. We plan to put casters on the bottom and hope to reuse the casters that are on the PVC frame.

Here is another look at the frame from above and  some measurements:

If you’re interested in making one for yourself and want to use these plans feel free. Our only request is that you seek out wood that has been sustainably  harvested or at the very least avoid wood from Georgia Pacific which is owned by Koch Industries. If you don’t know Koch Industries is owned by anti-social sociopaths that are out to destroy the US Government, remove all social support systems, and privatize everything so that they and a select and small group of other wealthy sociopaths can gather immense wealth and, in all but name, enslave the majority of the US population while raping the earth and rewriting history.

Sorry to go a little dark there but it’s pretty important that we all avoid buying from Koch Industries and try to reduce the wealth and power that these anti-American, anti-social, sociopaths have built up.

Thanks for your interest in our hamper design! If you have any questions please leave them in the comments or shoot me an email.

Our tour starts outside in the back yard, takes us around the house to the east side and then the front door on the north. The first interior shot is of one of the two upstairs rooms that could serve as bedrooms (though pictured as an office) before we venture down the steps look around at the main living space and end up in the master bedroom facing (from left to right) the door to the bathroom, the closet, and the door to the rest of the house. We end in the greenhouse built onto the south-wall.

To the left is a (not to scale) look at what the first floor will look like.

As you can see the master bedroom is in the north-west corner. The room will be bermed completely on the north and partially on the west. As we are looking to build in an urban neighborhood and nearly to the limits of the property we will have a house on the west side that will provide a great deal of shade during the summer.

Our plan is to have radiant floors and a masonry stove with a baking oven built into it but to forgo mechanical air conditioning for at least the first year. That was the plan before too but this design will not include the high ceilings or cupola that the roundhouse had included. Both of those features would have helped carry the heat up and out of the house. We’re hopeful that the high insulative value of the bale walls, the mass of the cob walls, the living roofs, the earthen floors, and trees growing around the house will help to minimize the interior heat. If it gets too bad we might consider a window air-conditioner.

Why are we even going to build a fence?

We have a dog and a cat and they both love to be outside. Without a fence they need to be tethered to us and that’s not nearly as fun for any of us. Our dog, Iggy, is a 7lb. Chiuaua mix so he’s naturally scared of people and generally protective of “his territory”. This makes a fence crucial and it means that a chain-length or other easy-to-see-through fence will only encourage his barking when someone walks past. Our cat, Dobby, is mostly an indoor cat. He’s too young, friendly, and curious for us to allow him to just wander the neighborhood so we really honestly do need a fence. Without one he may go home with someone else or try to meet a car head-on and we love him too much for either of those options so a fence is crucial.

What is a wattle fence?

A wattle fence is weaved similar to wicker (wicker baskets, furniture, etc) but unlike wicker furniture they are significantly more sturdy. These fences were and still are mainly used for keeping pigs, goats, even cows and other larger animals penned in so they have strength to match their beauty. We won’t need ours to be super strong but as we plan on having veggies and things we will want a fence tall enough to keep the deer from jumping it.

The picture of the fence above was grabbed off of Flickr from a user named Veggiesosage. It’s a great shot that shows you how a hurdle (or section of wattle fence) ends as well as showing you how they are weaved. There are loads of other examples online and I suggest that you check them out if you want to get a good feel for this very artistic and functional form of fence making.

How do you build a wattle fence?

To build a wattle fence upright stakes are placed in the ground (these are often called sails in the UK). Many fence builders will build the fence onsite and will stake the sails right into the ground but there are others who build inside of forms such as in logs that have pre-drilled holes which allow them to build sections of fences that can then be placed in the ground later. In the above photo you can see this section is built with the sails sticking out from a log.

After the sails are in place green branches, usually of hazel or willow, (though any green straight thin branches will do), are woven in and out of the sails. Often these weavers, (as they are sometimes called), are braided together to add stability and hold the sails in place better. Some builders build patterns into their wattle fences by using two weavers on either side of the sail before switching direction and some just build for speed without worrying about the finished look or creating a pattern. If you do a Google image search you’ll probably notice some wattle fence builders that use different colored weavers and even some that split their weavers in two before weaving them.

Why wattle?

Wattle fences are 100% natural and have low embodied energy as the materials can all be gathered locally. Plus the wood used in them is typically burned as kindling or left to rot but when they are left to rot they often poses brush fire hazards. Teresa and I want to able to make a functional low-cost fence in this fashion because wattle fences have served their purpose for hundreds of years proving that they work. Plus the technique can be shared with neighbors and friends. Rather than seeing our neighbors spend precious dollars at a big warehouse chain store on PVC based fencing that is made to look like wood we’d rather help them create a lasting and environmentally friendly fence that is not only not environmentally damaging (as PVC is) but is regenerative – that makes a positive impact on the plant.

How hard are wattle fences to build?

The process of building a wattle fence for the inexperienced (and that is what we are) is time consuming but the results can be extremely beautiful and the life of these fences can reach to ten years. If a sail has rotted it has likely done so near the ground but that rotted sail can be used as a guide for it’s own replacement and when a weaver rots it can be removed and replaced without too much fuss. This means repairs are low cost and very little maintenance is required. They’ll require more looking after than a PVC fence but they also won’t be creating toxins and when they do rot the carbon released would have been released by them had they been burned or left to rot on the forest floor making them carbon neutral.

We estimate that the yard space we want to fence will take us 24 to 72 working hours to fence. Clearly if we were digging post holes and installing a modern milled-wood or PVC fence we could probably have it done in 4 to 6 hours but the embodied energy would be much higher and the job would be much less rewarding. We plan to spend some time this winter and spring experimenting and building wattle hurdles to practice our speed. If anyone would like to join us please leave a comment. If the hurdles we build are good enough we might sell them as room dividers so keep an eye out for those too!

A living fence

Wattle fences that are built with willow sails often take root creating a living fence wherein the sails won’t rot and will actually sprout. Even if the sails don’t take root many wattle fence owners use the fences to support the growth of plants such as ivy, grapes, or other vines. Clearly these living fences have a place in the modern urban environment. We’ve long known that in densely populated areas we need to build skyward. Living fences, (even if the fence is only the support system and itself isn’t alive), provide an amazing opportunity for urban dwellers to expand their growing space, provide passive fruit (such as grapes) to the public, and to help clean the air of toxins.

Wattle fences are a great base for these vertical growth systems because they don’t make the vines go very far between cross-sections and provide ample places for the vines to wrap around. Wattle fences also serve as wind-breaks by slowing the air that comes through them and not forcing it over-the-top of them like a wall would. Such wind breaks can be very beneficial to home-owners, especially those living in high-wind areas in older homes or homes that are not as weather sealed.

As with cob, straw-bale, and other natural systems that we find ourselves drawn to we hope to see more people become interested in wattle fences and encourage you to learn more and try your hand at building one. Thanks for your interest and leave a comment below if you’d like to talk more about wattle fences.

Well the White House apparently didn’t. I shared the following idea with them more than three weeks ago and told them I’d give them two weeks to think about it before I started to promote the idea myself. I’ve been rather sick with the flu and an upper respiratory bug so it took me an extra week but still the Obama Administration has not responded so I leave it up to us – my fellow citizens – to push for this plan.

The Renewable Energy Loan Program

I said it wouldn’t cost anything and here I go putting the word loan in the title but hear me out on this. We’ve got some amazing technology out there in renewable energy – solar PV systems, small-scale wind turbines, and so on but most home-owners can’t overcome the initial instillation costs to take advantage of these things. This is where the loans come in but how do we convince already cash-strapped Americans to take on more debt? Here is how:

The government loans you the money for the cost of installation but the loan is paid back at a rate that matches the cost savings of the system that was installed. 

Let’s look at a simple example. Your electric bill is $200 a month. A solar PV system costs $10,000 and saves you $100 a month on your electric bill. The government lends you $10,000 and you get a solar PV system installed. Now your electric bill should be $100 a month but you’re still going to pay $200 plus the 7% yearly energy cost increase (7% on average) until the system is paid for. Our example would take just over 8 years. After the loan is paid off the consumer begins to see the energy savings. While 8 years may seem like a long time to wait before seeing any benefit those figures are using today’s prices.

The costs for solar and wind is dropping quickly and by the time a loan program could be established we could see costs down by 25% and performance rates nearly double. With twice the performance the loan recipient could see savings of $200 or nearly the total cost of their electricity and by paying the same rate ($200) every month for a system that now costs only $7,500 the loan can be paid off in around 3 years. Even if this was not a no-interest loan the loan could be paid off in less than 4 years.

There are currently installation based financing plans but they are not accessible to everyone. The strength of a government based loan plan is in it being offered to everyone. Why should only wealthy and upper-middle class home-owners with great credit qualify for energy independence? Why shouldn’t low-income communities and families benefit from solar and wind technology and why shouldn’t they be given the chance to reduce their energy bills?

Plan Benefits

Environmental Benefit By creating and promoting such a plan the government can reduce our use of polluting and non-renewable forms of energy. We won’t need to debate things like “Fracking” or mountain-top removal mining because the cost vs. return will make these dirty and dangerous methods of energy extraction less appealing. There is a clear environmental benefit to the loan program.

Government Benefit The US government is a government for and by the people but in the past several decades it’s become increasing controlled by special interests, banks, the healthcare industry, and the energy industry. This loan program reduce the power of all three (if done correctly). These should be direct loans by the government, there should not be third-party-middle-men. Healthier energy means less particulates in the air from coal power plants. This means less kids with asthma. It won’t break the backs of the healthcare industry but it can reduce their ability to make money off of the middle and lower class. Lastly the energy industry, or more specifically, the fossil fuel and nuclear arms of it will have less power because their products will no longer be as desirable. While they won’t go away totally their reduced profits will reduce their influence.

Local Benefits Local communities will see increased jobs for installation and maintenance workers. These are skilled jobs that pay a fair wage. States and communities will also be more empowered when it comes to their local utility monopolies. Being able to produce much of one’s own power creates greater leverage for the consumer. These systems will need to be manufactured somewhere and while China is trying to get out in front of the US a program like this could help infuse the industry will cash and result in more US manufacturing jobs if implemented soon enough.

Individual Benefits The benefits to individual families and property owners is huge. Energy independence or reduced dependence for people of all socioeconomic positions is critical to creating strong families and communities. Reducing the stress that comes from bills that are always going up can free capital that can be saved or spent more effectively.

How do we do it?

We need more than one man with one blog post to get this done. If you’re interested in the idea spread it. Tell your friends and family to ask the government why they don’t have such a program already and let’s work together to push them to establish one. We’ve got to send lots of emails and make lots of calls if we want this to happen so let’s do it!

I’m open to ideas about different ways we can change the plan too – should we include energy reducing things like adding insulation? Maybe. What do you think?

I was listening to Marketplace last night while waiting for my wife to finish work when they played the following:
(embed removed because it auto-played and there was no way to shut it up).

If the embed doesn’t load you can hear the idiocy here: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/commentary/orourke-if-1-had-less-would-99-be-better

In the above clip O’Rourke talks about the “zero sum fallacy” and claims that the 99% movement (or Occupy Movement if you prefer) ignorantly subscribe to this fallacy. I assume he assigns this to liberals in a similar way to how the false argument of the slippery slope can be assigned to conservatives. The only problem is he’s dead wrong.

First a large number of the protesters and their supporters are simply seeking to go back to the pre-Reagan regulations, taxation, and wealth distribution. This is probably not possible but the majority of the left doesn’t believe that simply taking away from the rich will solve the problem – they believe that forcing the rich to bring everyone who helped make them rich along will solve the problem. All of this goes to prove that PJ either needs to be schooled again as he was on Real Time by Alan Grayson or that he’s just so thick that he won’t ever be able to understand the very simple objectives of the 99% movement.

Speaking of an inability to understand the basics let’s talk for a second about zero-sum. PJ and his friends believe that wealth generates wealth. The truth is that the idea of charging money for access to money is the only thing that can in-and-of-itself generate wealth but this wealth isn’t real. It’s not backed by anything real other than our trust that it exists. Money is the real fallacy.

The fact is in the real world there are limited resources and opportunity costs to everything. Even if we don’t see who’s slice of the pie we are stealing from real wealth is always generated from a limited amount of resources. We can’t create anything real without using resources – the planet only has so much in the form of resources.

You can speak about zero-sum being false in an academic setting where there are no real resources involved but in the real world, the world that PJ O’Rourke doesn’t seem to understand you can’t call zero-sum false. To do so only proves that your an idiot.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement is awesome and I support and stand with my fellow 99%ers and the 1%ers that have joined in the cause because they realize that things must become more balanced either for altruistic or selfish self-preserving reasons. While I agree 100% that we need to end the influence of corporate greed in our government and in our homes I can’t help but feel that we must take a holistic approach or face a return of the problems that we are railing so hard against.

If we want to bring about change we need to fight the corruption but we also need to make ourselves more self-reliant and work to set up checks against this ever happening again.

We need to remove the control these criminals have over our government but we must realize that we let them take control in the first place and we financed their take over.

So many people these days have been and are being forced from their homes. These people find themselves eating as cheaply as they can, wearing clothing longer and maybe trying to patch things when they rip. So many are doing these things with an expectation that we can all return to the days of living in large disposable suburban houses and the days of driving $60k SUVs, and eating out at chain restaurants 3-5 nights a week. If we do that we have only ourselves to blame when these profiteers and financial fascists claim power once again.

While it is not entirely our fault we do have ourselves to blame in that we let it happen. True we were marketed to and in many cases lied to but we chose to believe in the United States of Commerce and to believe we could have everything our way just as they sold it to us. The truth is many of us should have paused and said no. No, we don’t believe the hype, we don’t believe that we can live life on credit and never have to pay the collector. We should have refused to believe that we could leveraging our futures to enjoy ourselves now. We shouldn’t have but we did. Now we need to learn from that mistake, it was an experiment and it went horribly wrong.

We let the corporations and the banks take over, we let them feed us ideas that were too good to be true, we let them sell us giant toxic houses and worthless educations, we let them charge us $5 fees every time we use our money. So in that sense we do carry some blame for this mess. This is why we cannot go back to the same things that we did before as it will only lead down the same road. True these corporate overlords are doing everything in their power to maintain power but we allowed them the opportunity to take the power in the first place.

Our Revolution

That is not going to work if we don’t resolve to change who we are. We must refuse to allow banks to be too big to fail by investing in local community banks and credit unions who know us, who keep our money local, who invest our money in projects that we believe in or that at the very least have a local impact.

We need to live in smaller more human scale places that connect us back to our planet and to our neighbors and are build with local materials harvested locally and not by the hands of ultra-wealthy industrialists that rape the land, it’s people, and the end consumer. We need to build ourselves homes that functions for us, not houses that force us to work for 30 years to pay for them as they poison us and fall apart around us while continuing to put money into the pockets of those that work against our best interests.

We need to get back to growing our own foods. This will reduce our bills and increase our health and our strength. At the same time it will help break the food monopoly, reduce industrial farming pollution, reduce food transportation costs, reduce the abuses against illegal and migrant workers, and will reduce the spread of food-borne disease.

We need to begin mending and making our own clothes, and supporting each other on a local scale. Wool, cotton, linen, and other raw materials can often be locally sourced which again reduces transportation costs. While not everyone should buy or build their own loom localizing clothing production reduces environmental destruction, child labor abuses, and the corporate greed that comes when banks and other middle-men work their way into the system. Even if we don’t make our own, buying locally made materials and finished clothing products make a serious impact.

How do we get started?

We can find great joy in simple things like gardening & cooking, sewing & knitting, and building things ourselves.

Eat beans as your protein for several meals a week, not because meat is too expensive but because you can make amazing meals with them and they are cheap. They’re also easy to grow. Plant them in a victory garden and declare victory over your food bill by cutting the cost of food by 50% to 80%. When we start to make dents into our cost of living we can get to a point where we realize that we don’t need as much money because we don’t need as many material possessions.

We can’t all build our own homes but we can buy older smaller homes and retro-fit them with cheap locally sourced non-toxic materials. We can also cheaply build things like small wind turbines and small solar kits. If even 20% of us began to generate 25% of our own power (or reduced our use and generate enough to effect our usage by 25%) it would have a massive effect on the price of electricity. That would be 5% of the total energy used. There would be less incentive to dig up coal, less incentive to frack for methane, and so on. That 5% represents a huge amount of money these power companies use to buy politicians.

Eating less processed foods, building our own homes, and powering them ourselves will all help to make us healthier. Spending more time sewing, building, and creating what we need with our hands will make us stronger and smarter. All of these in concert will make us more free and will help to prevent the financial and corporate elite from taking control again.

Measuring True Success

The occupy movement might succeed in getting better representation for the people but it will be a hollow victory if we don’t see this revolution for what it is and that is a chance to fundamentally change how our society functions.

True victory will come when we are all living within our means, when we create our own authentic lives, and when we don’t provide opportunities to be taken advantage of. We let the wolf into the hen house when we left the door open. Putting this wolf down only solves half of our problems. Once we arrest the enemies of our republic we need to make sure we don’t leave the door open for their return and that will take changing who we’ve become.

Economists believe that we will see stagnant growth for maybe the next 10 years. They see that as a bad thing. I don’t know that it is. Our growth since the 1980s has been a lie. It has been based on the phantom profits of Wall Street. It has not been real growth. In fact this growth was more like cancer in that it did more harm than good as it rapidly expanded and consumed the health of the rest of our collective body. If we want true prosperity we need to realign our society. We need to learn to provide more real valuable and tangible goods to ourselves, our families, and our communities. Doing so will allow us more time to pay attention to what the government is doing. It will also remove the incentives for the kind of corporate greed we’ve seen.

Teresa and I had an amazing time visiting West Virginia this past weekend. We stayed at the Guest House at Lost River with our great friends Bob, David, and Tammy. We had so many wonderful conversations over breakfast and dinner including a chat with Christina who spins and paints her own wool. She gave us some great advise about where to potentially find wool for insulation. We also stopped in to the Lost River General Store a couple of times for lunch, beer, a lavender cookbook, and some more great conversation with Toni and some other folks who were staying at the Inn at Lost River and folks staying at the Guest House.

Cob and Straw Bale Builings

It wasn’t all fun and relaxation for us though! We also visited two natural building projects and even spent about an hour helping to cob in the rain at one of the building sites on Sat.

A Mountain Bale Cob Cottage

Once the rain got too bad and the wind got too cold we needed to quit cobbing. You can see all the photos I took of our cob building adventures here on Facebook. Aside from helping we learned a ton and had even more great conversations. Unlike our plans to use cob for nearly all of the walls (though there is some flexibility there and we might do some straw bale walls) Joelle and Alexor are building with an interesting technique whereby they are using the cob (and empty bottles) as a thick mortar for some of the walls and using the bales almost like bricks between these layers of cob. They’ll have less mass in the walls and more insulation but it should prove to be a great idea considering their building site.

Joelle says they’ve not have a lot of helpers but we’ve talked with several friends from Pittsburgh who are interested in the techniques that they are using and are willing to come play in the mud so come spring time we’ll go back to help and we’ll bring a load of friends too!

Querencia: The Straw Bale Studio

On Sunday on the way back to Pittsburgh we took a detour to Capon Bridge and stopped at Taproot Farm. We met and talked with Beth about a large studio that she is building mostly out of straw bale with a serious amount of cob add-ons and features (such as interior walls, benches, and other great sculptural finishes). The photos of Beth’s studio can be seen here on Facebook.

We didn’t do a lot of physically helping but they had to cancel a living roof workshop planned for Saturday and with the cold and rain Beth said that our visit on Sunday and the photos helped to energize her.

Querencia is already beautiful even without being finished and we’ve made tentative plans to return in the spring to help with the earthen floor.

Cob Is

I had a very vague idea of cob before this trip. I knew I wanted to use it. I knew it was easy to build with, and I knew that it had thermal mass. What I didn’t know was that when we make monolythic cob structures what we are really making is essentially sandstone. The dry cob walls at Joelle and Alexor’s felt like sandstone because that is basically what it is.

I’ve known that the lime plaster, once it hardens, is limestone but I did not understand that the cob is sandstone. We came out of the trees and we found that we could survive in colder places by living in caves. Cob and earthen or “mud” homes should not be thought of as dirt dwellings but as stone dwellings. Mud and dirt or even soil is the organic material that we, and animals, and plans turn into. Clay and sand are the remains of stones, rocks, and mountains.

Just like the materials that we consume which come from the soil help to sustain our lives and are then returned to the earth after we die (or should be) the sand and clay that once was a mountain is again formed into stone when we make cob and when we apply lime plasters. If we allow it to that stone will once again be turned back to sand and clay dust and as the earth spins it will eventually be turned back into compressed rock and maybe even into a mountain again.

Montani Semper Liberi

The motto of the state of West Virginia is Montani Semper Liberi which translates to Mountaineers are Always Free. I was born in the mountain state and have always found this motto comforting. Not because I believe it 100% but because I see examples of how the ability to craft a life seems to be tied to the DNA of West Virginians. It’s probably there in all of us but in West Virginia those genes are switched on. Mountaineers are always free because they can create things and by creating their own lives in the way they feel fits them best these folks are more free than most.

The freedom to build oneself a shelter and to be sheltered in a structure of one’s one making was becoming a lost art. Now it is now on the rise again. Toxic homes built of foreign hardwood that carry heavy cost for both the environment and foreign peoples and that are outrageous priced are still the norm. These homes are not sustainable financially, environmentally, physiologically, and psychologically. This lack of sustainability has pushed many people out of modern industrial buildings and caused them to question the sustainability of our entire culture. We are rediscovering smaller space, more intimate spaces, and more natural less toxic spaces.

Our homes of the future are not the homes of the past but they are a combination of what has worked since the dawn of time which includes the industrial age. Post industrial homes will still have mechanized comforts but they will be comforts that are both human scale and less damaging.  When we become free of the constraints of industrial building we can create homes that serve our purpose instead of signing a “death pledge” (mortgage) on a home that we conform to.

Thank you to everyone who we met and got to know this weekend! Our lives were improved by each and every one of you that we met and spent time with and we are grateful for that and for you all!