By Kara Stiff, Low-Carbon Life
I admit it. It was me who brought the crazy house-building scheme into our marriage. But he encouraged me! If he hadn’t, I would have given up somewhere along the way. But I didn’t, and we built a house using light straw clay. How on Earth did that happen?
By Brian Kaller, Restoring Mayberry
These days, human-scale straw bales have been largely replaced by mammoth cylinders that require mammoth farm equipment; another way we have used the cheap energy of recent decades to burn our bridges. If you can find some of the old rectangular, metre-long bales, however, they can be put to many uses.
By Brian Kaller, Restoring Mayberry
These days, you spend your life paying off a house, and even building a shed or animal shelter can be expensive...For thousands of years, though, people used a simpler technique that used nothing but natural, local materials.
By John Thackara, John Thackara blog
The Nubian Vault Association has evolved a quite different approach: the long-term, muti-dimensional cultivation of living local economies based on three kinds of value: a roof, a skill, and a market.
By Lakis Polycarpou, City of the Future
Whatever we do in Cyprus doesn’t really stay in Cyprus. It’s like the effect gets multiplied and spread, from here to the nearby regions, and from there on.
By Brennan Blazer Bird, Shareable
This is the story of how a simple idea forever changed my life, as well as the lives of many others.
By Ashley Lubyk, Verge Permaculture
My first step onto an earthen floor (sometimes called a ‘poured adobe’ floor) awakened me.
By Shawndra Miller, Shawndra Miller blog
I spent part of last week at a workshop offered by the Mudgirls, a natural building collective in British Columbia.
By Ian Wild, Transition Culture
I like to think that it’s the sort of place Shakespeare’s ghost visits now and then. Arriving unseen through the thick walls, seating himself at the back and enjoying plays – all manner of plays...
By Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
As part of our month's exploration of the theme of 'scaling up', I recently visited Ottery St. Mary in East Devon to see Kevin McCabe, his wife Rose, and the extraordinary new cob house he has spent the last 3 years building.
By Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
Over the next 2 days we'll be looking at 2 aspects of earth construction, cob and clay plasters, and their potential for scaling up.
By Janaia Donaldson, Peak Moment Television
Natural builder Chris Foraker gives a tour of work-in-progress at Aprovecho Center, Oregon.
