date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 13:50:49 +0100 from: "Gill Seyfang" subject: BTOR - straw bale and earthships in the american desert - to: Gill Seyfang, CSERGE Back to Office Report - field work and conference in the USA 1-sustainable straw-bale building in Crestone, Colorado 2-living 'off-the-grid' in Earthships in Taos, New Mexico 3-Globalisation and Environmental Justice conference, Tucson, Arizona thanks to CSERGE and the school for funding this research trip. 1- I visited the small town of Crestone, Colorado which is known as the capital of straw bale building in the USA. Straw bale housing is a sustainable solution to building needs: it is low-tech, materials are cheap and locally sourced, straw walls coated with earthen plasters are highly insulative, and many houses also incorporate passive solar heating and electricity. In addition to straw bale, there were also many people using more innovative methods, such as 'papercrete', 'rammed earth', 'cordwood' and 'scria bag' wall materials. I met with local self-builders and building contractors and discussed their motivations for alternative building methods. Primarily it was a concern to reduce environmental impact and engage creativeley with their dwellings. Crestone is also the home of Maurice Strong, figurehead of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, who gave large areas of land in Crestone to a wide range of global spiritual centres in the interests of world peace and understanding. This draws people to the area who are looking for a simpler, spiritual life, away from the cities. Crestone is fairly unique in that it has land for sale very cheaply, and very lenient planning codes, which allows this experimentation. In other regions, as in the UK, planning regulations are much more prohibitive against this sort of building technique. (In some southwestern states, building codes for straw bale are being adopted, though they are targeted towards the 'high end' of the market and still inhibit low-cost self-build.) These factors combine to produce a hotbed of people looking for alternative ways of living, and there are lessons for housing everywhere which could be learned from these techniques. 2- I attended an Earthship Seminar in Taos, New Mexico, where I learned about the development and building of 'earthships' - self-sufficient houses that are 'off the grid' and independent of energy or water input. They are also low-tech and built from the waste products of industrial society - old tyres, cans and bottles! (covered in mud plaster, they're quite beautiful - see the attached images). So - they are the ultimate sustainable building - both adapting to climate change (houses that don't require heating or cooling in any climate, that function without being reliant upon utilities, that are earthquake and hurricane-proof, and that empower people to self-build), while also mitigating climate change (they don't require any fossil fuels for energy, water, sewage or heating). They are high thermal mass, passive solar heated, they collect rainwater and recycle it. They are about encountering the environment and living sustainably with it. Designer Mike Reynolds claims that they're not about 'saving the planet', they're about 'saving our asses' when the fossil fuel energy and water infrastructure collapse (either permanently or temporarily in power cuts). Again, it is planning regulations which are hampering the development of these experimental buildings. Reynolds proposes a 'test site' for sustainable buildings of all types, free of planning codes, to speed up the evolution of these ideas and applications. I was initially quite skeptical about earthships, but living in one for 3 days, and learning about the logic behind them, I was won over and came away harbouring dreams to build the first residential earthship in the UK! There are currently 2 demonstration (non-residential) earthships in the UK, one in Scotland and one in Brighton (this one owned by the Low Carbon Project). Mike Reynolds and members of his team are visiting the UK in October for a conference, and I am trying to arrange for a speaker to come to UEA. Visit www.earthship.org for more information. 3- Finally, I attended the 'Globalisation and the Environmental Justice Movement' conference in Tucson, Arizona. I gave a paper on the use of new systems of money and exchange to build sustainable communities, drawing on my research with LETS, Time Banks, and Green loyalty points, and this was well-received. In addition to many papers on global issues, there was a strong focus on cross-border environmental justice issues, with many community activists from southern Arizona and northern Mexico present to build networks and affinity groups. It was striking how much of ther activism took the form of literature - in many cases, the stories of the Native American tribes had never been written down before and so emergent poetry or creative writing was a powerful tool for building identity and recognition. The conference included a visit to several community projects in Nogales, Mexico: a community revegetation project, a community college, and we also met a group of maquila (export factory) activists. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Dr Gill Seyfang Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE) University of East Anglia Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK +44 (0) 1603 592956 g.seyfang@uea.ac.uk Personal web page: www.uea.ac.uk/~e175/ Department web page: www.uea.ac.uk/env/cserge/ * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\email-banner-1.jpg" Attachment Converted: "c:\eudora\attach\email-banner-2.jpg"