unsustainable "sustainable houses"

Its good to see that sustainable houses can be stylish and dont have to be ramshackle hovels made of coke-cans and old tires like those by garbage warrior (which is also cool, I think). Homlifestyle.com make some nice pads - advertised as green, eco and sustainable etc etc, prefabricated and delivered by bio-fuel trucks, of course. Good website.
I am bit skeptical though. Obviosuly capatalising on the current green trends. Its advertised as a second home for guilt-ridden city-dwelleres - so is it "sustainable" if you're not supposed to live in it? It probably helps the buyers justify building their holiday home in the first place.

The garbage warrior however, shows us that if you want to live sustainably, you can't! Government, pressurised by the big utilities lobbies, dont want that. The companies need income for the shareholders - as we all found out with British gas about a week ago. If you build houses "off-grid" you will get sued.

The garbage warrior (a proper architect) builds houses from discarded materials and the utility bills cost a couple dollars a month. Why not! The houses look kinda funky if you like that style. I think its cool. Much cooler than a white-trash trailer made of sustainable oak for the nouveau-riche.


garbage warrior's "earthship":

Rice

Some people were relatively shocked when they heard that Haitians had to eat "mud-cakes" (what a euphamism!) but nobody bothered asking why. Its very simple and unsurprising: debts and dependency.

Al Jazeera's Inside USA: Twenty years ago, Haiti produced enough rice to feed its population. Importing rice from other countries like the US was unheard of. Today, the country of less than 10 million people is the third largest importer of US rice in the world – 75 per cent of the rice eaten in Haiti is shipped in from the US.

Great for farmers in places like Arkansas and Missouri but devastating for farmers in the Artibonite valley, which used to be Haiti's rice bowl.

And now that Haiti is utterly dependent on imported food, the entire country is vulnerable to the mood swings of the global market. (often speculation see post below)

So when the price of rice doubled in the last year, the majority of Haitians, who live in bitter poverty, got slammed.



See also:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/223.html

I've been flicking through "The complete book of self sufficiency" by John Seymour. Its a real page turner. Here is the foreword:

"... We can do things for ourselves or we can pay others to do them for us. These are the two 'systems' that support us; we might call them the 'self-reliance system' and the 'organization system'.
In the modern world, during the last hundred years or so, there has been an enormous and historically unique shift: away from self-reliance and towards organization. As a result people are becoming less self-reliant and more dependent than has ever been seen in history. They may claim to be more highly educated than any generation before them; but the fact remains that they cannot really do anything for themselves. They depend utterly on vastly complex organizations, on fantastic machinery, on larger and larger money incomes. What if there is a hold-up, a breakdown, a strike, or unemployment? Does the state provide all that is needed? In some cases, yes; in other cases, no. Many people fall through the meshes of the safety net; and what then? ... "

They suffer because they cannot help themselves. The book goes on to show us how to help ourselves by showing us how to bake bread, brew beer, grow crops for food or energy, build solar panels and water mills, keep livestock, compost, make bricks, smoke bacon, tan leather and so on for 300 pages. You can either live by this book (perfectly feasible) or as a reference to slowly become less dependent on these systems - which I think is a good idea.

Its definintely worth having. So here is a link to the same pdf that I downloaded:

http://rapidshare.com/files/109834236/The.Complete.Book.of.Self.Sufficiency.rar