I have been invited to participate in the 2017 Tiny House Summit as one of their Keynote speakers. This event will be online for five days and is completely free to the public. It will happen from February 20th through February 24th. There will be many presentations about tiny houses and the world of tiny living.
If you click on the image on the right you can sign up to participate.
We just updated the site to be a mobile-friendly one, which it wasn’t really before.
Jenny Pickerill is a professor of environmental geography at the University of Sheffield, and I met her when she was conducting research for this book, gallivanting around the world on a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travel Fellowship. She interviewed me and we toured a variety of novel eco-homes near Crestone, Colorado, where I was living at the time. In addition to Crestone, she visited ecological enclaves in Britain, Spain, Thailand, Argentina and other locations in the United States.
Her purpose in assembling this academic study into ecological living was to focus more on the social, geographical and political issues around eco-housing, which are often ignored, in the hopes that a broader acceptance of sustainable architecture will evolve. I found her analysis enlightening and well worth the read, if a bit academic in its outlook. Each chapter of the book is devoted to a different filter, which in total provides a good understanding of the issues involved.
The first chapter focuses on the eco aspects of eco-homes, and why this is important. She observes that “eco-houses are being built to deal with the issues of waste through structural innovations by altering size, harnessing renewable technologies, retrofitting existing housing stock and changing occupants’ behavior and practices. Each approach has benefits, limitations and financial costs.” She goes on to chastise government and industry for emphasizing the technical fixes while ignoring simpler solutions.
Next, Jenny delves into the home aspect explaining how hard it is to define what home really is. Home can generally refer to country, state, city, bioregion, neighborhood, as well as a specific house. We have an emotional attachment to our homes that must be recognized in order to make eco-houses appealing to a wider audience. The emotional component is affected by aesthetics, location, style, privacy, comfort, and worth.
I am pleased to announce that my most recent book is now available, both in print form and as a Kindle from Amazon.com. Earthbag Architecture: Building Your Dream with Bags is the story of my involvement with earthbags over nearly two decades. I spent much of this winter resurrecting memories of the earthbag projects that I have completed and sorting through a multitude of photographs. Some 240 of these full color images grace the pages of this informative book.
If you’d like to see Kelly’s book Rolling Shelter: Vehicles We Have Called Home, its Kindle version is free today and tomorrow, Wed Sept 3 and Thursday Sept 4. Just click on the title… Or if you are using the program called Kindle Unlimited, it’s free anytime. Enjoy! With homelessness an issue, living in vehicles … Read more
What do you do after you’ve built your sustainable homestead? Have you considered expanding your original self-sufficiency plans to include an income generating business, teaching workshops and possibly producing food for your community? The Industrial Country Market has done all this and more.