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Michael G. Smith
After graduating from college, I spent a couple of years living in Costa Rica in the rainforest, working primarily on rainforest conservation and reforestation. I had gone to Costa Rica with a kind of na•ve idea that I was going to help preserve the rainforest from destruction. And I worked with some incredibly talented and motivated and smart and far-thinking local people, who had exactly the same objective.
But what became clear was that the forces that they were dealing with weren't local; the forces were global, and had to do with this apparently insatiable hunger for resources, for stuff, that drives our consumer culture. Especially places like here, in the United States, but increasingly all over the world. And that as long as that hunger, that drive for resources, and the cheap energy that makes it possible to move things like forestries from places like Costa Rica to places like Hollywood, where hugs amounts of tropical woods are used in movie sets, just as an example, that's going to continue to happen.
So what I became really interested in, was working on the demand side. Is it possible to offer people a different paradigm, a different cultural paradigm, that says: What's really important to us is our relationships with the people around us, our relationship with the place that we live, our relationship with the stuff in our lives that we eat, that we clothe ourselves with, that we build with.
I think by focusing on those relationships, I think there's a ripple effect, a positive ripple effect, that will lead out into the rest of the world. And I think when people aren't connected, aren't paying attention to where the stuff in their lives come from, it's very, very easy for these huge, out-of-control environmentally devastating industries to do whatever they want. Because the consumers aren't paying attention to what the consequences of their purchasing actions are.
So I became really interested in trying to educate people in consumer societies, and specifically in the United States, because that's where I'm from, that another whole set of options is available to us, which basically are, in some ways, much more similar to how traditional societies have lived. We can feed ourselves. We can grow a lot of our own food. And I'm not saying that trade, per se, is evil, or that it's even desirable to eliminate trade.
So the time I spent in Costa Rica was very, very eye-opening for me. Just getting out of this country, seeing a little bit of how other people in other parts of the world live, and also, really for the first time, traveling through Central America, really seeing the impacts on people's lives of our lifestyle here, our foreign policy, our military empire, etc., etc. And that kind of politicized me, in a way that I hadn't been previously.
And I think how most of my political action... You know, I sometimes go to a protest and carry signs, and march, and chant, and so forth. But what feels like a more positive use of my time, is trying to create models that people can look to and say, Oh! that guy over there built his own house for $2000! He lives on $500 a month! Maybe that's something that might be possible for me...
The whole technique of cob was something that I just kind of came across almost accidentally. The person who deserves most of the credit, I'd say, 70% of the credit for introducing cob into this country is Ianto Evans. And the person who next deserves the most credit is Linda Smiley, his wife. So the two of them had built a partially cob cabin for themselves sometime in the mid-1980's, which they inhabited for about 5 years. At the end of that time, they moved, they left the property where they had been building and teaching, and had been so impressed by the cob, actually, that they were like, Wow, this is one of the most interesting things to us, that we have to offer.
Other than their single experiment, as far as we know, there hadn't been a single cob structure constructed in North America in at least 100 years. There was some cob stuff built on the East Coast, mostly in New York State, but also in Ohio, and some of the other states, in the late 1800's, mid-to-late-1800's. There was certainly adobe happening on the West Coast and the Southwest. But their inspiration and their models came both from Britain, where Ianto's from, and also from Africa, where he'd spent quite a bit of time, working on other kinds of projects.
In addition to doing the cob work, they were involved with a lot of international permaculture, sustainability, appropriate technology transfer, and that's what actually got me in touch with them. I had heard about that work, and was very curious about it. Ianto also had done a lot of research into sustainable gardening and food production, and both of those things really interested me. So I happened to get in touch with them just at the point where they were getting ready to start the Cob Cottage Company, and it seemed like, Yeah, I could go help out with that for a bit. I had some building background, carpentry background, etc., that was going to be helpful.
So I just kind of ended up showing up and helping them build their second cob house, which they're still living in. And that was the spring of 1993 that we started that. By that winter, they were moved into that structure, it's a very, very small, very sculptural, very carefully designed, almost entirely cob structure. And that was only the second cob building that Ianto and Linda had worked on.
So we were in the process of building that we were learning a lot, teaching ourselves a lot. And a lot of that came from just having a pretty experimental attitude of, What would happen if we did this? You know, What are the limits of this material? How far can we push it?
So this shelf up here is built using a technique called corbelling. It's made entirely out of cob. There's no reinforcing in it other than just extra straw. And that was a technique that we came up with while working on that Heart House, Linda and Ianto's second house. We built the shelf like this for a bookshelf, never having done it before, or seen it done, or heard of it, and I'm not exactly clear where the idea came from, I presume it was probably Ianto's invention.
But as the cob wall continued to go up, we needed a scaffolding to access the top of the wall for building. And I remember the day that I found myself sort of hesitantly putting one foot, and then the other foot, onto this cob shelf, to see whether it would support me, and kind of half-thinking that the whole thing was going to collapse, and I was going to end up on the ground. That didn't happen! And pretty soon we had 4 or 5 people standing on a shelf like this, continuing to cob the wall up over our heads.
There was a very magical process of building that structure. Materials kept showing up for us in very kind of magical ways. There's a particular window... We were giving some thought and some attention to things like, Where's the light and the sun going to be on the solstices and the equinoxes? and that sort of thing. But the actual manifestation of how those things interact within that building were partially serendipitous, also.
So there's a circumstance, for example, where, at sunrise on the summer solstice, and really only for a day or two on either side of the summer solstice, the rising sun comes in through a certain window and casts a certain pattern right above the wood stove in the house. And this is something that is one of Ianto's big strengths, is noticing and paying attention to the sort of cosmology of the place where we are, and building in and designing into our living structures little signals and little reminders that things are changing, that the earth is moving, that the cycles of time are passing and continuing and returning.
And that's really a departure from how most of our architecture and building happens in our culture and in our climate, which is not at all place-centred. It's very typical for buildings to get designed completely without the designers ever having been to the site. It's fairly typical for a lot of the building components to be assembled in a factory somewhere hundreds of miles from the site where they're going to end up.
The extreme example of that, obviously, is the whole mobile home phenomenon, where the structure is built obviously completely independent of the site, and it's trucked in and plunked down on a foundation. And it's incapable, because of how it came to be, it's incapable of really responding to the conditions on the site, and having any kind of conversation with the site.
And for me, and for Ianto, also, I think, that's one of the things that makes a good building, is a rich, deep conversation between the building and the things around it, ad the people in it, too.
So, a lot of what Cob Cottage Company came to be was kind of a traveling school, where we would be contacted by somebody who wanted to build a cob house, often, in many cases, somebody who had taken a workshop from us previously, but not exclusively. And we would bring a workshop to that person's site, and through the process of teaching a workshop, we would help with the construction of the building. That's still a lot of what Ianto and Linda do, and what I do a little bit of, but less than I used to.
So we started traveling and teaching, mostly up and down the West Coast of the United States and into British Columbia, but a little bit wider. Ianto, particularly, has traveled a lot more to Western Europe, the Eastern United States, and other places, too. But I think that it was very, very valuable for us, to travel and experience the conditions on all these different sites; to go to, and sort of seed, or fertilize a new pocket of culture in different places.
What we found, kind of to our surprise, was, despite the fact that there had been no cob construction done in the last 100 years in the United States, and practically none in Britain in the same period of time, lots of people were really interested in this stuff. It had some kind of appeal that was extremely strong for lots of people.
And nowadays, although I certainly wouldn't say that cob is a household word in the United States, a lot of people know about it. In the last 3 years, we've sold something like 30,000 books. So, I'm fairly sure there's hundreds of thousands of people, at least, possibly more, possibly millions, at this point, who, if you said 'cob building,' wouldn't think you were talking about corn cobs, which is what most people who've never heard of it before think. And that's a pretty rapid rate of dissemination into the culture over, what seems like a very short period of time to me.
So, at least in a certain segment of the population that may be predisposed to pay attention to this kind of stuff, the technique has made pretty significant inroads into the consciousness and the collective imagination quite quickly.
The biggest advantage, I'd say, of earth building is that earth is such a ubiquitous material. Most places that people are building, there's earth. And that's huge! That's a huge, huge factor. I think it's hard for people who are raised in an industrial society, where energy is very, very cheap, to understand the significance of that fact. Because we're used to thinking nothing of moving, you know, huge amounts of material, including very heavy material, very long distances.
But traditionally, throughout the history of humanity, that has not been an option, and it's very possible that will come to be less of an option in the near to middle future, even in wealthy places like the United States. So just learning to build with the stuff that is there on the site is an incredibly valuable thing for us, I'd say, at this stage in our history, to re-learn that.
There's a technical aspect to building with earth that makes it very accessible to lots of people. Even natural materials that are commonly used, one that springs readily to mind is wood, require a little bit more training and technique to get good at. Carpentry is actually, as it's practiced currently in the western world, is a very technical skill, it's a craft. And people take years to learn how to become good carpenters. Most of the earthen building techniques are so simple that people can learn how to do them in a matter of hours to days.
And then we have lots of experience with Cob Cottage Company in workshop teaching of people who took, say, a week-long workshop, with very little to no previous building experience, and went from that directly into building their own homes. Usually people require some help with the more technical aspects of the building, especially the carpentry, things like wiring and plumbing, if those are included into the home. Those are things that people can't learn as quickly. But the actual earth-building technique is so simple that most people can pick it up very quickly.
One of the other big advantages that earth has as a building material is its weight. Because earth is a massive, heavy material, it has the ability to store heat, or conversely, to store coolness, over a long period of time. A heavy earthen wall, and this also goes for other heavy materials like brick and stone, takes a long time to heat up, and a long time to cool down. And it turns out that that's critical for efficient passive solar construction. If you want to build a house that is going to be heated mainly with the sun, you need a way to store the heat that's coming in from the sun during the daytime, and keep it in the building to release during the nighttime, which is when you really need it.
In the daytime, the sun's out, temperatures are high, everything's good. But at night, temperatures are going to drop, you're a lot more likely to be inside your house at night, and that's really when you need that heat! So the thermal mass of earth, either in your walls, or in your floor, can hold and store that heat until you need it. And that's true not only on a daily cycle, where you have daily temperature swings, hot in the middle of the day, cool at night, but also over longer periods of time.
Another way to do that, or another way to take advantage of that thermal mass, is by having the mass of the cob or other earthen material in close proximity to a wood-burning heat source. The wood stove right here is built right up against this surrounding cob hearth. So when the wood stove is going, it's releasing a lot of heat through radiation, some of which is projecting out into the room to warm us directly. I can feel a lot of heat coming off that stove right now to me. But in addition, a lot of that heat is going back and being absorbed into this cob wall, and the cob is heating up. So what that means is, in an hour, we can stop feeing the wood stove, the fire will go out, but then the cob will be continuing to heat the space.
And that principle's been used for millennia, probably, particularly in really cold climates like Scandinavia, where there's something called a Finnish stove. Germans had a similar technique called a kakalofen. Chinese had something called a kang. All of them are basically very, very heavy massive wood burners in which you can make a very hot fire for a short period of time, heat up all that mass, and then have the heat from that mass continue to radiate and heat your space for a period of time afterwards. It's a much more efficient way of using the energy that's released by the combustion of the wood than relying entirely on the heat that's released at the time of combustion.
So, again, it's using the thermal mass of the earth as a battery to hold the heat for when you actually need it.
The biggest disadvantage of adobe is because it's made of a lot of little separate units that are kind of stuck together with mud, but there's no real continuity, there's no tensile connection between all those different units. If you get a big shake, or the ground moves, in an earthquake, or something like that, there's a tendency for those units to shift and come apart. And, in the worst-case circumstance, for the building to collapse. So, adobe, of the 3 major load-bearing techniques is probably the least strong in earthquake conditions.
And the actual ingredients and mixture in a cob building can be very, very similar to what goes into an adobe structure. It's once again a mixture of clay and sand and straw. And there's some huge advantages to [cob], relative to the other techniques.
One is we don't need any forms. We're just building and sculpting our walls in place as we go. You can do sculptural stuff with concrete, etc. etc. But to do a curved sculptural concrete building, you first need to build a curved form, which is fairly technically difficult. To achieve the same result out of cob, you don't need any special tools, and you don't need any special training. So, it's very, very easy for people without much training and without much technical background to achieve really spectacular results. In fact, it's practically inevitable. [Laughs]. I've almost never seen anybody build anything out of cob that wasn't beautiful. So that's pretty remarkable, in and of itself.
The other significant advantage besides the sculptural qualities of cob is that if you build carefully, you needn't have any seams, any weak joints in your entire structure. So the ideal is, you're always adding the new cob onto the wall before the cob underneath it is completely dry. And you're able to "sew" using either your fingers, or using a tool that we call a "cobber's thumb," which is a worked piece of wood. You're able to sew the new cob into the layer of web, sticky cob underneath it, and you're able to get very, very good connection, good adhesion between those layers.
I haven't been myself to Africa, but I've seen photographs, where one of the solutions is to build each course of cob sort of triangular in section, actually kind of like a upside-down heart shape in section. And then the next upside-down heart shape locks itself in place on top of the previous course. So there are certainly ways around the poor connection that you tend to get with coursing. But, just as a general statement, I'd say cob has the potential to be much stronger in earthquake conditions than especially adobe. Because you don't have all those inherent weak points in the seams between the different courses.
You know, any of these techniques, you can build with very, very few tools. So, with adobe, really all you need is a form, and you can do the rest, you know, a shovel's helpful, a wheelbarrow's helpful, and a hose is helpful. With rammed earth, it's pretty much the same, you need a form and a tamper. With cob, the tools that you actually need to do it are even fewer. You could pretty much just do cob with a stick or a shovel or something. A tarp, a few buckets, a wheelbarrow, a hose, a machete, those things are really, really helpful, and I wouldn't encourage anybody to try to build a cob house with nothing but a stick. But it is a very, very low-tech technique at its root, as are all these other traditional building techniques.
Now what that doesn't necessarily mean is that cob has to be a low-tech technique. And in fact, there's some limitations, there are some pretty severe limitations on treating it as exclusively a low-tech technique. The majority of the work that goes into a cob building is in mixing the cob. That can take up to three-quarters, two-thirds to three-quarters, of the labour in the building of the actual cob walls themselves.
There are ways, pretty good ways, to mechanize that. So, either using a tractor, a technique called tractor cob; using a mortar mixer; in Britain, they're using just a heavy truck, and driving back and forth over the mix, and mixing it that way. So, it's certainly feasible, and reasonable, I would say, to throw some kind of industrial equipment at the cob process, and speed up the mixing part of the equation a lot.
And I think what that enables, is it enables projects to happen more quickly, it enables people who are working with a budget and a tight timeline, which most professional builders, most contractors are working under those circumstances; it enables them to consider cob as something that they could use in their professional work. So I'd say that's a positive development that's happening lately in cob.
Still haven't seen it really turn into a mainstream technique that's being used for mass marketing, mass housing developments, and maybe it never will. But in the meantime, I think the biggest impact that cob is having is allowing people who want to be building for themselves, and who don't have a lot of resources, or a lot of training, to learn a technique quite quickly that enables them to build a really beautiful and really special home for themselves.
So, it's been an amazing process for me. You know, coming from a fairly mainstream American background to start realizing that these really simple, low-tech, and really good, effective techniques for living really high-quality lives, using fewer resources and less energy are out there. The techniques are out there. We know how to build good natural houses. We know how to heat ourselves efficiently. We know how to make electricity from the sun and the wind and the water.
So, part of the question becomes, how come we're not doing it that way? How come we're still, for the most part, if you look around, you see people consuming really vast and unsustainable amounts of resources, and especially of energy. And I think that's really one of the key questions, is not How do we do it? Not how we do it, in the technical sense, but how do we do it, in the cultural context. How are we going to actually change our cultural context to embrace this way of living?
There are some pretty significantly different aspects to living a more sustainable life, especially because it takes a lot of time. Building your own house, growing your own food, cooking good food from ingredients that you grow, or that you buy in bulk, all that takes a lot of time. One of the things that becomes clear, when you start looking at that issue is, it's a very, very difficult thing for any one person, or any one family, to do by themselves.
And there are certainly exceptions. There are certainly very committed individuals or families who move out into the wilderness and make their living off the land by themselves. They have to work extremely hard to do that. And it's very isolating. Because that's not what's supported, for the most part, by most of the messages we get from our culture. So I really think that finding a supportive group of other people who are interested in living their lives that way, too, is pretty critical. And I've found that in my own life.
Working in a group context where people share a set of values and a set of goals makes it a lot easier to act, I think, in concert with those goals yourself. Because there's some peer pressure, frankly!
People are kind of paying attention, on some level, to each other's choices and resource usage. And we're going to hopefully gently question and challenge each other on that. I challenge when I see people buying a lot of tropical fruit, including bananas. I say, do we need to do that? You know, can we find a local source of fruit that's going to meet our needs better? Can we grow our own?
So, I think when you're trying to do something that's a departure from the cultural norm, it's incredibly helpful to have a group of people to do it with, for all kinds of reasons.
Another key, one of the most key factors for me in choosing to live in community is just, in and of itself, the act of living with and sharing with a group of people reduces your resource use and your energy use. A simple example: Here at Emerald Earth, we have, let's see, we have about 6 different households, or family units, and between those 6 households, we have a single washing machine. That's an example. We have a single set of power tools in our shop. There's a lot of other things like that. You know, a single lawnmower. A single truck that we share.
So, as opposed to the very isolated and dispersed nuclear family lifestyle where every family needs its own complete set of all the acoutrements of our culture, here, even if we want those things, we want to have a television, we want to have a DVD player, we want to have a chainsaw, we can use fewer of them per capita, just as a result of sharing that stuff.
There's also economies [of scale] that show up around things like food production. I think it's a lot more efficient for a group of 10 or 20 or 30 or 100 people to collectively create a sustainable food source, as opposed to a single family trying to do that. Likewise with buildings, with natural buildings, specifically. As we reduce our reliance on high technology and fossil fuel energy, the thing that's tending to step up to take that place is human labour.
So most of these low-tech techniques actually require a lot of time and a lot of physical effort from a lot of people. It's really, really nice to have a group of people to draw on for moving heavy objects, or mixing a lot of cob, or digging a big hole, that sort of thing. So there's a lot of different pieces in it for me.
In terms of the social aspects, I think: You know, living rurally, we're out at the end of a 5-mile-long dirt road. And it can be pretty challenging, in those kinds of circumstances, to feel like you're getting your social needs met. Now I think the different people who live here have different experiences around that.
But for myself, for the most part, with the combination of the people who live here year round, and a lot of visitors coming through for workshop, work parties, to be here as apprentices or interns for periods of time, I find that I get most of my social needs met that way. If I was living as part of a single family, in the same context, in the same physical context, that wouldn't be true. So that's another piece for me.
And another piece is the kind of spiritual and psychological growth that seems to be a necessary component of living and trying to make decisions together with a group of people. So, we're a very, very ego-centrical and individual-focused culture. In contrast with more tribal cultures, and even cultures where family is much, much more important than it is here in our culture, we grew up without being taught a lot of the skills that are really necessary to get along in a group of people. And for me, I think even more important the technical skills of how we're going to build our houses, how we're going to create our energy, how we're going to grow our food, that's I'd say the key, in terms of having a sustainable future, is figuring out how to work together.
You look around the world, and you see conflict, everywhere. And a lot of that conflict comes from competition over scarce resources. A lot of it comes from differences in ideology. A lot of it comes from greed, and people wanting more than their share, or wanting more power, wanting to control other people. It think that one of the advantages that living and working in a group of people like this has, is on this very tiny microcosm scale, you get to see those forces, and you get to see that inside yourself.
You get to see that coming out, my need for control, my irritation when somebody isn't doing something my way, my fear that other people are going to use up all the olive oil, or some other resource that I'm attached to. But, because it's a safe context, and a group of people that are really committed to living together and working through problems together, there's a lot of encouragement for all of us to express that stuff, to get it out on the table, to talk it through, to negotiate, to come up with good solutions that are going to work well for everybody.
One of the main tools that we use for that is the consensus decision-making process, which is, in contrast to a voting type of a model for doing decision-making, where, in a straight majority vote situation up to a half of the people could be really unhappy with any decision that's made, in a consensus decision, every individual has to agree for the group to come to a decision.
And that can take a lot of time. More than time, what it takes is trust. It takes a trust that everybody else in the group is not working purely from, or primarily, even, from their own self-interest. But everybody is holding the interest of the group, and of each other. And with that trust present, I find that for the most part, consensus is a pretty effective and efficient decision-making process.
So, part of the model of what we're creating here at Emerald Earth is, we're trying to be very deliberate about balancing the needs of individuals and families with the needs of the whole group. And we're trying to, in the development of our infrastructure, building our buildings, designing our common spaces, et cetera, we're doing a little bit of social engineering. We're thinking, How do we want this community to function in the future, and let's create an infrastructure that supports that.
One of the things that's really important to us is that this doesn't become a suburb of people withdrawing to their individual homes, living completely separate lives, and getting together only occasionally for social functions, or something like that, but that the communal aspect of what we're doing here continues to be important in everybody's lives.
And one of the main ways that we come together, we come together a lot in meetings and decision-making, we come together for parties and dances and rituals, but probably the most important way that we come together on a daily basis is in meals. At this point, every lunch and dinner, every day, is available for people to eat together, communally, in the common house.
And it isn't expected that everybody's going to come to every group meal. But we've chosen to develop really substantial and ample cooking facilities in our common areas, and not in our private areas. In our private homes, which are very, very small, there's usually a pretty minimal kitchenette, with a sink, a couple of burners for heating tea, or leftovers, or making toast, or whatever you want to do, a little bit of counter space, but it's not a full kitchen.
And so, that's partly to encourage the group to come together and share at meals, and it's partly a resource-usage issue. The fewer things that the homes, the individual homes, need to accommodate, the smaller they can be. Which means less resources that they use in the construction, and the less energy that needs to go into heating them, and keeping them comfortable.
So, in general, any function that we can take out of the individual homes and put into a communal space, we've chosen to do so. So we thought, What are the really important things? Why are people going to their separate homes?
We have not been interested, like some other communities do, in building one giant house that everybody lives together in. That doesn't work for us, kind of on an emotional level, because most of us here like a little bit more privacy than that, we want to have a space that we can retreat to, that we have control over, that isn't going to be full of someone else's screaming kids, or somebody else's music, or even somebody else's cooking smells; but we can go to, we can relax, we can put on our own music, we can read a book, we can do work, if we need to do quiet work, we can have our family interactions, and our interactions with our children out of the kind of fishbowl that you get in the common house situations.
So we've created homes that are basically going to give us the privacy that we need for retreats, and serve that way, but that aren't going to usurp a lot of what the common functions are going to be. Again, that's for social purposes, and for the purpose of reducing the resources that we're using.
So, up until this point, we also haven't chosen to put bathing facilities, or bathrooms, into any of the private structures. Those, we have a couple of showers that are in our common house, plus we have a bathhouse / sauna complex that has a couple of showers in it. I'd say, you know, if somebody designed a house, and they wanted to have a shower or bathtub in it, I don't think that'd be a big deal. I think that would be fine.
But, I'd say the main reason why we have chosen not to, is once again the resource usage, specifically having to do with the hot water. Actually, with one exception, the homes are plumbed with cold water, they're plumbed with electricity, but they don't have hot water. It takes a lot of energy to heat up water. Wherever you're using a lot of energy, it makes a lot more sense to figure out how to use that as efficiently as possible.
And say, for example, we're going to heat up a lot of hot water, we're always going to have hot water in our common house. That's going to be available for cooking, for washing dishes, for laundry, for showers, and that's going to get frequent usage throughout the day with everybody taking their showers there. If you separated it and had hot water in everybody's separate houses, we would definitely be looking at an on-demand hot water system, which is certainly possible, either a gas-powered on-demand system, or there's some pretty inexpensive, pretty effective wood-fired on-demand systems, which I've actually been interested in getting a couple of here.
But it's expensive. So, any additional expensive item that you don't have to duplicate many times in individual homes, and you can just have one or two or three for the entire group in a centralized location, just makes sense, from a financial and an energy standpoint.
Water, and the usage of water, also has a lot of other issues associated with it. One of which is, What happens to the water after you use it? Again, there's kind of an economy of scale issue. We have grey water systems that are developed here to use our waste water from our common house and from our common bathing facility quite efficiently. And it's worth putting the energy into developing those systems and making them work really well because there's a fairly high flow of water through those systems.
Our individual houses with their sinks that get, you know, maybe somebody uses them for brushing their teeth a couple of times a day, or washing a few dishes -- there's just not much throughput of water to make it worthwhile to put a lot of energy into reclaiming that. Most of us have very, very simple grey water systems from our houses. The water does get used, for the most part, for example, directly onto some trees that are right outside the house. But there isn't a very efficient usage of that water.
And another great example of this would be bio-gas digesters and methane production. We know people who design and install very simple low-tech techniques for composting waste and making gas that can be used for cooking, or other kinds of usages. The thing is, that it requires a lot of material to make that work.
So, for example, in China, my understanding is, one of the ways they do that is, they'll have a communal toilet for an entire village of hundreds of people. Maybe a few toilets that all go into a single tank. The tank is then digested and composted, and all that gas is used, it's collected in one place, and then redistributed from that point out. As opposed to having to have a separate bio-gas digester in everybody's homes, people wouldn't be able to afford it, for one thing, and it would be very inefficient, in terms of using the material.
Because a lot of what I'm here for, it feels like, to me, is to create a relationship with the place where I live. And I have a pretty developed relationship with my home, with my structure that I built with my hands, that I sleep in, that I know every single detail [of]. I know for the most part where every board, and where every piece of wood in my house came from. Most of them I cut down. A lot of those were within sight of where my house is now. And I can look at a pole in my house and say, Oh, yeah, that used to be growing over there.
So, one of the things that we're deliberately designing into our lifestyle here is that we spend a lot of time outdoors. Because our toilet facilities are outside of our houses, our shower facilities are outside of our houses, our common house, which is our primary cooking and social gathering place, is separate from our individual homes, we, at the very least, spend a lot of time moving back and forth between those different structures.
Also, just a lot of our livelihood here, our gardening, our crafts; we're increasingly hoping to have a lot more interaction with the forest, and sustainable forest management, and that sort of thing; all of that stuff is outside. Almost all of our recreation in the summertime is outside: swimming in the pond, playing games. In the summertime, we eat outside almost exclusively. And what that enables, I think, is a much richer relationship to develop between the people and the place where they live, as opposed to in a circumstance where we spend a lot more of our time inside our homes.
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