permaculture

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson <lakinroe@silcom.com>]

Think Small!

On Friday,  Jan 12th and Monday, Jan 15th, Sustainable World is 
broadcasting an interview with Shay Salomon, author of the book, 
"Little House on a Small Planet." Shay will be talking about how to 
live in less space, but have more room to enjoy it.  Shay, one of the 
co-founders of the Small House Society, will discuss the 
environmental impacts of the McMansion  building trend. She'll also 
tell us about how choosing a smaller house can "free your mind, your 
wallet, and your soul. "

Sustainable World Radio: Friday mornings at 9:00 am PST, and Monday 
mornings at 9:00 am PST on KCSB 91.9 FM in Santa Barbara, California. 
Also, streaming live on KCSB.org.

Thanks for tuning in!

Jill, Kevin and Suzanne

e-mail: sustainableworldradio@earthlink.net

Little House on a Small Planet

Shay Salomon and Photographer Nigel Valdez

        Live in less space but have more room and enjoy it.  Does 
that sound like a contradiction? Smart readers will discover that on 
the contrary, living small can free up your mind, your wallet, and 
your soul.  With the cost of living rising, the environment suffering 
from excessive building, now is time to scale back.  Join the small 
house movement.

        In Shay Salomon's newly published book, with a foreward by 
Francis Moore Lappe, Little House on a Small Planet ( 
www.littlehouseonasmallplanet.com) is a guidebook and an invitation, 
with floor plans, photographs, advice, and anecdotes. Discover how to 
build, remodel, redecorate, or just rethink your needs.  Live close 
and simple and apply spiritual and social needs to your material 
desires. Pockets of people all over the continent are realizing the 
benefits of scaling down. You too can build a joyful, sane life that 
emphasizes home life over home maintenance.

        Little House is split into three sections; building small 
houses, altering existing
houses, and the politics of housing and lifestyle choices. The book 
is informative and hopeful, even empowering.  Salomon takes a 
refreshing approach, instead of focusing intently on the problem of 
current housing trends, she provides the data needed to understand 
them, then spends her energy on drawing out solutions that each one 
of us can choose to follow  through on.

        In fact, the politics of housing is a theme threaded 
throughout the entire book.
Reading news coverage after Hurricane Katrina, Salomon learned that 
in Houston, where many of the refugees were headed, 14% of all 
housing units (homes, apartments, duplexes, etc) were vacant. Salomon 
did some research on how this compares to the rest of the country. 
She found that in the year 2000 there were 10.4 million vacant units 
and 250,000 people sleeping in homeless shelters. This meant there 
were nearly 45 homes that were completely empty per person sleeping 
in shelters. Salomon asks, "How is it that we have a housing crisis? 
Maybe a homing crisis, or a sharing crisis, but this isn't a housing crisis. "

        Shay Salomon is a carpenter and construction manager who 
coaches owner-builders towards a mortgage-free life.  She has taught 
at least a hundred courses in carpentry, straw bale building, solar 
design, and women's building courses.  A cofounder with Greg Johnson, 
Jay Shafer, and Nigel Valdez of the Small House Society ( 
www.smallhousesociety.org), she wrote Little House on the Small 
Planet , which chronicles the small house movement and offers advice 
to people who want to improve their life by living in far less space. 
The photographer for Little House, Nigel Valdez, chose pictures of 
real people on average days in their little houses. Nothing appears 
staged. People are relaxing with their kids, their feet up on the 
coffee table, or shaving in the bathtub, which happens to be in the 
kitchen. Shay Salomon and Nigel  Valdez have worked on this project 
for 7 years.

        The Santa Barbara Permaculture Network sponsors the 
event.  For more information please call (805) 962-2571, or email 
margie@sbpermaculture.org,  www.sbpermaculture.org.

Quotes about Housing from the book:

"The Union of Concerned Scientists ranks housing third among 
destructive human enterprises, just after transportation and 
agriculture.  But our housing need not be destructive.  Again we can 
chose !  We can chose human scale, enhancing our connections with 
those we love. We can chose eco-scale, reducing our demand for the 
kind of energy that is disrupting life now and for future generations."

"Construction has some alarming effects on the environment.  Forty 
percent of all the raw materials humans consume, we use in 
construction.  Building an average house adds seven tons of waste to 
the landfill!  New house construction is arguably the single greatest 
threat to endangered species, even in areas where human population is 
on the decline, animals and plants are threatened each day, due to 
the construction of new houses. Might our houses feel more 
comfortable if they weren't so destructive."

"Throughout North America building has been influenced by "green 
thinking", and houses have improved, but despite major advances in 
insulation and design, the typical house built today requires as much 
energy to heat and cool as one built in 1960. Why? Because it's 
bigger. House size and location are the greatest determinants of a 
home's effect on the environment.  The challenge is to build a single 
family housing as efficient as a New York City apartment, which, on 
average uses a fraction of the energy of a typical detached house."