[permaculture] This Week on Sustainable World Radio Fri Jan 12, 9am and Mon Jan 15, 9am Shay Solomon "Little House on a Small Planet." interview streaming live
From: Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson <lakinroe@silcom.com>
To: permaculture@openpermaculture.org, permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org, eastbaypermaculture@yahoogroups.com,
Subject: [permaculture] This Week on Sustainable World Radio Fri Jan 12, 9am and Mon Jan 15, 9am Shay Solomon "Little House on a Small Planet." interview streaming live
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2007 07:08:56 -0800
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."
[permaculture] This Week on Sustainable World Radio Fri Jan 12, 9am and Mon Jan 15, 9am Shay Solomon "Little House on a Small Planet." interview streaming live,
Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson, 01/11/2007