Contents
*New Features at Greenhomebuilding.com
*Extruded Housing?
*Global Warming getting Warmer
*Feedback
*General
Information
Greenhomebuilding.com E-zine is a monthly opt-in email publication for people who are interested in sustainable architecture and alternative or natural building. It is written by Kelly Hart, the host of http://www.greenhomebuilding.com ..........
New Features at Greenhomebuilding.com
I
have just spent many days going through the entire Greenhomebuilding.com
website making significant changes and additions, all intended to make it
easier to access the wealth of information available there. You will notice
at the top of the home page (and also available on all of the other pages)
is a search feature provided by Google. This search box is set to search the
entire Greenhomebuilding.com
website for any word or phrase that you are seeking information about. Also,
at the top of each page, are a series of links that will take you directly
to any aspect of the page that is available. Such resources include books,
videos, and links to other informative websites.
Further links will take you to specific subjects that are addressed in the Ask the Expert Column. This means that I have gone through all of the questions and answers and sorted them according to pertinent subject areas. This should make it much easier to find what you are looking for, and should also reduce the number of redundant questions that come through.
Finally, I have started to add descriptions of plans that relate to the the topic of each page, and that are available for review or sale at the sister website www.dreamgreenhomes.com. I expect to continue adding the sample plans as they become available.
Extruded
Housing?
Newscientist.com reports that a robot that takes instructions directly
from an architect's computerized drawings will undergo trials soon. It squirts
successive layers of concrete (or possibly cob or adobe) on top of one other
to build up vertical walls and domed roofs. Such a machine could work round
the clock and in darkness; it only needs power and a constant feed of semi-liquid
construction material.
The key to the technology is a computer-guided nozzle that deposits a line of wet concrete, like toothpaste being squeezed from a tube. Two trowels attached to the nozzle then move to shape the deposit. The robot repeats its journey many times to raise the height and builds hollow walls before returning to fill them. Engineer Behrokh Khoshnevis, at the University of Southern California, has been perfecting his "contour crafter" for more than a year. "The goal is to be able to completely construct a one-story, 2000-square foot home on site, in one day and without using human hands," he says.
The first house
will be built in 2005. If the technology is successful the robot could enable
new designs that cannot be built using conventional methods, for example involving
complex curving walls. Greg Lynn, a leading architect from Venice, California,
said. "I believe that aesthetically there's a great potential to make
things that have never been seen before."
Global Warming getting Warmer
This excerpted article, titled With Eyes Wide Shut by George Monbiot, appeared in The Guardian.
Last month the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced that "the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest in any century during the past 1,000 years", while "the trend since 1976 is roughly three times that for the whole period". Climate change, the WMO suggests, provides an explanation not only for record temperatures in Europe and India but also for the frequency of tornadoes in the United States and the severity of the recent floods in Sri Lanka.
The extreme events to which climate change appears to have contributed reflect an average rise in global temperatures of 0.6C over the past century. The consensus among climatologists is that temperatures will rise in the 21st century by between 1.4 and 5.8C: by up to 10 times, in other words, the increase we have suffered so far. Climate change of this magnitude will devastate the Earth's productivity. New research in Australia suggests that the amount of water reaching the rivers will decline up to four times as fast as the percentage reduction of rainfall in dry areas. This, alongside the disappearance of the glaciers, spells the end of irrigated agriculture. Winter flooding and the evaporation of soil moisture in the summer will exert similar effects on rain fed farming. Like crops, humans will simply wilt in some of the hotter parts of the world: the 1,500 deaths in India through heat exhaustion last summer may prefigure the necessary evacuation, as temperatures rise, of many of the places currently considered habitable.
Paradoxically, the approach of this crisis corresponds with the approach of another. The global demand for oil is likely to outstrip supply within the next 10 or 20 years. Some geologists believe it may have started already. It is tempting to knock the two impending crises together, and to conclude that the second will solve the first. But this is wishful thinking. There is enough oil under the surface of the Earth to cook the planet and, as the price rises, the incentive to extract it will increase. Business will turn to even more polluting means of obtaining energy, such as the use of tar sand and oil shale, or "underground coal gasification" (setting fire to coal seams). But because oil in the early stages of extraction is the cheapest and most efficient fuel, the costs of energy will soar, ensuring that we can no longer buy our way out of trouble with air conditioning, water pumping and fuel-intensive farming.
Only if we take control of our economic lives, and demand and create the means by which we may cut our energy use to 10% or 20% of current levels will we prevent the catastrophe that our rational selves can comprehend. This requires draconian regulation, rationing and prohibition: all the measures which our existing politics, informed by our dreaming, forbid. So we slumber through the crisis. Waking up demands that we upset the seat of our consciousness, that we dethrone our deep unreason and usurp it with our rational and predictive minds. Are we capable of this, or are we destined to sleepwalk to extinction?
Feedback
Just
like to say thanks for the website, and the encouraging way that you are trying
to make a living from promoting a sustainable lifestyle - sooner or later
we have got to stop living off the planet's capital, and live within our income.
From the UK, it is easy to see the US as a reactionary, gas-guzzling, globalizing
monster - it's nice to be reminded that it does include other, sensible and
forward-looking people. Cheers! --Francis
Hall
General
Information
Greenhomebuilding.com E-zine is copyright Hartworks, Inc. 2002. Please feel
free to use excerpts from this newsletter as long as you give credit with
a link to our homepage http://www.greenhomebuilding.com .