I tend to have cycles of environmental activism. Usually what happens is that I’m enthusiastic for a fairly lengthy period of time, but then something will come up that discourages me, and my activity decreases for a while. Eventually however, my interest and enthusiasm revive and I get going again after my hiatus. I’m coming out of one of my lulls now, and I’m thinking further about things that are possible to do to the house (Note to Colin: Don’t worry… these are just *possible* things that we could *theoretically* do to the house…yeah….). One idea I’ve been kicking around is replacing our front yard (which is very small) with an earthship greenhouse. I’ve linked to this site before, but I’m linking to it again because it has a lot of useful information on retrofitting. The nice thing about the greenhouse only route is that I think it would be possible to set something up that would have fairly conventional asthetics, so it wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb in our neighbourhood. If all went well, it might also be financially self-supporting, since it would significantly reduce the heating costs of the house. We’re very fortunate to have a south facing front yard.
One of the things that puzzles me about the greenhouse aspect of the
earthship design, though, is where people get the glass for their
greenhouse, and what sort of glass it is. I might contact some people who
have built earthships in Ontario, like Tom
Wolf or Pat Potter. Here’s a report by an
architect on the Potter’s earthship.
posted at 14:11 on Sun, 10 Dec, 2006 |
path: /living
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