http://www.greeninventor.org/strawjet.shtml

I’m loving this new blog that savages the vacuous marketing behind the condos that are springing up all around Vancouver like mushrooms in cow shit:

condohype [via Rob Cottingham]

First impressions are important and Origin’s is one of timeless elegance, thanks to West Coast-inspired architecture and enduring, natural-looking materials like timber, brick and Hardie plank siding.

“Natural-looking materials?” Oh no they didn’t. Oh no they did! You heard it here first, friends. Fibre board is now the new oak.

Mike asked me to post a list of the books I have that are related to homesteading and homebuilding, so here it is. Note that the connection of some of these to homesteading is extremely tenuous.

• From Eco-Cities to Living Machines
• The Foxfire Book
• Creating Alternative Futures
• Guns, Germs and Steel
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• The Sierra Club Family Outdoors Guide
• Allen & Mike’s Really Cool Backpackin’ Book
• Stalking the Wild Asparagus
• The One-Straw Revolution
• Noah’s Garden
• Home Remedies
• The Dandelion Celebration
• Back to Eden
• Square Foot Gardening
• Bucky Works
• Whole Earth Catalog (Last, Next, Essential, and Millenium editions)
• Whole Earth Review (several years worth of back issues)
• Paper Houses
• Home Work
• The Dome Builder’s Handbook
• Dome Notes
• The Healthy Home
• Ancient Inventions
• Human Scale
• The Zen of Seeing
• The Book of Visions
• Solar Living Sourcebook
• Possible Human
• Archery Handbook
• Green Belt Cities
• Energy for Man
• Small Spaces
• Living on the Earth
• Intentional Communities
• Earth Sheltered Community Design
• The Underground House Book
• Earthship
• Everyday Life in Early Imperial China
• Trades and Crafts of Old Japan
• Native Funk and Flash
• Dome Magazine back issues
• Home Power back issues
• The Secret House
• Critical Path
• Biomimicry
• Tools for Conviviality
• Deschooling Society
• Amusing Ourselves to Death
• Lateral Thinking
• Nine Chains to the Moon
• Raising Your Spirited Child
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
• Little House in the Big Woods (and all the others in this series)
• The Herb Book
• Architecture Without Architects
• The Forgotten Art of Building a Stone Wall
• Box Beam Sourcebook
• Transmaterial (and see the related blog)
• Every issues of Make Magazine
• Radios that Work for Free
• Radio Shack Getting Started with Electronics
• Synergetics
• Boy Scout Pioneering Handbook
• Making Things
• WorldChanging (also see related blog)
• Serious Play
• The End of Education
• The Ingenuity Gap
• Fab
• Zome (a construction toy)
• Years of backissues of Utne Reader
• The Utne Reader Almanac

Some of these books I haven’t read yet. Some, like the Ingenuity Gap, are on my reading shelf to get to soon. There are some which are full of brainstorming positive ideas for solving real problems in the world (WorldChanging, The Book of Visions, Utne Reader Almanac, Whole Earth Catalogs). Looking at this list it might appear that I’m really into domes and earth-sheltered homes, but that’s not really the case. I’m leaning much more towards straw bale construction these days, but most of the books I’ve read on it have been from the library.

Speaking of books that I don’t have, I would like to recommend a few:

• Hurricane Kitchen
• Shaping Things
• The Chair (for the short form, see this essay: What’s wrong with the chair?
• Passive Solar Energy
• Gentle Architecture
• A Pattern Language
• The 20-Minute Gardener

Of the rest, some I would recommend with all my heart, some I would not. But that will have to wait for another post.

Real Estate Roller Coaster - Google Video

Land:

• http://www.bchomesforsale.com/
• http://www.okhomeseller.com/
• http://www.landquest.com/
• http://www.bc4sale.ca/
• http://www.niho.com/

Offgrid Power:

• http://www.gaiam.com/realgoods/
• http://www.backwoodssolar.com/
• http://www.energyalternatives.ca/
• http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001011.php Listeroid (Bio)Diesels (Start here… but also see: http://www.utterpower.com/ and http://www.utterpower.com/jeffm.htm)

Lodging/Housing:

• http://www.sustain.ca/ (Ontario)
• http://www.wildernesscabin.com/index1.htm (BC!)
• http://www.yurtco.com/ (BC!)
• http://www.yurts.com/ (Oregon (I think))
• http://www.weekendwarriorcabins.com/ (and http:///www.robinsonplans.com/) (Saskatchewan)

Cohousing/Ecovillages

• http://www.yarrowecovillage.ca/
• http://www.cohousing.ca/

Fears of Canada-Mexico superhighway driving U.S. critics loco

Are North American governments secretly conspiring to build a “NAFTA superhighway,” four football fields wide, from Mexico to Canada, to bypass regulatory controls and whisk goods swiftly to market?

looks superficially like this:

U.S. Protests Mexi-Canadian Overpass

In addition to facilitating trade between Mexico and Canada, the overpass is expected to increase tourism in both nations by as much as 60 percent. Boasting hundreds of restaurants, gas stations, and hotels, the state-of-the-art overpass will render it unnecessary for Mexicans or Canadians ever to touch U.S. soil when traveling to and from their respective homelands.

I think I prefer The Onion’s vision.

1. Regional Catastrophe
2. Human Die-Back
3. Civilization Extinction
4. a. Human Extinction-Engineered
5. b. Human Extinction-Natural
6. Biosphere Extinction
7. Planetary Extinction

Nice to have a vocabulary to talk about what we’re up against. Cheer up, that disaster on the news is only category 1.

John Robb’s Weblog: Coffee and communities

&ellipsis;the center of gravity for resilience against the panoply of systemic threats we will face in the future. Not the home/family (too small). Not the nation-state (too big). The community. In short, your success over the long run (for both you and your kids) will be based almost entirely on how resilient your community is to disruption.

This directly relates to what I’m hoping to achieve with the co-op I live in and the ideas I want to hash out on this blog.