We all know that building a house takes time. At least, building a proper house takes time.
When you realize that most homes build nowadays have a life expectancy of 20 years (which is shorter that most mortgages) it makes sense to put a bit more effort into building your home than the average contractor.
Hence.., it will take some time to build a proper house.

That is how one gets to decide to put up a temporary home, preferably right next, or behind the house to be build. And that’s what we’ve been busy with the past weeks.

Buying a Home

What we decided upon is a couple of units and I’ve just been told that is a very generic phrase, so allow me to elaborate on it.

With (much) bigger projects, contractors tend to build temporary offices near the project, which is obviously convenient. These offices can be made out of one or two ‘units’, up-scaled to anything the contractor needs. Even two stories with 10 or more units per floor.

These units are also used for temporary living and that is what we choose to use. All other options seemed to expensive, to small or to impractical.
Eventually, we bought the units from a couple in Limburg (Holland). They’ve been living in them for 2 years while building their home. Our challenge was to find a way to transport our new home for 220 km to Chenogne.

Moving a Home

At first you might think this is easy, which it wasn’t, but in the end.., it wasn’t so bad. It just took a lot of hard work, and a very, very long day. But, you cannot just put these units anywhere.., a bit of groundwork has to be done beforehand. And Niels (you remember Niels right?) and a friend of his offered to do the work for us.

Moving Earth

Now, this was to be done the week before the units were to be moved. We wanted to place them as quickly as possible and the couple whom we bought the units from had a permit deadline.

Anyhoo.., the boys worked for three days in bad weather and had to level the piece of land where the units would be placed and make a 70 meter long path for the trucks to drive on.
Laila had a freaky week in which she had to rent groundwork equipment, book a hotel and buy gravel for the path.., all in French (sort of) and pretend she was working at her regular full time day job.

The Longest Day

As far as I can remember we never had a day quite like this.
We got up at 4 AM, because we had to be in Limburg at 7 AM. Then 6 hours of loading and off loading the units,  a 2.5 hour drive, waterproofing the roof and forgetting to eat and drink our lights turned somewhere at 8 PM.

written by Niels

So, I went back to tire pounding. My muscles from the Zwolle Earthship job were wearing thin and so was my skin. Blisters on day one, calloused over on day two, torn up again by day four, but only then because we were rained off the site on day three. Welcome to Scotland, where the good people of Greenhead Moss Community Nature Park in Wishaw, near Glasgow, are building a community centre Earthship. Mikey Reynolds style. And frequent readers of this site should know how the Four Elements people feel about that particular style.

Why still building Earthships

So, why am I still building Earthships? (And why do Rogier and Laila still want an Earthship builder to build their house for them?) Well, because I like building them. I might stress and rant about the sloppy insulation, the ridiculous amounts of cement used, the waste of perfectly good glass and aluminium and yes, also about the horridly unskilled volunteers getting in my way, but I still like building them. I love the hard work, the sweat you produce and the undisturbed sleep you get. Wake up, eat, shuffle, pound, level, tamp, get some more food in, repeat once or twice, take a swim, cook and eat together, play some ultimate frisbee and fall asleep. Repeat for twelve days straight. Consider yourself lucky you didn’t play rugby at night.

And I love the people I work with. My colleagues are crazy enough to do this job and that should be enough said. Besides the ones I knew from Zwolle I got to meet some of the first European tire pounders, involved in the Fife, Brighton, Normandy and Brittany Earthships and they clearly know what they’re doing. At some point we were well fed by volunteers and the three of us must have slapped up 25 tires within an hour. Hammers weaving in and out, the three of us locked in some arcane and violent dance. Marvelous. May I mention I swung the heaviest one at 10 lb.?

Volunteers

I even like the volunteers (a little). When there’s just a couple I can actually take them along and teach them something useful. And when there’s a lot I can appreciate the speed they bring to the site. Without pneumatic hammers, bigger diggers and conveyor belts, getting up the walls with just a small team is a bit of a physical and psychological struggle.  “Aardewerk is paardewerk” is what the dutch have to say about moving dirt around, but they probably don’t know about Glasgow’s alcoholic rehab plan. They (and we) were quickly renamed the chain gang, but thanks a lot guys. Seriously appreciated.

Kicking Mike

But most of all, I like the fact that we’ve kicked Mike. Yes. The Guru’s out. No more hit and run buildings. No more ‘looks good from Taos’ remarks. We’re open to criticism and change now. We’re all experienced Earthship builders, so we know about it’s pros and cons, but we also know about other styles and techniques. We’re ready to mix and match. We know about rainy climates and drainage. Instead of telling clients how damn lucky they are to be allowed to spend hundreds of thousands on the presence of Mike, hallelujah, we’re telling ourselves how lucky we are to be building peoples well considered ecological dreams.

And that’s also what I keep telling myself about the Four Elements House.

I was visiting the greenpeace website and came across this article. I would like to know what you think about this!

They seem like a perfect solution, making fuels from plants to help cut carbon emissions. The simple promise of so-called biofuels has led to many companies and politicians being swept up in the hype. However more and more research is revealing many current biofuels are a false solution.

Over the last few years biofuels seem to have enchanted governments, car manufacturers and many others who must cut emissions to prevent dangerous climate change. US President Bush, hardly a fan of climate solutions, suddenly started promoting biofuels to make it appear he was taking action to cut emissions. Car manufactures have seized on biofuels as the perfect get-out-of-jail free card. Under pressure, especially in Europe, to meet efficiency targets they have consistently missed for the last 8 years, the manufacturers lobby convinced EU politicians that biofuels were the answer.

Many biofuels targets have been hastily proposed in the last two years for political expediency or to deflect attention from the efficiency targets car manufacturers fight tooth and nail against. But behind the hype, evidence has been mounting that many biofuels might even be worse than fossil fuels.

Put very simply biofuel problems fall in to 3 areas:

• Biofuels made from industrial food crops can produce more emissions due to large fossil fuel use in their production.
• Biofuels from other crops such as palm oil are often grown on land which has been cleared of tropical rainforest, generating huge amounts of carbon emissions.
• Increasing demand for biofuels means land used for food production is taken over driving up the price of basic foods.

Seriously suspect

We have been arguing for years that the environmental credentials of biofuels are seriously suspect. As we pointed out in our ‘Cooking the Climate‘ report into palm oil, a growing source of biofuels, this is anything but a clean energy. We uncovered how the production of palm oil is driving the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforest and as a result, C02 emissions are spiralling.

Despite these big issues biofuels seemed to be on a roll. The Philippine government passed a new law forcing car owners to use a certain amount of biofuel when they fill up their cars, whilst the EU pledged that biofuels should make up 10 percent of transport fuel by 2020. And other countries, like the UK, have fallen for biofuels. The UK government are pushing through a law that will demand all transport fuels contain 5 percent biofuel by 2010.

However recently there have been signs that the politicians who first fell for biofuels might be belatedly realising they have made a big mistake.

The EU Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas, has thrown the EU’s biofuel target into disarray when he stated that it would be better to miss the EU target on biofuels than to trash the environment and push more people into poverty. Speaking to the BBC, Dimas admitted that – “we have seen that the environmental problems caused by biofuels and also the social problems are bigger than we thought they were. So we have to move very carefully”. He went onto claim that the problem would be solved when he unveils tougher environmental and social standards next week. But the fact is without really strong criteria the EU target is effectively redundant.

To top it all, the UK’s leading scientific body, the Royal Society, has released a report warning that biofuels risk failing to deliver significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from transport, and could even be environmentally damaging.

Is the tide turning?

These events signal that the tide is possibly turning against biofuels and that politicians are just beginning to wake up to the dangers of mass biofuel production.

If we are going to use biofuels, we need to make sure that they are part of the solution, not contributing to the problem. That means not tearing up the rainforests to make way for biofuel crops just so that the car industry can continue to drag their feet on the issue of improved fuel efficiency.

Real energy solution are clearly outlined in our Energy [R]evolution report. Truly sustainable energy technologies such as wind, solar and geothermal energy coupled with massive energy efficiency increases can deliver climate friendly, clean and secure energy. For transport there are significant efficiency gains to be made before biofuels should be considered.

Governments would do better ensure cars are far more fuel efficient than wasting time and resources on promoting false solutions.

While stumbling on the net I found a website from plenty magazine. They posted an article on a new kind of rooftop wind turbine which I think is worth taking a look at.