Going Brown – A guide to real ‘green’ housing

While the rich go green at great cost, the rest of us can jump on this bandwagon

In the next few weeks, we will be featuring a series of blogs called ‘Going Brown’  inspired by an article by the cheap-ass curmudgeon.

By MICHAEL VAN HALL with additions by Pierre Soleil and pictures from Tony Wrench’s earth house

Michael Van Hall [the cheap-ass curmudgeon] is looking for people who live in low-cost to no-cost housing, by choice, to feature in his next book, titled Shacking Up. When he asked blog readers to send him leads,  he was disappointed with their responses.

He didn’t get examples of housing as featured in the picture above.  He got ‘green’ ’sterile’ ‘fancy’ houses.

Mainstream fancy eco-housing

Van Hall realized that people’s definitions of eco-living did not correlate with his own.

“Why not ? you ask. It’s green, smallish and built with all the latest sustainable building materials. It probably even has a dual-flush toilet or two. So what’s wrong with that?

You’re right, there is nothing wrong with that—as an example of the mainstream’s definition of eco-friendly housing. And yes, it’s probably even LEED certified.

I understand the thinking out there in the “green community.” There are benefits to using all these new building materials. Even though they cost a fortune, they are mostly sustainable.

So go ahead, install a $olar voltaic system to help reduce your carbon footprint. Use all the new technologies available to reduce your damage to the environment and our dependence on fossil fuels. I will applaud you.

By all means, go green. If you’ve got the money and want to live cooped up in a sterile box, go for it. Living in an expensive non-toxic box may be better than living in a cheaper toxic one. I’ll give you that.

Many companies have made it possible to go green and remain pristine. You no longer have to sacrifice luxury to relieve your guilty conscience.

But these companies and all this newfangled stuff they’re selling isn’t what I mean when I talk about low-cost and no-cost housing.

The word green has always stood for money. These days, if you want to go truly green it costs a LOT of money. If you want to make money, just tap into the green market. If you can label it green or natural, people will buy it—at almost any price.

But nobody seems to want to look at the environmental cost of going green. What environmental price are we willing to pay for the manufacture and disposal of those energy-saving solar panels and those big power inverters? How come nobody talks about that? And what about the manufacture and disposal of all those batteries, which are a huge biohazard?

And the hybrid revolution? Have we all forgotten that in the ’80s and early ’90s, we had more than a few cars getting over 40 miles per gallon and some over 50—all without hybrid electric power plants using all those batteries that we are going to have to dispose of. (The Honda Civic even had an EPA rating of over 50 m.p.g.—and it got it.)

Hybrid cars rely on electricity for manufacture, and whilst they might save oil, they wont be of much use when there’s no electricity.

Real eco transport is using a bicycle or a horse and cart which can also be used for ploughing. When the oil runs out even hybrid cars will sit rotting on the metalpile.

I could go on and on. But why? Is there a better way?

Yes, there is a better way. Go brown!

Come on, fellow greenies. It’s time we changed our colors. You don’t have to spend a lot of green to go brown, and going brown is about as green as you can get.

What is going BROWN?

It’s a hand-built house made of thick earthen or stone walls that never need paint. Why use those new, expensive, NO VOC paints when you don’t have to use any!

How to build a Low Impact Roundhouse An amazing book by one of the early pioneers of brown housing, Tony Wrench

It’s south facing windows with the right amount of overhang to let in the sun in the winter and keep it out in the summer.

It’s a rocket stove or box stove for cooking and heating and water piped from a stream to the makeshift kitchen

It’s living on wood from the forest for building, heating and cooking.  Gathering wood takes up time, but so does working at a sh***y job that you hate in order to buy electricity. Gathering wood provides good honest fresh-air exercise

It’s an outdoor shower in the garden—the plants will love it.

It’s creating your own food forest wherever you can, even on the eaves of the house

It’s a composting toilet—not the plastic ones you buy that hook up to electricity, but the hole in the plank with the straw or sawdust in the bucket nearby so you can turn your poo into fertilizer.

Brown housing is earthen floors, handmade windows, doors and … well, you get the idea.

I just can’t call these things green anymore. No one knows what I mean when I use that word. So I’m going to start calling them brown. Maybe it will catch on, and those of us who love this kind of thing will start referring to it that way.

Now, back to what I have been asking for. I want some examples of brown! Brown houses, brown people—people who have chosen to go brown because they believe in brown living and brown being.

Brown leads wanted by the cheap-ass curmudgeon

I want the real stuff, like Tony Wrench’s Low-impact roundhouse [featured in most of the pics in this postiing]

Now there’s a solar voltaic system I can get behind. They will never have to re-paint this house.

Look at those beautiful, natural, uncut timbers.

Compost Toilet – The compost toilet decomposes the humanure over two years to produce compost for the fruit trees and bushes

See how un-smelly and earthy a compost toilet is

There is no food in the world that will taste better than that which is cooked over an outdoor flame or on a woodstove that also supplies ample heating

If you want more detail on the design and building of this house, please check out ‘Building a Low Impact Roundhouse’ by Tony Wrench, available from Amazon.

How to build  a Low Impact Roundhouse

Look at this gorgeous winter light bottle wall insert

The low-impact roundhouse is a great example of going brown. I need to know about more houses like this one. If you run across any Web sites, have pictures of your own or, better yet, you are living the brown lifestyle, I want to hear from you. E-mail Michael Van Hall cheapasscurmudgeon@gmail.com.

Spread the word—go brown!

Michael Van Hall has been making magic out of dirt and whatever happens to be lying around since 1998. He is the author of The Cheap-Ass Curmudgeon’s Guide to Dirt

© 2010, Pierre Soleil. All rights reserved but relaxed Pierre Soleil We like to pass on the word so YOU are welcome to use this document in accordance with the Creative Commons license. That is, you can tweet, facebook, repost, excerpt and even adapt it so long as you don’t pretend it’s yours for commercial purposes