Northwest Corner of Nauhaus Prototype
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Well, one wall anyway.
Yesterday Ian and Mario from Lime Technologies came out in the rain to help us install some Hemcrete, starting the first home in the United States to be built with the product.
The rest will be installed after the Eco Panels go up.
Click here to view the entire Nauhaus Prototype Construction Chronology.
Click here to watch the full interview with Ian Pritchett.
This is the tenth in a series of articles for the New Life Journal.
By: Clarke Snell
Are you going insane like me? Do you ever sit in a parking lot and imagine the forest that used to be there? Do you ever look at the eastbound river of cars while you’re flowing westbound and ask yourself, “Where are we all going? Why can’t they stay where they are and do what I need to do there, while I stay where I am and do what they need to do here?” In the deep of night while the bedbugs bite, do you ever ask yourself, “What do rabbits know that I don’t?”
Yes, I must be crazy. So crazy that I’m completely baffled by how we humans come to find ourselves in the present world of our making. I’m so bent that to me we seem to be the only critters on the planet that can’t go with the flow. You know: live, eat, have babies, die, become compost for plants that are in turn eaten by our babies…repeat cycle. Is it my demented ramblings, or is our obsession with experimentation and childish competition grinding us to dust? Here’s my call for entries to all scientists, priests, freaks, and super-models: What the hell are we doing here?
My favorite theory about the existence of human life on planet earth is that we were seeded here by extraterrestrials. Sort of like bees making honey, they knew that we’d bring all the raw materials of the planet to the surface, process them into useful compounds and units like plastics and alloys, then concentrate them in piles (cities, landfills, etc.) where our masters could then easily harvest these goodies for their own use. If this process eventually killed the worker drones (us) or adversely effected the lifecycles of the planet itself, that would be of no concern. The point was efficient resource extraction. Though admittedly ridiculous and based on no facts (sort of like our present foreign policy), this theory has a compelling internal consistency and does offer an explanation for certain strange human behaviors such as packaging small amounts of water in plastic bottles. At the very least, it allows us to feel like we’re doing a good job.
Whatever the origin of our shenanigans, we’ve become so intransigent that the planet itself seems to be trying to throw us off. That’s the image that scientist James Lovelock used in an interview I heard recently. He said that humans have become an invading virus on the organism that is planet Earth. Global warming is the response, the fever attempting to combat the virus. The earth, though, is in the latter stages of its life, and therefore, like any senior citizen, may not be able to survive the fever.
Gawd. The more it all sinks in, the more I understand Disneyworld: Attention Citizens, just don’t think about it and watch the big mouse with the white gloves… I mean, how do we stop being a virus!?
Well, I’m no genius, but one thing I can do is pay attention. When you do that, you start hearing a lot of good ideas. Here are a few: Let’s not drive lettuce in from California when it’s being grown right here. Let’s not drive wood in from Oregon when it grows right here. Let’s not drive paint in from who knows where when it’s made right here….What?
That’s right, if you live in the distribution area of this magazine, you have access to locally made, non-toxic, environmentally conscious paints, masonry sealers, and wood finishes. The company, based in Asheville, is called Earthpaint. It’s founder, Tom Rioux, started his career in painting at the age of 14. After many years as a professional painter, Tom become deathly ill. His kidneys, liver, and lungs were failing and he had horrible arthritis. After 3 years of chemotherapy and major diet and other lifestyle changes, Tom pulled through. He was convinced that it was paint that almost killed him, so he decided to dedicate himself to researching and developing better paints.
After literally more than 1,000 failures and a major investment in lab time and other entrepreneurial necessities, Tom has developed a line of finishes that are truly amazing. They are biodegradable; made up of non-toxic, native ingredients from plants, minerals and other basic elements. Except for a single ingredient in one product, all of Earthpaint’s materials are harvested within an eight hour drive of Asheville. Most travel less than four hours. What’s more, they not only compare to modern synthetic finishes in price, but in many cases outperform them. For example, Earthpaint’s Interior Clear Skies wall paint carries a full 25 year warranty!
Talking with Tom about paint is a true inspiration. Not only because he’s fun and really knows what he’s talking about but because, well…you’re talking to him. He’s not just a billboard, a label, or a trademark. He’s your neighbor telling you real-world, no BS stories about the reality of paint. (Ask him about VOC’s, for example, if you want to hear a real nail-biter with a surprise ending.) Tom’s business is family-owned (no pesky stockholders demanding his soul) and truly local which allows his intentions to be personal and passionate. It also makes him accountable to us. If we have a problem, we can talk to him about it. Such a set-up will by definition be “green” to the max. The rationale won’t be based on barely meeting provisions in compromised government regulations vetted by corporate interests, but on the simple and obvious credo that you don’t soil your nest.
To me, that’s the transformative power of building a truly local economy. Earthpaint’s success is our success. If Tom fails, we all loose. Perhaps our only problem is that we don’t really believe that we’re all in this together. As long as there is a mythical Bahamas to retire to, then people will continue to soil their bed before they sell it to someone else. What we need is more Earthpaints. They are out there trying to be born. All they need is our help. It’s a no-brainer, people. Buy, sell, eat, drink, build, live, and die local…unless you want some two-headed ten-eyed aliens coming down here to steal plastic from our cold dead hands.
For more information about Earthpaints, visit their website www.earthpaint.net) or call them at 828-258-2580.
Clarke Snell, Managing Director of the Nauhaus Institute is pictured with Cliff Sterns, HUD Field Director, and Gary Dimmick, HUD Community Planning and Development Director
The Nauhaus Group presented our West Asheville prototype and mixed-use Brevard project at a recent meeting centered around the new Obama Administration’s “Sustainable Communities Initiative”. Regional Directors of key federal agencies including HUD, the EPA, DOT, and USDA carpooled to Asheville for a 5 hour meeting marathon on October 29th. Greg Sills of BluEcon Project Management and Philippe Rosse of Eblen-Kimmel Charities organized the soiree to introduce the feds to the “Asheville Experience”.
Sitting in this meeting, I was once again blown away by how much amazing brain power and passion we’ve been able to cram into this tiny mountain community. The line-up included the Asheville Design Center’s large-scale urban development project for the redesign of I-26; the City of Asheville’s thoughtful Riverfront Redevelopment project; the Nauhaus’ rad model for carbon neutral living; and a (there’s no other word for it) kickin’ presentation from Asheville Go!, our local green workforce readiness initiative. DeWayne Barton closed Go!’s spiel with a passionate spoken word performance that blew me away. (Damn, I love this place!) Maybe the best summary of the Asheville vibe came during HUD Regional Director Chris Stearns opening remarks when he apologized for wearing a suit.
To me, the meeting seemed like a real success. Joe Minicozzi, Urban Planner for the Asheville Design Center, called it a “first date” and I think most people who were there are looking forward to the second. Personally, I love doing these presentations because we always get an enthusiastic response. But fielding intelligent, interested questions from people who really have the resources to make a difference, steps it up a notch. I’m looking forward to see where these connections lead.
By: Clarke Snell
This is the first in a series of columns written for New Life Journal on the quickly propagating though illusive animal known as “green building”. These days it seems like there is such a frenzy to do “green building”, that few of us slow down long enough to really say what it is. I’ll remedy that problem right off. For me “green building” grows out of the broader concept of “sustainability”: the simple idea that the way of life we choose must not lead to circumstances that prevent that way of life from continuing. Bees have got it down, rabbits can do it in their sleep, but we humans just can’t seem to wrap our big brains around it. In order to even start moving in the direction of sustainability, I feel that we need to create buildings that balance five often conflicting traits:
Five Elements of Green Building
(1) Low Construction Impact. Building is almost always an initially destructive act. Land usually has to be at least minimally cut and reshaped, holes need to be dug, and materials refashioned to serve the building. A green building minimizes its construction impact on the local ecosystem through careful design that considers the building site as a partner rather than an inconvenience. It minimizes its impact on the ecosystem of the planet by utilizing replenishable materials that cause the least amount of environmental destruction in their use.
(2) Resource Efficiency Through the Life of the Building. After a building is built, people move in and use it. This hopefully long relationship usually constitutes the main period of impact that the building will have on the planet. Heating, cooling, lighting, bathing, and watching re-runs of “Survivor” all require resources that are often non-renewable and polluting. A green building creates the daily indoor environment for its human inhabitants in the most efficient, non-polluting, and renewable manner possible.
(3) Longevity. Creating a building requires natural resources such as construction materials and fuels as well as human labor and ingenuity. The longer a building lasts, the longer the time span before the natural environment will be asked to ante up resources to repeat the process. A green building, then, is designed to have a long fruitful life.
(4) Nontoxic. It’s a true testament to our dire straits that this one even makes the list. As bizarre as it may sound, we have to be very vigilant if we want to create a modern building that is nontoxic to its inhabitants or the environment at large. Okay, y’all, it’s pretty simple: a green building does not poison its inhabitants or the environment.
(5) Beauty. To be simplistic (give me a break, it’s just a short column), a sustainable system is one where component elements work together to create a self-regulating, self-maintaining cycle. The complex tangle of relationships that tend to create such systems in nature develop slowly over eons. Everything on the planet earth developed, changed, and adapted as part of a sustainable system.
Flash forward to today. We modern humans find ourselves out of the sustainability loop. What happened? Simply put, we left home. Once we cut ourselves off from a deep, cultural connection to a specific place, an exact climate, a complex matrix of relationships that slowly developed over time, we left the basic source of our sustenance, our sustainability. Now we are left with the daunting task of trying to rebuild that delicate connection to the web of life.
Hey, don’t look at me. I can’t begin to imagine the delicate negotiations we’re going to have make to get back in the club. It does seem to me, though, that to create a sustainable lifestyle, we need to stay put more of the time and derive more of our social, physical, and spiritual sustenance from our own backyards. For example, it takes a long time to build healthy soil to grow good food; to build a network of friends and compatriots that will be the basis for community; to nurture the trees and other plants that will be part of a house’s cooling strategy. These things simply won’t happen if we aren’t sufficiently seduced by our buildings to stay with them for the many years it will take to turn them into integrated places that nurture both their inhabitants and the environment. A green building, then, needs to be deeply and personally beautiful to its inhabitants, a place that is as hard to leave as a lover and as unthinkable to neglect as your own child.
From Theory to Practice
Okay, we’ve defined the task, let’s build some stuff! Unfortunately, we live in a place called the real world where things are never that simple. The fact is that the five elements I’ve outlined are often in conflict with one another. For example, to save energy using passive solar design on a forested site, you need to create a larger construction impact by cutting more trees to access the sun. On the other hand, cob, a mixture of clay soil, sand, and straw, can have an incredibly low construction impact, but isn’t the best insulator. Cob buildings, then, will often use more energy to heat, than comparably sized buildings using other wall systems. Even the seemingly no-brainer concept of building without toxins is harder than it sounds. When it comes to drain pipe, for example, you’re probably going to use PVC. It’s a non-renewable petrochemical product and highly toxic dioxins are released in its manufacture, but I have yet to find a truly practical alternative.
In the end, “building green” is a deeply personal process in which you make judgments as to how a building will best merge with your own personal mode of survival, be it computer programming or subsistence farming, to create the most beneficial impact on your environment, both local and global. An ideally “green” building, then, must be a very specific thing, matching your idiosyncratic personal needs with the fabric of your exact local environment. It’s a daunting challenge, yes, but what more important goal have you got on your to do list? In the coming months, I’ll be throwing in my two cents worth as to how you might go about creating that strange, beautiful animal known as the “green building”.
Perhaps Team Nauhaus should choose a project to let our idle office computers support.
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a non-commercial middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world.
We are presently using a hemp insulation product (Tradical Hemcrete) in our Nauhaus prototype project , but we can’t currently manaufacture hemp-based insulation in the US. Luckily, this issue is getting more and more media play. Here’s a very positive little piece from CNBC.
Industrial Hemp fun facts:
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Dan Phillips helps people build houses for themselves out of mostly salvaged materials.
:: Groovy Green
This short film by Gus van Sant, based upon an essay by William S. Burroughs, hilariously presents a more satisfying and pleasant way to live. Last night, a few Nauhaus comrades and friends tried the method of simply re-doing anything that gets clumsily screwed-up, and it was very successful. The well-executed delivery of the ice cream made it even more delicious. Thanks, Joe!
DE is a way of doing. It is a way of doing everything you do. DE simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most relaxed way you can manage, which is also the quickest and most efficient way, as you will find as you advance in DE.
Last Friday while buying coffee, I was told by Jamie at the West End Bakery that he saw me on TV attending a job fair. So I went online to figure out why.
And here’s their story about the event:
Forbes.com rates Asheville as the sixth best metro area in the nation for business and careers.
One business sector poised for major growth locally is the green energy field.
Alternative energy companies are about to get a major chunk of stimulus money.
And Thursday, President Obama announced an extra $800,000 dollars for the City of Asheville to hire people for energy projects.
“I think it’s the greatest thing to come down the pipeline,” said Judy Dinelle of 84 Lumber.
They met to exchange ideas and talk about how to use Stimulus money.
Many expect to get some of the money by July.
To find out how to apply for jobs, contact the Western North Carolina Green Building Council.
