Picture it! Eco-Sense Update - December 2007

The Future
Imagine your neighborhood 500 years into the future! Imagine a landscape of small village communities scattered over the landscape, pockets of local cooperation and sharing, expressed as clustered small homes surrounded by fields and forests. Tendrils of trails and light rail link one community to another. The homes, warm and cozy, have snuggled into the landscape after being there for several hundred years with edible native plants and vegetable gardens lining the shared courtyards and trails. On the roofs there are gardens where rain water seeps through mini-watersheds to the storage tanks in the ground. Off in the distance you can see the local energy plant with windmills and solar collectors. Imaginative creations occupy the inside of the homes, protected by thick walls with windows allowing natural light to fill the room and warm the earth floors storing this thermal energy for later in the night. Each home is an artistic expression of all its inhabitants. These efficient and simple homes are filled with basic items, creativity and love…not stuff.

Interestingly there are no cars and no vast stretches of blacktop, people command the walkable common areas and fields. A young girl picks dandelion leaves from the side of the house while her brother is observing the salmon in the river.

What else might we see? Perhaps, we don’t even use money. We all work at something that we are good at and enjoy. In fact, we don’t even call it work. Vacations don’t even exist as we feel no need to escape from our lives. Trade and sharing occur within our community. There is no poverty and crime is quite rare. The community controls the social norms.

What is interesting about this picture, besides the optimism, is the realization that something similar to this is where we must be in order to live sustainably. This beautiful mesh of simplicity and high tech. provides for a comfortable healthy life. If you removed the new fangled gadgets (trains and energy plant) and envisioned it with First Nations, you would see a sustainable community that had existed for thousands of years. We have a lot to learn and need to take the best from our indigenous peoples and our modern society. Get over our egos and cathartic expressions of disconnection from our communities and our planet and just say no to stuff.

If this sort of a picture of a sustainable future is so desirable to us why don’t we just do it? What the hell are we so scared of? If anyone has an answer please share this with us.

How do we get here?
Sadly on our current path, we may miss our chance to get here smoothly; many less fortunate will involuntarily give their lives through disasters, war, starvation, disease, slavery, cultural obliteration; all of which we are seeing today. We are wasting the wisdom that was offered from the early stewards.

We will only get to this place if we form a clear vision of where we want to be and then have a reality check of where we actually are. From this we can produce a road map fueled by our excitement for the dream.

Focusing on the problems in our society will only get us deeper into this mess. Trying to solve individual problems just results in temporary half fixes. We need a new way of thinking that includes excitement about our future.

Hopefully one of the homes in this picture is our cob home. I wonder what changes it will witness well beyond our time; will it still be sharing the land with the frogs, woodpeckers, and chocolate lilies?

Our vision
Our new future started three years ago, albeit a vision spurred by a future of dire consequences. With this vision of what we wanted we told others of our dreams and our goals. We flirted with the idea of teaching others about learning to live a reasonable life, avoiding the consumer driven paranoia that segregates our societies spawning labels as undeveloped or developed. We thought that combining three generations together could make it happen, becoming the model of social norm of ages past. With a natural no waste, self sustaining home, powered by what ever nature threw our direction - wind, rain, snow, or sun, our dream has come true.

Payoffs
Last December with the completion of our workshop we started planning for the house. Winter allowed the digging of the entire infrastructure by hand (pick ax, 8 foot pry-bar, and shovel). We learned the skills and earned the muscles to build foundations, research sustainable alternatives and negotiate those to the inspectors. We experimented using common (eco)sense to create insulated strong walls. We played with mud, we learned about BTUs, U values, R values, kilowatt-hours, net metering, LEDs. We filled our walls with cedar and clay, straw and clay, pumice sand straw and clay, and even some formaldehyde-free recycled fiberglass insulation.

This December we are not quite in the house, but for the first time in quit a while it seems so close to completion; and the payoffs are being felt. Not financial payoffs, but personal ones.
The personal payoffs come from pride. We have always stated we are just two regular people, no special skills… and yet just by participating to be a part of the solution in our own way, we have met hundreds of great people, all them peeking in on our bucket as Ann points, smiles and continues yapping at them “What’s the worst thing that can happen?”, and inspiring many. This is a payoff.

We have felt privileged to have the professional and media exposure; awed by seeing officials, architects, engineers and politicians swayed to see the feasibility of it all. We have been rewarded with new friends. And, we have needed every bit of the friendship and positive feedback as the personal side has been tough.

We have been split between values and what lifestyle is meant to be/wanted to be, and what the environment can truly allow it to be. We have cognitive dissonance over what we expect from ourselves as we learn more, see our façades, and work to reprogram our brains. We can truly say we have been more self critical than all our critics combined, and feel we have done a fine job, and done it honestly.

We could go on to update you about the accomplishments of the month, new inventions, crazy ideas, or rant relentlessly about all that is shit. Instead we want to just say thanks to all those that have supported us, our efforts, and the bigger picture. We hope the holiday seasons that are upon us (whatever they may be) are safe, filled with the best they have to offer and most importantly simply sustainable, without all the stuff.

Stuff
If you haven’t yet checked out this website, www.storyofstuff.com, set aside 20 minutes for a very practical and entertaining view of pretty much everything we rant about… even good for kids!

Publicity
December was a busy month in the publicity department and we are honored to have been selected by the Royal BC Museum to incorporate our home into an exhibit starting in March looking back over 150 years of colonization. Our cob house (along with two other ‘green homes’) is the final exhibit inspiring a new future of stewardship. We hope that our attempt at sustainability earns the respect of cultures of the past and the future.

The Knowledge Network spent another day here for the short documentary airing sometime this Spring. They will be here for one more shoot sometime in early January.

The A-Channel also showed up on short notice and spent three hours getting their own private tour. The 2-3 minute clip aired a couple weeks ago on the evening news. Our friends Valerie and Stephan taped it for us (no TV here). It was very well done and covered many aspects of our home. We expect they will come back for our community flush event (details in last months update on our website).

The Goldstream Gazette also ran a front page article updating the western communities on “the Ultimate Green Home”. It wasn’t bad but there were quite a few technical errors in the article.

And finally Gord chatted with a journalist writing an article for “Granville Magazine” about sustainable energy systems. This article is due to come out this Spring.

Earning and Income
All this spring publicity will be great to help us kick start our tour season. The bank account is getting low and it’s time to start earning a small income to continue with our dream of living a reasonable life.

Website
Changes are coming soon to our website with lots more content. We have a photo site with Flicker where you can watch a slideshow with or without all the photo notes. http://www.flickr.com/photos/eco-sense/sets/72157600040396645

Warm regards and wishes to all,

Why do chickens have to be in cages? Because humans don’t care about the chickens. When you get to be goverment in B.C. Please make it illegal to: put chickens in small cages ,trim their wings and c lip their beacks . It was good that McDonalds increased the sizes of the cages. But…they are still to small for the chickens. Imagine if you coulden’t move. The chickens in McDonalds can’t move. The chickens other places are squished. Why don’t all of us make it so chickens can run freely. Joke: What tipe of love do we put in non free rang chickens? Answer: love for money.

Thanks. Bye.

Emily [daughter of Ann Baird] Age 7 (almost 8 )

The ultimate green house
December 12, 2007 | | | |

Highlands couple’s building project has rewritten the rules on environmental innovation and the building code

By now, dozens if not hundreds of engineers and architects have toured the unusual house that Gord and Ann Baird are building atop a hill in Highlands.

Constructed with what is essentially mud and reclaimed timber, its roof is rigged with rows of solar panels and thermal vacuum tubes. On sunny days it will feed electricity into BC Hydro’s grid. It’s the first building in North America with load-bearing walls made from cob — a mix of sand, clay and straw. A zigzag network of tensioned cabling makes the split-level house seismically sound. All its grey water and waste is recycled or mulched into soil.

The list of clean, green innovations seems endless. And yet the one thing that impresses any given tour group is the compostable toilet — in an outhouse, across the yard from the actual house. Apparently there’s nothing like a loo that replaces the six-litre flush with a scoop of sawdust.

“The amount of PhDs though here is unbelievable,” says Gord, a former autobody shop owner and self-described “born-again environmentalist.”

“Some people come because of the cob house, some because of the grey water or solar energy systems. Always the inevitable happens — people learn something they hadn’t planned on, and they are hooked,” he says. “What hooks most people is the compost toilet. We get e-mails from people about putting compostable toilets in their homes.”

Popularity of the toilet is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it illustrates a new way of thinking about home building and sustainable lifestyles. The design and materials selection will shrink the building’s carbon footprint for its life-cycle, which Gord expects to be hundreds of years.

“It’s a combination of low-tech and high-tech,” Ann says. “But ultimately we’re building a house of mud that people have been doing since the beginning of time.”

The eco-house idea crystalized out of the Bairds’ concern with climate change, the desire to live in harmony with the environment and the fact that Ann had lived in an off-the-grid house on an island near Salt Spring. With a “why not?” attitude, they pooled their savings, quit working and moved their kids and Ann’s parents into trailers on the property in 2006.

Construction itself began in May, with hopes to finish before the new year. The novelty of trailer camping has long worn off. “Damn right I’m ready to move into the house,” laughed Gord.

The house, as Gord says, is a “living laboratory,” with dozens of nuanced design features. Pumice was added to the cob, which allows the walls to breathe, and increases strength and insulation. Cob itself is fire resistant and repels bugs. It will have a green roof to regulate temperatures and water. The solar panels feed battery packs, which gives them four days of autonomy from BC Hyrdo in a power failure.

Further, the rooftop thermal vacuum tubes will heat captured rainwater for a sterilization system that avoids tapping the Highlands aquifer, although well water is available if necessary.

Ann designed a greywater filter using an underground tub of rocks, leaves and worms that naturally break down fats and food bits. The water will be used for the orchard.

“We use all rainwater storage for irrigation. We will never draw from groundwater for domestic use,” Ann says. “We’re trying not to have any waste. Water is so valuable, but you’ve got to (filter) it properly otherwise it could be pathogenic.”

Building a truly green house has its engineering hurdles, but the Bairds didn’t have to invent any new technology — it was more of adapting what exists in novel ways. Meeting building codes, though, was another matter.

The Baird’s house is so far from the norm, Canadian Standards Association policies and building codes don’t exist to deal with load-bearing cob or the solar-thermal heating system.

“These exact components were not legal to use,” Ann says. “It really opened up a can of worms.”

“A big challenge was the solar-thermal heating system,” Gord added. “The biggest challenge was learning how to approach the code properly.”

After consulting with the chief building inspector for Ottawa, and presenting the Baird’s plans to Greater Victoria inspectors, Highlands building inspector Chris Leek came up with safety guidelines under the code’s “alternative solutions.”

The Bairds must demonstrate the heating system won’t catch fire and the potable water system can’t be contaminated.

“We did it though the alternate solutions in the code, where it’s up to the owners to demonstrate compliance to meet safety factors,” Leek said.

Compliance hasn’t been a problem, and Leek plans to show the Baird’s house to building inspectors across Greater Victoria. The Bairds and Leek are even developing a workshop for building inspectors on the cob house.

Getting home insurance was also a headache. Since cob buildings don’t exist in Canada, their insurance agent had to use actuarial tables from the U.K., Gord says, based on medieval homes. “Our insurance is based on 500-year-old houses in England.”

When finished, the Bairds estimate their 2,150-square-foot home will cost about $236,000, including labour. People are surprised, they say, that the family won’t have to give up creature comforts — they’ll have fridges, freezers, baths and most basic appliances (except for television).

The house is wired with ethernet cabling for the Internet, and they are participating in a study on ambient electromagnetic frequencies using their house as the test subject.

“We tried so many new things, we involved the inspectors, were very public about the house,” Gord says. “We hope to inspire others to experiment.”

editor@goldstreamgazette.com