How do you care for people and the planet via the built environment?
Bill Mollison’s definition of order is: “A system that produces more than it consumes.”
Most modern housing consumes far more than it produces. Many people refer to their house as a “money pit” because of the expense of upkeep and repairs. Many of us pay to have landscape maintenance done and to have the home cleaned. We use chemicals and mined materials to clean it, make our lawns grow, paint it, carpet it and heat and cool it.
The built environment is responsible for 40% of greenhouse gases caused by human activity and produces substantial amounts of a number of other forms of pollution.
Embodied energy is a significant form of pollution in the built environment. It includes all of the energy and resources it took to build the structure. A “life cycle analysis” would reveal what that includes.
For instance, if a structure is made of wood, embodied energy would be the energy it took to grow the tree, to harvest, transport and process it, to transport it to the site, and to build it. This would include the waste stream created and the energy needed to clean that up. Wood mills use highly toxic chemicals that are released into the air and water and may travel long distances through watersheds.
As permaculture designers, we seek ways to reduce resource extraction, and the emissions. How much less embodied energy and pollution would be created if you built a structure from materials you gather on your own land (like wood, or stone or clay)? This was how people have built housing in most places in the world for thousands of years.
Additionally, people built their home themselves, sometimes with help of neighbors, and with mostly free materials, thus having no debt or mortgage, though sometimes they had to lease the land. Often, shelters were built in a few days.
A Quincha Mejorada being built - this is a traditional home in Latin America made from small trees or bamboo, mud, and straw. These homes are built by the community, often in a single day or a few days.
Music helps keep the workers happy while others cook food for them.
These houses can be very nice!
Only in modern times have we used highly toxic products and procedures, at great expense (most of which is not fully paid - the damages from waste pollution, for instance). In the past, when people have had to work their whole lives for someone else in order to have shelter, and even then struggled, it was called serfdom. Now, it’s considered normal.
Most people are not going to build their own home from clay, though clay homes are delightful to live in. And this isn’t the most efficient way to address housing at this point because so many structures have already been built. Thus, we include a section that will cover retrofitting existing structures, with a focus on reducing energy needs and increasing yield.
One advantage of reducing toxicity and pollution in homes, and looking for ways to increase the yield of the building itself, is that it can be much less expensive to live in such a home. One could even make money from one’s property instead of sinking so much of one’s lifeblood into it.
We’ll address permaculture solutions in the built environment from several angles, in the context of the three permaculture ethics, care for the planet, care for people and care for the future.