houses down. Some straw houses.have survived since the early 1900s. To build one doesn't require skilled construction workers, just 6-7 volunteers a day. Benefits of plastered straw bale construction include less transport, low cost ($10/sq. foot), high .insulation values (R-values of 26-160), superior noise protection, less labor costs and actually more fire resistance than conventional building materials. ·Currently, this valuable housing material is mostly wasted every year after harvest because people are not aware of its advantages. If you decide to look into tfus option, make sure you don't use hay since it doesn't work. This vid~o shows how to build a straw bale home on a concrete foundation with a traditional roof. Drawings of necessary tools and a wall plan arB included. Unfortunately, the video doesn't show, the plastered house, only the straw bale structure. So for more reading, check out Plastered Straw Bale Construction: Super Efficient and Economical Buildings, by Bainbridge & Steen. Available for $10 from The Canelo Project, · HCR Box 324, Canelo, AZ 85611. Also A Straw Bale Primer, by MacDonald, $10 from S.O. MacDonald, PO Box 58, Gila, NM 88038. Public Therapy Buses, Information Specialty Bums, Solar Cook-a-mats & Other Visions of the 21st Century. By Steven Johnson. 1991. 128 pages. $7 .95 + $2.00 S&H. St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Aye., NY, NY 10010. Visions ,ofthe 21st Century is filled with wild and entertaining drawings of both serious and playful inventions. While many of the ideas are overly high-tech, there are some low-tech ones that make sense, arid overall, the book is useful for sparking the imaginati<?n! My favorite vision is the Pedal Train, (left), though a normal bicycle is wonderfully visionary and improvements to bicycling infrastructure (bike lanes, bike parking, showers, etc.) would hopefully take precedence in the normal world. Other visions include a portable gym locker with shower, a briefskate (skateboard that is also a briefcase), the Green community, protected public sleeping areas and public accommodators (toilets and phones by bus stops). Toward Sustainable Communities: A Resource Book for Municipal and Local Governments. By Mark Roseland. 1992. 350 pages. Free from National I ........,....,,.T.... e!lh~-... ~ ----lOWARD SUSTAINABLE COV\MUNmES Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, J Nicholas St., Suite 5 20, Ottawa, Ontario KIN 7B7, Canada. (613) 992-7189. Toward Sustainable Communities is about real, functioning projects and initiatives for an environmentallyhealthy future. These visionary yet practical models wiJl enlighten and guide city policymakers and citizens· alike. For promoting sustainable transportation, Roseland describes the successes of on-street preferential parking programs for car-pools, and the free or inexpensive transit fares in Portland and Seattle. Hotels in ' Hamburg and Frankfurt, Germany, decrease the negative impact of tourism by giving free transit passes to guests. Toronto improves female bus ridership by having buses stop anywhere along their routes after dark so women have shorter and safer distances to wall\. We learn that giving up a second car and using public transportation breaks a $3,000/year · habit and saves between $150 and $250/month. One Maryland county makes this clear by providing mortgage insurance at increased borrowing power levels for single car households. Some practic.al land use initiativ~s Roseland uncovered include a Melbourne study showing it's cheaper for cities to pay developers to build' near downtown cores than to pay the infrastructural costs of sprawl. Portland, Oregon understood the advantages of high qensity, nodal planning strategy that emphasized energy conservation. Now 43% of commuters · to downtown use the bus and.light rail. One way to encourage diverse density is to try a program similar to Kingston, Ontario's low~interest loan program for converting vacant commercial space to residential. Other cities are saving energy and money lost to the heat island effect of black asphalt (about $2.6 billion lost in US) by mixing asphalt with lightcolored sand. Or Ii ke Sacramento, an electric company can offer energy efficiency home conversions that are amortized over 15 years, so your electric and water bills are lower than before the conversion. Recycling is one way to reduce urban .landfill space problems, but reuse is the approach that treads even more lightly on energy resources and landfill space. Minneapolis requires food eaten on restaurant premises to be served in reusable containers, and this has had a tremendous positive impact One German town even has a dishmobile which is equipped with 600 plates, silverware and equipment for washing dishes at public festivals and private events. Also, some German natural food stores refuse to sell packaged goods, so customers must bring their own containers; they ~'}ve tons of space in the landfill that would be t-aken up by non-biodegradabJe food containers. Garnering information from these successful programs will make simjlar changes in your own community easier. RAIN Summer 1994 Volume XIV, Number 4 Page 53
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz