mind body planet

Yert Crazy

I’m back at home today everyone and I am really missing my former abode in Ithaca. The week was very fun and I am now seriously thinking about it as a place I will look for jobs when I graduate. The only down side to that is that I hear the job market in Ithaca is very hard to break in to. I will certainly keep my hopes up though. For now I am looking ahead to the future, namely the semester which starts next week, and I want to move on with this blog. There is obviously still some run off from my week of fun and sun and so I will be bringing back our discussion of green home building. My friend Jamie who just moved to Ithaca will be the first topic on this discussion actually.

When Jamie was in college he lived for a year in what is called a yert. This was a project as part of his educational experience and he got credit for the experience. Basically a yert is a type of housing that comes from the areas of Mongolia and the steppes mountains. It is a small round house that is designed to be easily broken down and moved. At least that was the way the nomads of the time did it and still do today. What was different about this design was that it was not meant to be moved. This home was made with a green roof, or garden on the roof, it was constructed with very sturdy, heavy wood and metal parts. Though it was different hat that of the nomads, the point was that it was completely unconnected to modern housing. There were no lights in the house and there were no distractions. It was also built in the woods as to seclude it even further from all things civilized. 

This is just one design, but right now there are tons of options when it comes to homes built with the earth in mind. The point of homes like this is really to lower the ecological footprint of the inhabitants and the creation process. This can be done in a variety of ways. Some things like building with recycled materials or from minimally processed materials. Some types of materials like compressed straw bales are being used to compose the walls of homes as they are quite efficient with heat loss and retention. There are also homes being built out of material known as cob, which is essentially cob, clay, and straw. As the days go one the designs for the more high tech ideas increase, but these are options that are much more accessible to those without much money to fund such a project. 

I’m out of time for today, tomorrow we’ll come back with a little bit about a natural resource that is fast becoming one of our most precious natural resources. 

Reducing your Footprint

Every once in a while now, and that is increasing, we hear more and more about something called our carbon footprint. For most people this term can seem a bit vague and maybe even a little bit silly if you don’t have any sort of frame on the issue of climate change. Though there has been a huge amount of consciousness shifting because of efforts by people like Al Gore and all of the environmental crusaders worldwide. For these people I don’t necessarily need to try and inform you of anything because you are out there on the front lines of your issue. At the moment I have been sort of forced out of making any large scale actions on the basis that my schedule is packed full of class and work. I have been sort of forced in to the level of what I imagine to be where most people can function in the effort to reduce their footprint and change their consumption habits. For now I just want to begin my telling you a little bit about your footprint.

If you do anything that burns a fuel or electricity, use products that are manufactured in any way, or make use of any natural resource such as timber, then you have a carbon footprint. A carbon footprint is roughly the amount of energy it takes to sustain all of your habits and daily activities like those I have just stated. By measuring it this way you can see exactly where in the world all of the consumption and pollution issues are really centered. In this country, mots of us has a carbon footprint so large that we use seventeen times more than what is sustainable on this planet. In other words, if everyone on earth consumed as much as the average American, then it would take seventeen earth’s to sustain all of that consumption.  Your carbon footprint is not an extremely accurate number in terms of how much pollution you put out, but it does give great frame of reference. From here we can make decisions about things like reducing our level of waste and even how is the best way to travel in terms of environmental impact. I know personally of several web sites out there online, I don’t want to name any for fear of being considered a sponsor, and they are all usually a free test as to how big your footprint is and they can get extremely particular with the input data.

` Personally I have found that reducing your footprint is not the hard part, what is really difficult is keeping it that way for a long period of time. It seems to be common knowledge around the world that American’s love to consume and it is not just a meaningless stereotype. We all have a strange sort of addiction to things that are wasteful and comfortable. Breaking the habit of consumption is easily shown by taking the average American effort to lose weight. We try hard for a while after making our resolution and then when we hit the target weight we let it all go again and start over. It is a problem with our waistband as well as our environment. Hopefully we can all find the courage, determination, and sense to see that reducing our footprint is a big help for the environment and a great way to be socially active without causing a scene.