Redoing my earthen floor was a major project last fall. But the great thing about natural building is that you just add water to the old floor material and use it to make the new one. But this was still quite a project. Last video I discovered that my light clay straw insulation had disintegrated and turned to compost, so this time I insulated with perlite.
https://www.instagram.com/hardcoresustainable/ https://www.facebook.com/HardcoreSustainable/ http://hardcoresustainable.com
Last winter I had the chance to visit an earthship like none I’d ever seen before. Earthships are living buildings that are adapted to their environment to make use of climate, water, and waste products. When people think of earthships, they usually think of the desert southwest of the US, because that’s where they originated and where many of them are built. In this video we visit an unusual version of an earthship, still off grid, still adapted to its environment, but very different from what you normally envision when you think of an earthship.
On Hardcore Sustainable this week we travel to Gulfport, FL to visit Hummingbird Hideout, an urban homesteading community. It’s not easy to homestead out in the country without close neighbors and usually a family depends on a lot of technology to make their lives easier. Lots of stuff, like your own car, your own truck, your own tractor can cost a lot of money and make dependent on outside sources of income. With neighbors so distant, there is far less opportunity to share technology and resources. As well, a lot of people living in the city don’t how good they have it in terms of access to resources and the efficiencies that sharing with neighbors can bring. It might seem less likely, but there is a lot you can do in a city on a small piece of land to make your life more sustainable and self sufficient.
Folks at Hummingbird Hideout have set up systems to make even life in the city much more self sufficient by sharing with their neighbors and using permaculture systems to get more of their resources on site from the earth and the sky.
In this first of two videos, we get a tour of the systems they have set up at Hummingbird, and in the second video we’ll get a tour of their food forest and native plantings.
https://www.facebook.com/HardcoreSustainable/
http://hardcoresustainable.com
Josh Whiton from Makesoil.org came through St Petersburg, FL last winter teaching classes on community composting, or soil making, as he calls it. He’s organizing an effort to set up neighborhood scale composting worldwide and better connect people to the land and their community. He explains his plans and philosophy around creating a regenerative economy that will restore the planet instead of destroying it.
Join the movement!
The rocket mass heater in Skyhouse at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage was in need of some repairs and improvements. It was at least 15 years old and had always had some issues with efficiency in heating the space it was supposed to. Mark Mazziotti, of nearby Red Earth Farms, was hired to do a total rebuild of the stove because of his experience in building rocket stoves and mass heaters. I happened to find out he was doing the rebuild and asked him if he would help me make a video about the project. It’s a little longer than some of my usual videos, but it’s interesting to hear the thought and planning Mark put into the rebuild.
Mark wants me to add that he miscalculated his estimate of his experience in natural building. It’s more like 15, not 20 years of experience he has.
It gets pretty hot in Missouri during the summertime. And living entirely off renewable energy it doesn’t have to be a challenge to stay comfortable on those 90°F+ dog days. There are simple things you can do to minimize your use of air conditioning–one of the biggest contributors to climate change. Nature has provided us with many options to keep ourselves cool. We just have to make the connections and implement the systems.
https://www.facebook.com/HardcoreSustainable/
http://hardcoresustainable.com
