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Texas Hobbit House: A Small, Handmade Treasure posted by Robyn Lawrence Jul 23, 2011 10:03 am filed under: green home decor, healthy home, inspiration, materials & architecture, earthen home, green home, hand-built home, handmade home, healthy home, inspiration, small home Add to FavoritesTell a FriendSharePrint DiggRedditCare2StumbleUponmore 90 comments Of all the houses I visited during my tenure as Natural Home editor-in-chief, the first one holds a special place in my heart. I visited Gary Zuker's hand-built cob cottage-built for $40,000-in 1999. Natural Home named it our "house of the decade" in 2009, and the house continues to capture the imagination of everyone who sees it. Gary, a University of Texas computer engineer, had no carpentry experience when he set out to build a small, inexpensive weekend getaway and eventual retirement home on 2 acres of wooded land, just up the hill from Lake Travis outside of Austin, Texas. Austin's resident sustainable-building guru Pliny Fisk, co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, helped him build a home out of modified cob known as Leichtlehmbau, a lightweight mixture of straw and clay. "Anybody can do this," Gary realized. "It's simple." After poring over drawings of medieval straw-clay cottages in ancient texts at the university's historical library, Gary pulled together a straw-clay recipe based on historical documents and modern-day innovations. "Real cob is mostly earth with straw as a binder," he explains. "Leichtlehmbau, a German term for light straw-clay, is a legitimate extension of it. You add more straw and use only clay to cut down on the amount of earth and increase insulation." Gary bought 250 bales of straw at $1.50 a bale from nearby farmers. He had 6 cubic yards of blue clay, which a gravel company was hauling out of a local pit, delivered for $25. He found more than 100 recipes for exterior plaster used to seal the clay and straw, including ev

Given how valuable space is in New York City, the city's rooftops are strangely empty. But a proposal from the city's planning department could change that by making 1,200 acres of commercial rooftops available for urban farmers to open greenhouses across the city. City law imposes restrictions on how tall buildings are allowed to be in different areas, which is one reasons why rooftops stay empty - developers often build to the maximum height possible. The planning department's proposal would allow buildings to add rooftop greenhouses above regular height restrictions. And according to a study from the Urban Design Lab, that would mean 1,200 acres of empty, flat rooftops would be eligible for green penthouses. Besides the promise of fresh, city-grown vegetables (and fresh city-grown jobs), creating greenhouses up on these roofs has another benefit for New York. Rooftop greenhouses will be required to incorporate rainwater collection and reuse systems, which will help the city mitigate the pressure that big rainstorms puts on the sewer system.

"But if the community gardens, CSAs, farm-to-school programs and sustainable family farms in the Food Movement are so great why isn't everyone doing it? The simple answer is, because the rules and institutions governing our food system -- Wall Street, the U.S. Farm Bill, the World Trade Organization and the USDA -- all favor the global monopolies controlling the world's seeds, food processing, distribution and retail. This should come as no surprise, the "revolving door" between government and corporate food monopolies is alive and well, and goes back decades. But it means it's unlikely that the Food Movement's alternatives will ever become the norm rather than the alternative fringe -- unless the Food Movement can change the rules and institutions controlling our food. To do that, the Food Movement needs politicizing."

Two years ago, Forbes predicted that by the year 2018, 20 percent of the food consumed in U.S. cities will be grown in places like this. It's safe to say that's almost certainly not going to happen. Right now, urban-grown produce represents a minuscule slice of the food system. But there are several plausible scenarios that could make such food more commonplace in the city kitchen of the future. Several of these scenarios are growing more likely by the day. If energy prices spike, your average grapefruit's 1,500-mile journey to your fridge could make local food seem cheaper by comparison. Droughts are becoming more common, and soil-free hydroponic agriculture uses a fraction of the water of conventional farming and can easily be set up in urban environments. And there's always the unforeseen Black Swan event: World War II "victory gardens" made urban farming a temporary reality for millions in the early 1940s.

Global food prices will more than double within 20 years as a new age of crisis forces the collapse of our broken global food system, said Oxfam today. The international development agency said Europe is sleepwalking as the world enters into an unprecedented and avoidable reversal in human development.