Alan Boye BS MA - Sustainable Compromises: A Yurt, a Straw Bale House, and Ecological Living

Our Sustainable Future

Series Editors

Charles A. Francis

University of NebraskaLincoln

Cornelia Flora

Iowa State University

Tom Lynch

University of NebraskaLincoln

Sustainable Compromises

A Yurt, a Straw Bale House, and Ecological Living

Alan Boye

University of Nebraska Press

Lincoln and London

2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

Cover photo iStockphoto.com/anandoart

All rights reserved

Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Friends of the University of Nebraska Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boye, Alan, 1950

Sustainable compromises: a yurt, a straw bale house, and ecological living / Alan Boye.

pages cm.(Our sustainable future)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8032-6487-8 (paperback: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8032-6502-8 (epub)

ISBN 978-0-8032-6503-5 (mobi)

ISBN 978-0-8032-6501-1 (pdf)

1. Sustainable livingVermont. 2. Boye, Alan, 1950Homes and hauntsVermont. 3. Ecological housesVermont. 4. Ecological housesDesign and construction. 5. SustainabilityPhilosophy. I. Title.

GE 198. V 5 B 69 2014

640.28'6dc23

2013044111

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Jim Wilson, Jim Exten, and Mollie and Phil Freeman

The future of all life, including our own, depends on our mindful steps.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Essential Writings

To those devoid of imagination, a blank place on a map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac

Contents

List of Illustrations

1. What I Lived For

2. Sustainable Compromises

3. Where I Live

4. Water

5. Design

6. Foundations

7. El Sol

8. Economics

9. The Beautiful Tree and Other Disasters

10. The Amoeba

11. The Straw That Broke The

12. Finances

13. Collaboration

14. Artifacts

15. Solitude

16. Visitors

17. Thick Skin in a Winter of Discontent

18. Spring

19. Higher Laws

20. Postscript: Mistakes Were Made

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Illustrations

Sustainable Compromises

Linda

What I Lived For

In the late spring months of 1973 I built a yurt on a high desert plateau thirty-five miles to the southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and began living there alone. I had just finished teaching fifth grade in the small, mostly Hispanic village of Tesuque. I was almost dead-dog broke, skinny as a rail, and barely twenty-three years old.

I didnt have any idea what to do with my life beyond finding a place where I could live as cheaply as possible. Then friends told me about some land they had found that was for sale for next to nothing. Never mind that it was thirty-two acres covered mostly in cacti and sand or that it was a mile away from the nearest road, never mind that I knew nothing about checking deeds for proper ownership, much less anything about building a structure where a person could survive in such a placeI bought it. Besides, it looked like a good place to try out my self-romanticized vision of the starving artist: some half-crazed genius bent over his cabins only table, working under the light of a single kerosene lantern, while coyotes howled outside below a pale desert moon.

Soon, with the help of a few friends, I built an odd, cupcake-shaped dwelling on the land. I lived alone there for a little over a year before the rattlesnakes, the loneliness, the black widow spiders in the outhouse, and my own restlessness made me a sojourner in civilized life again. But for that year, I lived as simply as a human being could. I lived without running water, electricity, and refrigeration and survived only on the meals I prepared from a three-month stockpile of canned goods, rice, and beans. Granted, without my youthful blindness to the fragility of life, I would never have attempted such an experiment in voluntary poverty. My regret is that that same youthful blindness prevented me from properly learning the lessons of that lonely plateau until years later. Once I left the desert, my life became one of modern comforts and conveniences. I forgot nearly everything I had learned about living simply.

Flash forward thirty-five years. My wife and I had been living in New England for decades. As we approached retirement age, we started talking about selling our beautiful but drafty and inefficient Victorian house. We wanted a smaller place, one better insulated to withstand Vermonts long cold winters, but also something we could afford on the modest fixed income we were anticipating. Wherever we lived, we also wanted it to be as simple and as environmentally sound as possible.

We wore out a couple of real estate brokers trying to find a house that suited usthe houses were either too far from town or poorly insulated, either too expensive to fix up or too large. The idea of building our own home started to grow on us. The more we talked about it, the better it sounded. We decided it was possible to build a small, inexpensive, and environmentally sound house for less money than many of the houses we were looking at.

I had been an English teacher for most of my life; I knew next to nothing about designing a house or about sustainability. I hadnt thought about such things as the proper depth for a foundation or the problems of human waste disposal since I lived in the yurt. It took us three years to build, from our decision to do so until our first night in the house. The labor was often torturous, brutally hard on both body and spirit. At one point, we were on the brink of financial ruin. At times, our marriage was on very thin ice, and it is a miracle we still have any friends. Butwith the help of those friendswe built an off-grid, energy-efficient house, using mostly locally produced materials, and made it a comfortable and affordable dwelling.

Oh, one other thing: the house we built is made of straw.

What I learned from those two attempts at living in better harmony with the world is the subject of this book.

To reach the land where I built the yurt, you drove far into the high, lonely desert south of Santa Fe. The road wound through miles of low, rocky hills the color of straw, speckled with the pale green of pion and juniper trees. Several desolate miles past the New Mexico State Penitentiary and several desolate miles before you got to my land, you came to a multicolored mailbox with the word Cornucopia painted on the side. Three or four couples, an assortment of children under the age of ten, and a handful of dogs, cats, and chickens lived here in a sprawling combination of old adobe buildings, sun-sheltering A-frames, and three or four ramshackle wooden sheds. My friend Bob, who gave me the plans for the yurt, lived at the small commune with his young wife and their infant son. Everyone who lived there shared chores and common space and tried to agree collectively on any issues they faced. Cornucopia survived for only a few years. After a fire destroyed the A-frame, people went their separate ways.