The premise is to give people what Reynolds calls the six points of sustenance that they need to stay alive: Comfortable shelter without fossil fuel, electricity, water, food, treatment of sewage, and treatment and use of garbage.
I’m building a house out of “garbage…”
There are now earthships in nearly every state, costing from from $200 to $400 per square foot to build. They follow similar guidelines from the Earthship academy, a course which explains water systems, solar and indoor farming. They use about one-sixth the power of a regular house and are made from at least 40% recycled materials. They can also be climate resilient.
"I'm walking down my hallway, barefoot, picking bananas and spinach, and I'm seeing on TV people waiting in lines in cars for a sack of food, and mothers taking their kids out to their cars to turn the heater on so they can keep them warm. And I'm saying, we need to get people to know that this is possible and available. It's not just rhetoric and a pipe dream and a concept. The building I'm standing in front of is evidence that this is possible. Today, right now," said Reynolds.
They added a dishwasher and panoramic sauna, while still using the same water to hydrate and clean themselves as well as water their garden and flush their toilets. As much as they say the house protects and nurtures them, they also see a big potential return, so they may sell it, asking just under a million dollars.
This is me sitting outside a house I built from garbage. Well "house" might be a strong word. It's more like a celebrity-endorsed shack but, yes, Vanilla Ice loved it. I'll get to that in a moment.
It all started when I decided I finally wanted to buy a house, but I couldn't. I don't know what houses cost where you live, but right now in Melbourne the medium house price stands at $740,000. For that, you get a little something you hate in some distant, mean-spirited suburb where it's always windy and your friends never visit.
So I didn't buy a house. Instead, I got angry because the only people I know who own houses bought them with money they inherited from dead grandparents. People literally have to die for my generation to buy a house, and I don't want people to die. But I don't want to keep renting forever either.
What other options are there though? And that's when I had an idea. Why don't I just build a house out of free stuff? What if I found some land, found some wood, and just built a house? FOR FREE.
I convinced my friend Jim to help me drag bits of chipboard into the nature reserve, and then we nailed them onto a couple of upright posts. Jim is that kind of guy. Other friends were concerned that we weren't architects or builders, or that we didn't get council approval. But those guys didn't understand. Building houses is easy. You just have to not think about it.
Mr Ice's first concern was whether I'd acquired the proper building permits. "The county is gonna bulldoze it if you don't have the paperwork," he warned me. After that I think he realised it was a joke and was happy to just shoot the breeze. In fact, if there's one thing I learned about Vanilla Ice, it's that Vanilla Ice is nice.
My favourite moment was when he told me that owning my own house was cute, but it wouldn't necessarily make me happy. "It's not about the house," Vanilla said. "It's about the people you're with." Then he paused before adding, "You know that."
The thing that Vanilla Ice and I both recognised was that it would be funny to fuck with status. That is, dudes with houses are cool dudes, and girls like cool dudes. Except that my pad looks like a sort of high-end chicken coop, so I was fucking with status. Jade got it too, which I guess is why she warned me about being nice. Also I'd say her body language was somewhere between enthusiastic and unsure.
These are my parents, Ian and Amanda. One of the reasons I started this thing was Mum. She often wants to talk to about houses, mostly asking me if I've started saving for one. I always tell her no, but that had obviously stopped being a problem, so I figured I'd get them over for dinner.
We had fish and chips and rain trickled down the walls. I used the opportunity to talk about why they thought buying a house was a good idea, given how meaninglessly expensive they are. "Because renting is only an option if you work forever," replied Dad. "One day you might want to retire. Who knows what rentals will be worth then, but paid out monthly it'll be more than your superannuation."
The Sanitation and Environmental Services Department collects residential garbage and provides commercial dumpster service within the city. The city consists of two collection zones which focuses on solid waste services for our residential customers.
Solid waste/rubbish resulting from tree cutting contractors, construction, demolition or renovation, including do it yourself projects, is not house rubbish, and it is the responsibility of the property owner, contractor and/or tenant to remove.
To stay abreast with our holiday schedule and alternate garbage collection days, please refer to the City of Starkville website or click the link below to view the holiday schedule.THE SANITATION & ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICESDEPARTMENT WILL BE CLOSED ON FRIDAY,DECEMBER 23, 2022 AND ON MONDAYDECEMBER 26, 2022 IN OBSERVANCE OF THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYTUESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2022 THERE WILL BE A CITYWIDE COLLECTION.(ALL GARBAGE WILL BE COLLECTED)
After everything I managed to create a mere 30 pounds (14 kg) of trash. I read a statistic that to build an average house in the USA, 8,000 pounds of trash is created. That is many dumpsters full. That is over 250 times more trash than I created in building this house.
Building my tiny house was both exciting and overwhelming. I had some of my happiest moments in recent time and some major crashes. It was emotional and mentally trying. Building a tiny house is a commitment and a real challenge. If you are looking to build a tiny house I would encourage you to not take it lightly, especially if you are using repurposed materials. But at the same time, have fun! It is an incredibly rewarding and enjoyable process with the right mindset.
I am a garbage collector, racist garbage. For three decades I have collected items that defame and belittle Africans and their American descendants. I have a parlor game, "72 Pictured Party Stunts," from the 1930s. One of the game's cards instructs players to, "Go through the motions of a colored boy eating watermelon." The card shows a dark black boy, with bulging eyes and blood red lips, eating a watermelon as large as he is. The card offends me, but I collected it and 4,000 similar items that portray blacks as Coons, Toms, Sambos, Mammies, Picaninnies, and other dehumanizing racial caricatures. I collect this garbage because I believe, and know to be true, that items of intolerance can be used to teach tolerance.
The Mammy saltshaker and the "Nigger Milk" print are not the most offensive items that I have seen. In 1874, McLoughlin Brothers of New York manufactured a puzzle game called "Chopped Up Niggers." Today, the game is a prized collectible. I have twice seen the game for sale; neither time did I have the $3,000 necessary to purchase it. There are postcards from the first half of the 20th century that show blacks being whipped, or worse, hanging dead from trees, or lying on the ground burned beyond recognition. Postcards and photographs of lynched blacks sell for around $400 each on eBay and other Internet auction houses. I can afford to buy one, but I am not ready, not yet.
I was 10 years old when Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed; we watched the funeral on a small black and white television in my fifth grade class at Bessie C. Fonville Elementary. All my classmates were black; Mobile was proudly, defiantly segregated. Two years later, in search for a cheaper house, my family moved to Prichard, Alabama, a small adjoining city that was even more segregated. Less than a decade earlier, blacks had not been allowed to use the Prichard City Library -- unless they had a note from a white person. Whites owned most of the stores. Whites held all the elected offices. I was part of the class that integrated Prichard Middle School. A local television commentator called it an "invasion." Invaders? We were children. We fought adult whites on the way to school and white children at school. By the time I graduated from Mattie T. Blount High School most of the whites had left the city. When I arrived at Jarvis Christian College I was not naive about southern race relations.
My college teachers taught the usual lessons about Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. Dubois. More importantly, they taught about the daily heroism of the maids, butlers, and sharecroppers who risked their jobs, and sometimes their lives, to protest Jim Crow segregation. I learned to read history critically, from the "bottom-up," not as a linear critique of so-called great men, but from the viewpoint of oppressed people. I realized the great debt that I owed to the blacks -- all but a few forgotten by history -- who suffered so that I could be educated. It was at Jarvis Christian College that I learned that a scholar could be an activist, indeed, must be. Here, I first had the idea of building a collection of racist objects. I was not sure what I would do with it.
In 1994 I was part of a three-person team from Ferris State University that attended a two-week workshop at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. The conference, sponsored by the Lilly Foundation, was devoted to the liberal arts. The charge to our team was to introduce "diversity" into the general education curriculum at Ferris State University. I traveled with Mary Murnik, a colleague, to all the local antique stores. Colorado Springs is a politically conservative city, not surprisingly, there were many racist items for sale -- some vintage, many reproductions. I bought several segregation signs, a Coon Chicken Inn glass, three racist ashtrays, and many other items. I also bought several 1920s records, all with racist themes, from a dealer who tried to talk about "the problem with colored people." I wanted the records; I did not want the conversation. John Thorp, the other member of the team, and I spent hours planning a strategy to convince the Ferris State University administration to give physical space and money to a room that would house my racist collectibles. It took several years but he and I were successful. 2ff7e9595c
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