When acid rain starts to fall, mutant scorpions attack and marauding wackos try to eat your flesh you don’t want to find yourself holing up in a ramshackle farm house or an abandoned flat in NYC or London. You’re going to need a practical yet functional fortress to weather the decades of madness until the dove returns with the olive branch in its beak.
To build said fortress you’ll need to consider security, self-sustainability and endurance. The answer to all three is, you guessed it, hemcrete. (Start bugging your representatives to legalize the growing of hemp now, so you can start construction before the end comes.) Hemcrete is a bio-composite building material made by mixing specially prepared hemp shiv with a lime-based binder (Montana Hemp Council Magazine, Vol. 4, 2011).
Basically, this means hemcrete is made from cooked lime and ground up hemp stalks. But the result is as zombie proof, fire proof, mutant bug proof, bullet proof, mohawk proof dwelling. [Read more…]
Sustainable building is an albatross for a world stranded in the sea of global warming. So many of our resources are tied up in the construction, maintenance and operation of dwellings. And all too often these dwellings have been seen as our combative ways to keep the outside world at bay. Nature, a pox on thee!
Welcome to the Green Porch! Yep, this is my blog. It's a meeting place for those interested in the art of conversation, story, community and sustainability. Hey, its a big porch. There's room for all of us, so pull up a chair and I'll pour you a drink (adult beverages after 2:00pm, which where I'm from is also known as the watermelon hour).