SANTA BARBARA PERMACULTURE NETWORK
Presents:
Little House on a Small Planet
Slide Show & Booksigning with
Shay Salomon and Photographer Nigel Valdez
Monday, January 22, 2007, 7:45 pm
Santa Barbara Public Library, Faulkner Gallery
Live in
less space but have more room and enjoy it. Does that sound like a
contradiction? Smart readers will discover that on the contrary, living
small can free up your mind, your wallet, and your soul. With the
cost of living rising, the environment suffering from excessive building,
now is time to scale back. Join the small house movement.
In Shay
Salomon's newly published book, with a foreward by Francis Moore
Lappe, Little House on a Small
Planet (
www.littlehouseonasmallplanet.com)
is a guidebook and an invitation, with floor plans, photographs, advice,
and anecdotes. Discover how to build, remodel, redecorate, or just
rethink your needs. Live close and simple and apply spiritual and
social needs to your material desires. Pockets of people all over the
continent are realizing the benefits of scaling down. You too can build a
joyful, sane life that emphasizes home life over home maintenance.
Little
House is split into three sections; building small houses, altering
existing
houses, and the politics of housing and lifestyle choices. The book is
informative and hopeful, even empowering. Salomon takes a
refreshing approach, instead of focusing intently on the problem of
current housing trends, she provides the data needed to understand them,
then spends her energy on drawing out solutions that each one of us can
choose to follow through on.
In fact,
the politics of housing is a theme threaded throughout the entire book.
Reading news coverage after Hurricane Katrina, Salomon learned that in
Houston, where many of the refugees were headed, 14% of all housing units
(homes, apartments, duplexes, etc) were vacant. Salomon did some research
on how this compares to the rest of the country. She found that in the
year 2000 there were 10.4 million vacant units and 250,000 people
sleeping in homeless shelters. This meant there were nearly 45 homes that
were completely empty per person sleeping in shelters. Salomon asks,
"How is it that we have a housing crisis? Maybe a homing crisis, or
a sharing crisis, but this isn't a housing crisis. "
Shay
Salomon is a carpenter and construction manager who coaches
owner-builders towards a mortgage-free life. She has taught at
least a hundred courses in carpentry, straw bale building, solar design,
and women’s building courses. A cofounder with Greg Johnson, Jay
Shafer, and Nigel Valdez of the Small House Society (
www.smallhousesociety.org),
she wrote Little House on the Small
Planet , which chronicles the small house movement
and offers advice to people who want to improve their life by living in
far less space. The photographer for Little House, Nigel Valdez, chose
pictures of real people on average days in their little houses. Nothing
appears staged. People are relaxing with their kids, their feet up on the
coffee table, or shaving in the bathtub, which happens to be in the
kitchen. Shay Salomon and Nigel Valdez have worked on this project
for 7 years.
The
evening lecture takes place at the Santa Barbara Public
Library, Faulkner Gallery, 40 East Anapamu St, in downtown Santa Barbara,
on Monday, January 22, 7:45-9pm. No reservations
are required, admission donation $5. The Santa Barbara Permaculture
Network sponsors the event. For more information please call (805)
962-2571, or email margie@sbpermaculture.org,
www.sbpermaculture.org.
Quotes about Housing from the book:
“The Union of Concerned Scientists ranks housing
third among destructive human enterprises, just after transportation and
agriculture. But our housing need not be destructive. Again
we can chose ! We can chose human scale, enhancing our connections
with those we love. We can chose eco-scale, reducing our demand for the
kind of energy that is disrupting life now and for future
generations.”
“Construction has some alarming effects on the environment. Forty
percent of all the raw materials humans consume, we use in
construction. Building an average house adds seven tons of waste to
the landfill! New house construction is arguably the single
greatest threat to endangered species, even in areas where human
population is on the decline, animals and plants are threatened each day,
due to the construction of new houses. Might our houses feel more
comfortable if they weren't so destructive.”
“Throughout North America building has been influenced by "green
thinking", and houses have improved, but despite major advances in
insulation and design, the typical house built today requires as much
energy to heat and cool as one built in 1960. Why? Because it's bigger.
House size and location are the greatest determinants of a home's effect
on the environment. The challenge is to build a single family
housing as efficient as a New York City apartment, which, on average uses
a fraction of the energy of a typical detached house.”
<<<
Schedule, Little House on Small Planet
Booktour:
Jan 12 Fri 9-10am & Mon Jan13 9-10am
Radio Interview Sustainable world Radio
www.kcsb.org
91.9 FM Santa Barbara with Shay Solomon
Jan 22 Mon 7:45 Slide Show & Booksigning
Santa Barbara Public Library 40 East Anapumu St Donation $5
margie@sbpermaculture.org 805-962-2571
Jan 23 Tues 7:30 pm Ventura Tues April 25 Art Barn 856 East Thompson Blvd., Downtown Ventura (between Ash and Kalorama, behind Kids & Families Together) contact lynne okun <lbokun@earthlink.net>
Jan 24 Wed 1pm UCSB, Campus, talk hosted by David Cleveland 805-893-7502/2968
cleveland@es.ucsb.edu
Jan 24 Wed 6:30pm Solvang Library 1745 Mission Drive Solvang, CA 93463 (805) 688-4214.Donation $5-$10 Betty Seaman cobbetty@gmail.com, 805-698-3840
other locations in California, please see www.sbpermaculture.org or www.littlehouseonasmallplanet.com for complete list.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Ongoing January:
Cable Channel 21 featuring past permaculture lectures and programs:
People can go online at www.cmac.tv and
search on the Education channel - CH 21- for the schedule too.
(Special thanks to Chris Falcon for her ongoing support of all things sustainable by donating her time to video tape and get these programs posted).
Jan 8 - 9:30 am - Permaculture Solutions
Jan 8 - 11 am - Econest
Jan 9 - 10 am - Econest
Jan 10 - 9:30 pm - Econest
Jan 12 - 10 pm - Permaculture Solutions
Jan 15 - 11 am & 11 pm - Econest
Jan 17 - 3 am (for late-nighters again)& 3 pm - Econest
Jan 19 - 7 am & 7 pm - Econest
Jan 20 - 11 am & 11 pm - Econest
<<<
Resources:
Sustainable World Radio, KCSB 91.9fm, Fridays 9-10am PST (re-broadcast following Monday 9-10am), streaming live at www.kcsb.org
Program includes interviews with many permaculture speakers.
Santa Barbara Permaculture Network Website, www.sbpermaculture.org, has monthly events calendar and upcoming events page for happenings in our region and beyond (national & international courses listed), and links to other organizations in our area.
Arashi Permaculture Listserve: Post and receive announcements of permaculture events in Southern and Central Calif and beyond. Formed after Permaculture Design course in 1997 with Bill Mollison. Sign up for your location, www.arashi.com
Hopedance Magazine, www.hopedance.org, No longer hosts permaculture and natural building calendar, but will sponsor an ad with references to other websites for courses and event announcements.
Permaculture Activist, www.permacultureactivist.net, permaculture publication for North America
Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, www.sbbg.org (10% discount for members)
Bookshop
Carries large selection of permaculture & sustainability books.
Nursery
Native plants available all year, hours,10-3pm daily.
-end-
Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie@sbpermaculture.com
www.sbpermaculture.org
"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to grow." - Anonymous