[Sdpg] Jan.17, 7:30pm, author of "Little House on a Small Planet" speaks at WorldBeat Center

[SDECC & Permaculture Center]

LITTLE HOUSE ON A SMALL PLANET
Slide Show & Booksigning with
Author Shay Salomon and Photographer Nigel Valdez

Wednesday, January 17, 2007, 7:30 pm
WorldBeat Cultural Center, 2100 Park Blvd.
Free (donations welcome)

Information:  San Diego Permaculture Center
(619) 255-6111, email: sdecc at igc.org

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 a 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 WorldBeat Cultural Center, 2100 Park
Blvd., in downtown San Diego, on Wednesday, January 17, 7:30 pm.  The event
is free and donations welcome. The San Diego talk is co-sponsored by the San
Diego Permaculture Center, the Ilan Lael Foundation, Peace Resource Center
of San Diego, and the WorldBeat Cultural Center.  It is the first stop in a
Southern California speaking tour organized by the South Coast Permaculture
Network.  For more information about the San Diego event, please call (619)
255-6111, or email sdecc at igc.org.  For info on the Southern California tour,
email margie at 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."

-end-

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San Diego Economic Conversion Council (SDECC)
San Diego Permaculture Center
sdecc at igc.org
http://sdecc.igc.org