BOOK SIGNING TOUR& SLIDE SHOW TOUR Little House on a Small
Planet with author Shay Salomon and Book Photographer Nigel Valdez
San Diego
Shay Salomon will be selling her book and giving a Slide Show/Talk
. Below is a list of locations for the tour below in Los
Angeles Area Jan20-21
Jan 20 Sat 10am Los Angeles David Kohn Audubon Center at Debs
Park:
4700 North Griffin Ave.Los Angeles, CA 90031 (323) 221-2255
Sustainable Los Angeles Lecture Series!
Special Two Part Lecture and presentation:
Free Urban Permaculture Design Course followed by Talk and Slide Show
Presentation:
"LITTLE HOUSE ON A SMALL PLANET Talk and Slide Show with
author Shay Salomon & Photographer Nigel Valdez
Contact David Kahn <info@sustainablehabitats.org> 1-323-667-1330
Jan 21 Sun 8pm LA Ecovillage, 117 Bimini Place, Los Angeles 90004 (1
block east of Vermont just south of 1st St) ,Lois Arkin
crsp@igc.org 213/738-1254 $10-$15 (sliding scale okay)
Little House on a Small
Planet
Slide Show & Booksigning Tour in California
with
Shay Salomon and Photographer Nigel Valdez
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 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.
Tour organizers
For Updates on Tour contact Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
margie@sbpermaculture.org
www.sbpermaculture.org 805-962-257 also check Shay Salomon
Website
www.littlehouseonasmallplanet.com Go to either Website for tour
dates in other communities Jan 17 / Feb 8 2007 San Diego to Arcata