Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
mobile home. And that's still $50,000, $60,000, and you have a
house or a shelter that is going to cost you extreme amounts of
money during its life because it's not insulated well, it's not
pointing in the right direction. On the other hand you can build an
earth bag house like we did for around $4,000. And it stays cool
in the summer, doesn't need AC, you just think about the direction
of the sun, and I think it's a no brainer. I mean it's economically
smart, and it's a way that you can live, even if the power is shut off.
TRIP: You didn't really build the entire house for $4,000, did
you?
MORGAN CARAWAY: Yes. Earth bag building is very cheap
because really the price of the bags is one of the main costs, and
wood, for the roof, was another main cost. But we got all our
windows and doors at Habitat for Humanities that we would come
across. A great place, by the way, for building materials.
TRIP: What about power, and plumbing, and all that? I mean,
that stuff is expensive.
MORGAN CARAWAY: Well we use the Humanure system, are
you familiar with that?
TRIP: Yes.
MORGAN CARAWAY: We use the Humanure system, and it's a
great system, there's a book about it that I suggest to everyone
called The Humanure Handbook available from amazon.com, all
the major book sellers have it. And he says, it's crazy what our
current system is, which we flush away our waste with fresh
drinking water, and in the process lose the organic matter in our
waste and we ruin the drinking water. So it's not a very smart way
to deal with it, so we use the Humanure system which doesn't
stink like some regular composting toilets do. For electricity we
just have a very small solar set up, 300 watts of panels.
TRIP: Wow, you're living very simply, aren't you?
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