“Asphalt is the earth’s last crop”
I read that in an article a while back (it’s posted somewhere below, #soilcrisis) and it has HAUNTED me so much!
So my dad was being a butt about climate change and I just did one of those impatient-bomb things and was like: yo, da, everywhere there is a city is a patch that used to be covered in green forests n’shit. So if you think of it that way, the earth is at like, a 60% burn, and generally humans can’t live past 80%, so maybe we work on regrowing some surface-area skin for our girl mother nature, yeah?
And THAT stuck with him. All the facts and numbers had no context, he was of the “humans can’t have that much of an impact” mind, but that stuck. I think because in his life, he’s seen the cities grow and the parking lots get bigger and the rooftops get taller and all the housing developments cut down forests. That was the thing that he’d seen change. Michigan is pretty insulated with the lakes, freak snowstorms in W. Mich have been pretty normal, so it’s difficult to attribute them to climate change when 50 years ago they happened too. Until, of course, you start to point out that it’s not just one, it’s many and it’s every year.
Anyway, my point was just... may I introduce you to earth shelters! ^-^
And a map!
(These images came from a book called Earth Shelter Technology by Lester L. Boyer, Walter T. Grondzik, available on Google Books).
Parliament House, Canberra, AUS (Photo from Australian Parliamentary Education Office)
There are some issues with it, sure, but not many that some basic adaptions in human habit, community places, or new construction tech can’t take care of.
“The desirability of unobstructed views and natural illumination often results in problems with control of solar radiation.” (Boyer, Grondzik, pg19)
Icelandic Turf House of Glaumbaer (photo from Wikipedia Commons), which can be found across northern Europe and Scandinavia.
A traditional log-house/log cabin with a green roof, also from N.Europe/Scandinavia.
Earthlodge of upper Missouri tribes, including the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara.
My German teacher’s son was part of the initial push of engineers in Germany constructing green-roofs and leading the initiative to change policy, so we got yearly updates and have followed the idea for a while.
So far, tons of people have articles about it, so go find them, but a few key features the green-roof initiative has yielded throughout Europe: a decrease in pollution, greater economic stability as development, construction, and maintenance companies provide stable jobs, better air quality, better mood/stability in urbanized areas, more community efforts to maintain and interact in green spaces and to clean up other aspects of communities, less storm-water runoff (and thereby less urban flooding), increase in biodiversity of plants and animals, more stable ecosystems that decrease the high populations of insects and pests, stable populations of urban wildlife, better thermo-regulation of buildings (and thereby less use of energy and fuels to heat or cool the location).
Okay, so, TL;DR:
Earth-shelters and half-efforts (like green roofs and other nature-urban-integration efforts) may take some getting used to but bruh, they awesome af and we should talk about them so important people know we think they’re cool and then start building them, cus like, that’s how we get shit done now I guess.
