Reflections on Green Festival, Harrier at Mono Lake

Green Festival

Lew and I are getting pretty good at setting up our booth. We dodge union help and do it ourselves. We clip three pieces of lath to booth poles with plastic ties and mount our photo blowups (this year from our next book, BUILDERS OF THE PACIFIC COAST). We have a spiffy new 10-foot canvas banner, and the booth looks colorful and inviting.

We hit the ground running with our new book, THE BAREFOOT ARCHITECT: A MANUAL ON GREEN BUILDING. It was a mild sensation (this was obviously the right venue for it), and we sold over 100 copies. I haven’t seen a reaction to a book like this in many years. People seem to love it. It’s a wonderful book by a wonderful author, and the timing is right. Details at: https://shelterpub.com/_barefoot/BA-book.html

It’s great to get discovered by the 20-year olds.

Electric car

Cover of Plenty Magazine

Gimme Feedback

Response at our stand was just phenomenal. We were jammed up with people both days. People came up to thank me for our building books, especially SHELTER. It was an outpouring of — for lack of a better word — love. Maybe 10 different people said, “Thank you for your work over the years,” or, “I just want to shake your hand.” Overwhelming. I feel like I’m walking the line of self-aggrandizement here, but dammit, the feedback over the past few years has just been extraordinary. One guy picked up SHELTER and said “I learned to read with this book.” He said at the age of 5 he fell in love with the book and taught himself to read with it. I’ve written about this before, but it keeps happening, at an increasing rate.

What a LOT of people are now becoming aware of was part and parcel of the subculture of the ’60s-’70s. The hippies were right! Organic farming. Treating the earth with respect. Alternative energy. And on and on. Have I said all this before as well? Well, it’s heartening to see it catch on, even if 4 decades later.

Raptor in Flight

My friend Michael Jeneid just stopped by to show me these photos of a Northern Harrier he recently took from a kayak at Mono Lake, California:

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

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