Photo by Nin Solis – Living Inside
Article by Anna Bisazza

Deep in the Mexican countryside of Valle de Bravo — a lush escape about two hours’ drive from Mexico City — Emiliano Garcia and Helene Carlo found the perfect spot to build an eco home. Partners in life and in ASPJ, a Mexican architecture and landscape design studio, the couple had a burning question: can we build more sustainably and cheaper, and in a way that can be widely copied?

The main structural element is a concrete cube that supports the rest of the house.

“It was important for us to prove its feasibility and to be able to make our structure replicable, not only a one-of-a-kind,” says Garcia. The couple are keen for this type of building to become the rule rather than the exception.

La Lomita is named for its hilltop position, from where it looks out on to the picturesque surrounding mountains from its secluded spot, and is accessed by a small dirt road. The structure is distinguished by an unusual single arched roof and an open facade with corrugated metal finishing that loosely evokes the image of an aircraft hangar, but there are many other experimental features meticulously planned by Garcia and Carlo that are not immediately obvious.

“Being able to take weight off the building, bringing it to half of what it would normally be in a conventional build, was a really successful outcome,” says Garcia. The main structural element is a concrete cube that encloses two bathrooms and the staircase. It supports the rest of the house, which is built primarily in wood. “This means we’re not intervening heavily in the foundation by digging deep into the ground and building concrete slab layers. Here, we managed to separate the house from the ground, only attaching it to the necessary structural points.”

A second critical aspect for Garcia and Carlo was the traceability of materials and controlling as much as possible their impact on the environment. To build the columns, floors and walls — which amounts to 70% of the house — they used recycled laminated wood made from boxes for the transport of car parts in Volkswagen and Audi factories. “This is FSC-certified wood from Europe and we’re giving it a second use as OSB [oriented strand board], a material that is gaining popularity these days.”

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/25/ready-to-soar-inside-a-dramatic-eco-home-in-mexico

Photograph by Christopher Michel

The Truth About Antarctica

by Allegra Rosenberg

The only continent with no history of human habitation, the vast ice fields of Antarctica have formed a blank slate onto which humanity can project itself: all of itself, from the imperial superego to the conspiratorial id.

At the turn of the 20th century, Antarctica was still largely unknown. As Apsley Cherry-Garrard observed in the introduction to his classic book The Worst Journey in the World (1922): “Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man’s habitation.” But despite the hundred-plus years of exploration, habitation, and documentation since then, Antarctica remains utterly Other. It’s far away, it’s unlike anywhere else on the planet, and most people will never go there. They’ll only see pictures, and watch classic films like The Thing (01982) which project an image of peril and isolation onto the public consciousness.…

longnow.org/ideas/the-truth-about-antarctica

Quotes from article in The Guardian (10/30)

What I think about more often than anything else these days is the death of California. The death of its iconic landscapes. I wrote a piece in the Nation on why these changes are irreversible. How much of the beauty of the state might disappear forever. No more Joshua Trees. No more sequoias.

I’ve exalted in the beauty of California my entire life. Hiking, mountain running, traveling all over the state. There’s so much I wish my kids could see, could have seen, that they’ll not see. And that, of course, is happening everywhere in the world.…”

“What do you think Americans should be doing right now?”

“Organize as massively as possible: nonviolent civil disobedience. Instead of just fighting over environmental legislation in Congress, ending up in a bill that’s as much a subsidy to the auto industry and to fossil fuel as anything else: start sitting-in the board rooms and offices of the big polluters, all these meetings where the Kochs and other oil producers sit down with Republican politicians.…”

“Republicans are doing a splendid job of combining protest movements with electoral politics. It’s not only that Republicans have mastered low-intensity street-fighting, it’s that they’ve also been able to sustain a dialectic between the outside and the inside in a way that progressive Democrats haven’t been able to do.…”

“There is so much unmobilized love out there. It’s really moving to see how much.”

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/30/mike-davis-california-writer-interview-activism

From Maui Surfer

Why envisioning the collapse of civilization can be unexpectedly life-affirming​

by Adam Lowenstein

Harmen Steenwijck, Vanitas stilleven, (01640).​

“It seemed to happen gradually, then suddenly,” Candace says, describing the spread of the new pathogen. “I got up. I went to work in the morning. Outside the office windows, the city thinned out.”

At first, the New York Times keeps a tally of Americans who succumb, but eventually the “Death Knell,” as Candace and her colleagues call it, is taken down at the government’s request.

Candace’s company asks her to keep the office open, even as most employees are told to work from home. The move is temporary, they assure her. The company isn’t shutting down. “Just putting things on hold.”

As the fever spreads, Candace runs out of work to do. Soon she’s alone in the office. Calls to her family go unanswered. A call to her boss goes to voicemail. Emails slow to a trickle, until they cease entirely. “More people are leaving this city than there are staying,” a 911 operator tells Candace when she makes a futile attempt to report an elevator malfunction. “The city is curtailing all its services.

Private security guards stand in front of empty houses and department stores. Newspapers stop publishing. Plants begin to grow in the streets. Times Square is empty. “There were no tourists, no street vendors, no patrol cars,” Candace says. “There was no one.”

Candace is the narrator of Ling Ma’s Severance, a novel celebrated for its brutal yet empathetic portrayal of how humans seeking meaning in modern-day capitalism cling to the structures and expectations of work. Severance was published in 02018, but as with Emily St. John Mandel’s 02014 novel Station Eleven, in which a “Georgia Flu” kills 99 percent of humanity, anyone who picked up Severance after, say, March 02020 finds an entirely new level of resonance in its references to N95 masks and travel bans and cravings for routine as any sense of “normality” crumbles.

Reading Severance today is a powerful reminder of how much things changed, and how bad they got, during Covid-19. Yet it serves another haunting purpose: as a reminder of how much worse they could have been.

Memento Mori

Two thousand years ago, the ancient Stoics wrote of the concept of memento mori. Loosely translated as “remember death,” memento mori describes the practice of thinking about death as a reminder that life is impermanent and unpredictable. “You could leave life right now,” Marcus Aurelius wrote sometime around the year 00170. “Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

Today memento mori is usually thought of as an individual practice, as a mental tool to help you focus on what matters most to you. While it sounds depressing to regularly remind yourself that your existence will eventually end, quite possibly not at a time or in a manner of your choosing, many people find clarity in the exercise. It’s easy to get caught up in life’s pointless commitments and petty burdens and meaningless aspirations and take for granted what enables those commitments and burdens and aspirations: the remarkable fact that you’re a human being who is alive right now.

Civilization — the world as we know it — may be less precarious than our individual lives, but that doesn’t make it permanent. Many aspects of everyday existence depend not just on you remaining alive but on the world as you know it remaining alive: The work commitments and calendars that give our days structure and purpose. The smartphones and streaming services that give us connectivity and information and entertainment. The subways and roads and planes and public services that give us the ability to commute and travel. The laws and norms that give us food and medicine and clean water. The democratic principles that give us at least an imperfect opportunity for self-determination and self-actualization and justice.

To imagine losing all of that, and more, sounds like a morbid thought exercise. Picturing a major American city slowly emptying out for good (Severance) or humanity being nearly wiped out in a matter of days (Station Eleven) can indeed be pretty bleak.

But these stories can also be invigorating, even life-affirming. “There can be something reassuring about taking in a fictional disaster in the midst of a real one,” Hillary Kelly wrote in Vulture. “You can flirt with the experience of collapse. You can long for the world you live in right now.”

Books like these, as I wrote in an August 02020 newsletter that attempted to make sense of why I felt drawn to pandemic fiction in the middle of a pandemic, “let us peek over the other side to see what a worst-case scenario might look like, before retreating back to reality.”

End-of-the-world novels are memento mori — for civilization.
Read More …

NYTimes
By Ivan Penn
March 13, 2022

“Citing more blackouts, wildfires and higher electricity rates, a growing number of homeowners are choosing to build homes that run entirely on solar panels and batteries.”

NEVADA CITY, Calif. — In the Gold Rush, Northern California attracted prospectors looking for financial independence. Now, this area is at the vanguard of a new movement — people seeking to use only the energy they produce themselves.

Angry over blackouts, wildfires caused by utilities and rising electricity bills, a small but growing number of Californians in rural areas and in the suburbs of San Francisco are going off the grid. They can do so because of a stunning drop in the cost of solar panels and batteries over the last decade. Some homeowners who have built new, off-grid homes say they have even saved money because their systems were cheaper than securing a new utility connection.

www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/business/energy-environment/california-off-grid.html

From Maui Surfer