Every day over 3 billion people in the developing world cook food on open fires or inefficient cook stoves fueled by coal or solid biomass, jeopardize human health, contribute to household & community air pollution, and impact environmental devastation by depleting forests and increasing soil erosion. 4 million premature deaths occur every year due to exposure from toxic smoke emissions. Consequently women and children are disproportionately impacted by household air pollution.
This event hasn’t happened for several years. It was so popular and crowds got so large that it put a strain on the town of Hopland (California). Now it’s back, for one day only — Saturday, August 17th. We’ll have a booth, selling books, and I’m doing my presentation,”The Half Acre Homestead” at 4 PM.
Hopland is about 2 hours north of San Francisco on Highway 101. The Hopland Brewery is apparently closed now, but for great beer/dinner on the way back south, the Ruth McGowan Brew Pub in Cloverdale is a winner — you can see the beautiful copper and stainless brew kettle and tanks from the bar, and can take home a growler or two of fresh brew.
On November 29, I posted a link to a large New York Times article on SunRay Kelley. In retrospect, it’s not really good or fair reportage on SunRay; it doesn’t do him justice. Part of it is East Coast reporter snark about West Coast free-spiritedness. Part of it is that the reporter just didn’t get SunRay— that he’s not only an artist, designer, architect, and inventor, but a master builder. His mortise and tenon joints, even with gnarly lumber, are tight. He’s a carpenter whose buildings soar. There’s a joy and a spirit in both builder and buildings. The NYTimes reporter missed all this and focussed on a bunch of trivialities.
And there was a very weird interview with SunRay’s ex-wife, who came up with some mean-spirited comments. This shouldn’t have been included in the article. Cheap shot, ex-wife-wise and journalistic-wise.
SunRay’s way better than you’d get from this account. In my opinion, there’s no other natural materials builder in the world who’s combined such ecology, design, and craftsmanship in so many buildings on the American landscape.
Just settin it straight…
For anyone interested in SunRay and his work, we have posted a PDF of the 27 pages we did on him and his work in Builders of the Pacific Coast in 2004. (We do—ahem—a way better job on builders than does the New York Times.)
For the real SunRay, click here. (To get this in Acrobat, you may have to right-click and save linked file in downloads folder.)
Wonderful sculpture,Check out legs of old tires, look like muscles. A caveat, though, about this and the multitude of fire-snorting gizmos at the Maker Faire. They’re burning up a lot of non-renewable propane. It’s like the time for lighting houses with lavish Christmas lights is way over. Stop pissing it away.
