Ultimate Eco Home

Requirements

In order to create a home that ultimately integrates with ecology, that is nature, we need to build it as though it grew organically, like a plant. As humans, we need it to shelter us, to provide protection from the elements as they exist where we live, which varies widely from place to place. Our home must do many things over it’s lifespan of perhaps fifty or one hundred years or more, including storing our food, water, and tools. In order to provide space for us to live and work, now, and for future generations, it must minimize it’s impact on the environment, and like an ancient forest, be symbiotic with nature through time.

Our understanding of how much our so called “lifestyles” impact nature, has come a long way through our ever increasing level of understanding developed over the last century using science and technology. This understanding makes clear that we face existential risks including climate crisis, environmental degradation, and ecological collapse as we approach more and more tipping points in nature. At the same time our increasing level of technological advancements provides both risks and potentially solutions. For most people, economic uncertainty, food insecurity, and threats of large scale wars loom increasingly large on our minds. So, we naturally bury our heads in the the proverbial sand, so that the massive mental anxiety does not destroy us. We survive as we have always done.

Knowing all this, the idea of an “Ultimate Eco Home” emerges as a way to address some of our most urgent needs. Especially for young people, the challenges of economic uncertainty are making home ownership, often the most important investment in our lifetimes, out of reach more and more. So, we need to build our homes so that they don’t bankrupt us financially, while at the same time provide ecological sustainability for us now and for future generations, and at the same time achieves shelter that inspires living day to day.

All of this leads us to try to define what an “Ultimate Eco Home” must be. To that end, before we start designing and planning to build our dream home, we should set out what, given the many challenges we face, what our homes goals or constraints must be.

• 100% Renewable natural materials
• 100% Renewable energy
• Affordable