Natural-Built Tiny House Incorporates Biophilic Design And A Living Roof 🌱

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1. I'd love to see an update on this home and how the system worked out.

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2. Aesthetically, one of the best I've seen. The materials, the colors, the design. A++

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3. Does he know his wife lives there too?

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4. I'm In Love with this home <3

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5. <3

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6. Beetle kill pine…

   I came across this post from Keven Van Tighem about the mountain pine beetle.

   "I still see people describing mountain pine beetles as a problem. If you work in the forest industry, fair enough. But if you don't, it's long past time to stop believing what you've been told; those little beetles are actually a blessing for bears, biodiversity, water and forest ecosystems. They are here to help.

   Here is an essay from my book Our Place that sums it up (and if you don't have a copy of the book don't worry; your local bookstore can get one for you):

   Save the Beetles? (2014)

   Two hard winters in a row mean that our latest crisis in the forest — the mountain pine beetle outbreak — may be winding down.
   
   That would be too bad.

   Hyperventilating headlines to the contrary, mountain pine beetles may well be the best thing that’s happened in the woods in a long time. But you won’t hear that from Alberta Agriculture and Forestry or from the forest industry. Their story — and they got it out there first — is that the recent population eruption of this native bark beetle is a disaster that has to be stopped before it destroys our forests.

   Their preferred method of stopping beetles is aggressive clear-cutting. Shades of Vietnam: “It became necessay to destroy the village to save it.”

   Crisis rhetoric to the contrary, pine beetle populations have always erupted from time to time. The wildlife-rich Kootenay River valley west of Banff, for example, was hit by beetles in the 1940s. That’s why it’s wildlife-rich: by killing off the old pine trees, the beetles created countless grassy openings and freed up young spruce trees and aspens to grow freely. The resulting forest mosaic was far better for deer, bears and other wildlife than the dense old pine stands of earlier years.

   Southwestern Alberta and the Cypress Hills had a beetle outbreak in the mid 1980s. Many forest stands in and around Waterton Lakes National Park lost up to 90% of their lodgepole pines. Parks Canada came under heavy pressure from the Alberta government to let loggers into the park to cut infected trees. Fortunately, the feds said no. Outside the park, however, emergency logging left sprawling clearcuts along the foothills north to Crowsnest Pass.

   I went to Waterton a decade later as the park’s first conservation biologist. Curious about the long-term effects of the pine beetle infestation, I compared sites inside the park that had been left to nature with sites outside the park that had been salvage-logged to save the forest.

   The sites inside the park were lush and thriving. Douglas fir and white spruce that had been seedlings when the beetles killed the pine were bushy and tall. Openings in the woods were full of shrubs and herbaceous cover. Woodpeckers were abundant, enjoying the bounty of insects in standing dead trees. Fallen pine trees provided shelter for red-backed voles, pine martens and other wildlife. All that new habitat diversity, where before there had been a near-monoculture of aging pines, teemed with wildlife – from grizzly bears and elk to lazuli buntings, hummingbirds, flying squirrels, various species of warblers and flycatchers. The birdsong was almost deafening.

   Nearby salvage-logged areas, on the other hand, were a mess. Poorly laid-out emergency logging roads were now rutted with off-road vehicle tracks and full of non-native weeds like knapweed. Erosion gullies ran into clearcuts which had been planted back to lodgepole pine — as if somehow the Forest Service hadn’t figured out that the best defence against future mass beetle attacks might be a forest containing at least some trees the beetles don’t eat. Only a few common wildlife species were abundant; the great variety of more uncommon species that I had found in the unlogged forests was absent. The forest hadn’t been saved; it had been savaged.

   While the foresters who try to control the pine beetle narrative are always ready to help Nature, that help seems always to involve chainsaws and feller-bunchers. It’s easy to see how sawmills benefit; the benefits to Nature are considerably less clear.
   
   The simple truth that almost no forester will ever state is that mountain pine beetles are far more beneficial to forests than logging.

   Our changing western climate no longer favours dense, water-hungry forests of lodgepole pine. As mild winters and summer dry spells become more frequent, mountain pine beetles survive and thrive better than in the early twentieth century. Their population eruptions are simply Nature’s form of climate change adaptation. Once the beetles have boomed and busted, what remains behind is a more diverse and drought-tolerant forest with healthier trees and abundant wildlife.

   In fact, given that most of the water in our rivers comes from snow and that researchers have found that we lose as much as 60% of each winter’s snow to sublimation of snow trapped in the forest canopy, beetle-attacked forests may also play a vital role in increasing our future water supply – a critical need for a water-scarce region. The open canopies of beetle-modified forests trap more water in the snowpack while also shading those snow drifts in the spring so that the increased water supply comes slowly — unlike the massive, short-lived floods that pour off exposed clearcuts where foresters have “saved” the forest from beetles.

   Mountain pine beetles enhance biodiversity, help our forests adapt to a changing climate and improve water supplies. The only reason we think our native beetles are a problem is because loggers told us they are. In conservation, as in politics, it’s always wise to consider the source and what they stand to gain from the direction they steer the conversation.
   The forest, if it could talk, would tell a very different story."
   Kevin Van Tighem

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7. I really like your shows. You ask the most important things like how to get the parking spot ,the size ,and the cost. I think for most people who watch this kind of show would be very interested in these things!

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8. That's why earth friendly houses came to be…!!! Awesome !!

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