Tales From the Sustainable Underground. Stephen Hren

Foreword

       by Lyle Estill

      When I first caught wind of Sustainable Underground I was jazzed. I thought of all the laws that have been written in support of the status quo, and of all the nights people in the sustainability movement have spent sweating over breaking them. I felt it was a story aching to be told.

      When it was kicked around by the publishing industry, I encouraged Stephen to stick with it. I’m glad he did, because it became a wonderful read.

      I found myself laughing out loud at the sight of Stephen with his high-end coffee maker at the campsite of the primitive anarchists — deprived of his morning caffeine fix for lack of fire lighting skills. And I found myself heartbroken to read of the collapse of a Texas collective based on organizational deficiencies.

      Stephen brings his background, his humility, and his baggage to the book. In doing so he adds a delightful personal level which helps embellish the facts. Those who know Stephen know that he lives low on the carbon consumption totem pole, with intention. And while he is an inspiration to those who know him, he is often treated as a well-heeled novice by some of the characters in this book.

      I was in Paris when Stephen’s email arrived — asking for a foreword “by yesterday.” I immediately dropped my Hemmingway and Miller to give Sustainable Underground a read. As soon as I delved into the manuscript I was visited by Jean Paul Sartre who insisted, “existence precedes essence.”

      Can a lowly building inspector know the essence of a completed cob house before such a thing exists? Possibly not. Sartre was right, Stephen had offered up existential proof, and all was well.

      To write this book Stephen embarked on a series of wild journeys around America to not only visit, but also to probe those activists, and doers who are reshaping our society’s landscape into something that might sustain human life on this garden planet.

      Sometimes flaunting the law, sometimes hiding from it, and sometimes ignoring it completely, the real life characters in Sustainable Underground are all pushing the envelope of societal change.

      I feel it is a daring book. When it comes to the “War on Drugs,” for instance, Stephen not only delves into the issue, but also makes himself known as a partisan with the underdog side. I admire that courage. It makes me want to join the fight, rather than staying silent, with my stash kept in my refrigerator door.

      With its many stories and interconnections; from art to primitive anarchism to urban renewal, Sustainable Underground draws on everything from Faulkner to neighborhood activists. In doing so it engenders a certain faith that perhaps our species is capable of a wholesale change that might empower and sustain us all.

      I suppose the notion of “faith” might indicate that Sartre had it wrong. Sustainable Underground calls on the reader to find the essence, of things before those things can be brought into existence.

      Either way the book provides us with a necessary start point where we can forget about the law and the current order of things so that we can think differently about the world we inhabit, and reshape it in a way that allows us to thrive within those limits which are imposed upon us by nature.

      Lyle Estill has been taking chances with the law and disrupting the status quo since he started making fuel with Piedmont Biofuels in 2002. He is the the publisher of Energy Blog, and author of Biodiesel Power, Small is Possible and Industrial Evolution. LyleEstill.com

Introduction

      Plopping that first pile of mud onto the foundation felt revolution-ary... and illegal. After years of research, saving money and living in a yurt, my former wife and I were starting out building our own home, a place we intended (at least at the time!) to live the rest of our lives. Yet our building permit described a much more conventional home, a stick-built square cabin that any inspector would recognize as familiar, not the round cob home we were now building.

      After an initial frenzy of finding beautiful and affordable land, making the time commitments to build, getting our building permits and septic and well and drawing on what turned out to be woefully inadequate building skills, we’d changed our minds from the square cabin to a monolithic dome, managed to get a foundation poured, and then run out of money. So we took the last chunk of change, built a yurt and moved in. We thought we needed space, so we made it big, perhaps the biggest yurt in the world: 32 feet in diameter. We lived in it, even though it baked in the summer and held as much heat as worn out lingerie in the winter. We worked, we finished college, we moved away for a year and then the whole thing fell down in a massive two-foot snow storm.

      We were in Mali at the time, visiting a friend in the Peace Corps. It was just after the new millennium started, January 2000. We visited amazing places, like Djenne, where there was a seven-story mosque built out of earth, and countless other homes built out of the land they sat on. These were beautiful, simple homes, small but accommodating, decorated with love and attention, cool during the day and warm at night. Meantime, we ran into some fellow travelers from our neck of the woods, and heard tell of the snow storm back home, feet of snow and then more ice on top of it, rare indeed for us southerners. Tentatively, we began to express doubts about our not so little yurt in the woods and if it could have withstood such an onslaught.

      There were still weeks of traveling. Finally we made it back to North Carolina, got in the car and made the drive out. As we crested the hill of our property, we should have had a good view of our 14-foot-tall yurt through the bare trees. Yet we saw nothing. And so we knew. We parked and walked down the hill to find a swimming pool with an outline of our stuff on the bottom. The conical top section of the yurt had collapsed, but the cylindrical lattice-work bottom portion had held. The result was that the canvas that had made up the top was now a pool liner, with our bed, stereo, kitchen, etc. now underneath thousands of gallons of water. It was almost too funny to be upsetting, and we had been trying to figure out a way to get the mammoth yurt down without killing ourselves anyways. In our year away of work we had saved up money, and we were ready to start again and try to do things right.

      After the amazing buildings we’d seen on our travels, the square conventionally-framed cabin described in our building plans looked downright pathetic and unappealing. Even the monolithic dome we’d poured the foundation for seemed too technocentric and energy intensive. What to do? Conveniently, our inherent cheapness had saddled us with a large pile of earth just downhill from our building site. The folks who’d dug out the foundation had offered to haul it away for 50 bucks or so, but we told them to just dump it down there at the bottom. We’d kind of regretted the decision, until now. Here was a gigantic pile of red clay, waiting for a purpose. After some dawdling, we decided to go for it. There was some vague talk of cob on the nascent Internet, and we ordered a lightly worded how-to book by Becky Bee. We made some test bricks. We found a good mix. We made a small model out of construction paper of the building we intended to build. And then we mixed up a batch of cob with our bare feet on a torn section of collapsed yurt canvas and plopped it on our foundation.

      Without, of course, bothering to change our building permit. Which brings me to the subject of this book. Because at that moment, both of us became part of something that we had no idea existed. With that first plop of mud onto that foundation, we had entered the Sustainable Underground.

      There was the revolutionary sixties that petered out in the seventies, followed by the wasteland of the eighties. Then starting in the early nineties something started to happen in North America. People throughout the land started to figure out that the way we were living was unsustainable. To wit, it could not be sustained. Some said to themselves, why live a life that cannot be sustained? It almost goes against the meaning of the word “life” itself. Some people wrote about this unsustainability problem, some folks talked to politicians about it, some talked to their spouses about it over dinner. But some folks just went out and did stuff. And they