Green Building Renaissance

Sketching the future of sustainable housing

Rabbits are dancing again on this early April day. The rabbit mating season is upon us, and one in the grass outside my window keeps prancing past another, which is repeatedly leaping straight up in the air, landing in the same place. We’re all feeling it, the feverish need to be outside in the sunlight, to see the trees and all the land green up again, mushrooms sprout on logs, feel warm breezes and sweat on exposed skin. It is also the season when green builders at Dancing Rabbit head out to patches of grassy field—blank canvases—and begin to dig, saw, erect and otherwise construct their homes. Sketches pour out of notebooks kept at the ready all winter, and the game is on.

This month we hear from Brian, now amid construction of his cob house on West Road. Bear lays out a roadmap for the essential task of deconstruction and materials reclamation. Jan gives us a glimpse of the life before DR that brought her to this cusp of building her own strawbale home in the new neighborhood. Liat describes life in the trenches of a school bus-to-home conversion already underway. Finally, Ted offers a peek behind the curtain at some of the essential skills among our builders and behind our structures. This isn’t the first time you’ve heard about construction in these pages, and it won’t be the last; but we hope you’ll visit for yourself to taste the ongoing variety of creative green construction we’re brewing here. Read on!

March Hare Spring 2008 Issue 56

The Year of Mud		Dreams and Waking
Deconstruction 101		Profiles
Jan’s Autobiography

Come see our past issues for lots of Dancing Rabbit information.