Simple Green Living: Finding Good Websites

Where can you go around the web to find good information on simple green living? One of my projects here on this site is to review other websites, and over time I intend to have quite a list.

Now that green is finally fashionable, there are a lot of websites trying to take advantage of the latest trend. You won’t find those listed here. I am looking for websites on simple living and/or green living that provide useful information. Fine with me if they sell products too – hey, I link to Amazon every time I mention a good book! – but to be listed here, the sites have to be ones worth surfing to in their own right.

I’ll start today with a couple of the sites of my husband, Kelly Hart.

[1] Greenhomebuilding.com

This is Kelly’s largest site. It’s got hundreds of pages on all aspects of green home building. The easiest way to find something specific is the search box in the upper right of the home page or on the bottom of most other pages.

The table across the top is on every page, and will take you to the various categories of the website… oh, cool, when I just cut and pasted the words from that table, all the links came along, so I will just leave them here:

• Blog
• Sustainable Architecture
• Events
• Financial Aspects
• Owner/builder
• About Us
• Vernacular Architecture
• Education
• Store
• Posters
• Building Codes
• Ask the Experts
• Natural Building
• Bulletin Board
• Environment
• Building Components

That “Ask the Experts” section draws on commentary from some three dozen experts. Readers send in questions, Kelly forwards them to the right expert, and eventually posts the answers on the site.

The earthbag page shows the house that we built in Colorado, about halfway down the page.

[2] Earthbagbuilding.com

When we built our earthbag house in Crestone, Colorado, in the late 1990s, there was not much information available on the topic. Now there is much more, and there is so much going on around the world that Kelly and our good friend Dr. Owen Geiger are always finding new building projects to add to this website. They also do an earthbag blog together at http://earthbagbuilding.wordpress.com/ and I’m including a screenshot because you can get an idea of the building process from the pictures:

Earthbags are an incredibly inexpensive way to build a shelter and I think they have a good future in the US for people who need a simple place to live that they can build themselves.