... force everyone to live in mud huts
Technically we live in a mud hut and I'm spending 12 hours/day remodeling Yet Another mud hut.
Only it's called "adobe" and people are buying them, in my neck of the mountains, as soon as they come on the market.
the whole "mud hut" meme is imho a holdover from C16-19 colonialism and the colonisers' swaggering contempt for any architecture, any food, any religious practise, any costume, any music (etc ad naus), that wasn't the product of Anglo Europe. the subliminal message is 'those commie pinko greenies want to make Us [superior whitefolks] live like Them [backwards savages]' -- it's as stupid imho as the probably-apocryphal stories about British colonial administrators dying of heat stroke because they wouldn't give up their stodgy British diet and heavy clothing in the Indian climate. enviromentalists I think are -- for many modern, indoctrinated citizens of the corporate state -- the equivalent of the scandalous colonial who "goes native", letting the side down don'cha know, by adapting to, rather than rigidly dominating, the local biome.
houses made of mud and straw have many advantages -- of which sustainability is only one. my suspicion is that people's kneejerk fear and loathing of strawbale construction and other "ethnic" architecture has way more to do with the "ethnic" part of the association than any actual drawback of the construction method itself. I can't prove this, but the strength and irrationality of the prejudice I've encountered in individuals (anecdotal evidence) suggests that like many debates about sustainable lifestyle issues, this is not merely a technical or pragmatic discussion. some very deep emotional and ego values are engaged.
my parents, immigrants to America, would never eat sweet corn (zea mays). they hated it. why? it's delicious -- I loved it as a kid and still do. but to them, maize was something you feed to cattle. it was animal food and therefore infra dig for humans. these cultural associations are basically phobias, as powerful as any other phobia but not generally diagnosed as such; and like phobias they can be highly maladaptive and dysfunctional. the guy who can't bring himself to eat witchetty grubs in a survival situation... won't survive.
it is great that -- at last -- the colonisers are realising that adobe is a very sensible building material in the locations where indigenous people for millennia successfully used adobe. wow, how hard was that to figure out? The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
