Podcast appearances and mentions of lloyd kahn

An exhibition at the Bolinas Museum highlights the work of a local creator with big reach.The self-taught architect of the DIY movement, Lloyd Kahn.And, with San Francisco's election over, we look at who spent what and where.Plus, we'll hear poetry readings from three local authors.

Today my guest is Lloyd Kahn, and if you don't recognize the name, you've probably seen one of his books. Lloyd published the seminal book, Shelters in 1973, documenting alternative housing ideas not limited to but including tiny houses, well before the current modern movement.Lloyd has a lifelong fascination with shelter, and this conversation, we trace the steps of how an insurance broker in San Francisco built his own home and slowly transitioned to publishing internationally about Geodesic Domes, Tiny Houses, Mobile Houses, Driftwood Shelters and more. DIY building. While many thousands of the homes that Lloyd has documented over the years are small or tiny, he's got a healthy amount of skepticism about the tiny home movement.In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about Lloyds books, his original influences of the counter culture of the 1960's, and how the concept of shelter has changed over the years.In This Episode:How did Lloyd's fascination with shelter begin?Why Lloyd's 1973 book Shelter is the most important of his workWhy Lloyd decided to pull his Dome Books off the shelves even though they were sellingWhy Lloyd says that Builders of the Pacific Coast is Lloyds favorite bookLloyd tells the story of meeting and building with Derek ‘Deek' DiedricksenWhy Dome homes have fallen out of favor (and Lloyd is more than okay with that!)How Lloyd got into publishing in the first placeWhat is causing the current fascination with tiny houses?Lloyds advice for first-time DIY home buildersLloyds two favorite houses of all timesLloyd's take on aging well (He's 83!)Lloyds new book coming soon: The Half Acre Homestead (it sounds amazing!)Lloyd Kahn is the former shelter editor of The Whole Earth Catalog and editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications. He has published a series of books on building including Shelter and Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter. 

Complete show notes: soireeleone.com/podcast Recommended reading: Lloyd Kahn's The Septic Tank Owner's Manual. Shelter Publications, 2017. Or start with the tons of free information: https://oasisdesign.net/wastewater/septic/failure.htm Some recommendations: Use grey water friendly products. This is good practice to get ready for having a grey water system or moving to a rural area with a septic tank. The major consideration is sodium and boron (borax) as ingredients. Learn more about grey water: https://oasisdesign.net/greywater/ or https://greywateraction.org/greywater-faq/ Instagram: Soirée-Leone Website: soireeleone.com Producer: Marina Darling Recorded in beautiful Hampshire, Tennessee Try a Podcasting 2.0 Certified app: Podfriend - Breez - Sphinx - Podstation - Curiocaster - Fountain

Wie sehen nachhaltige Alternativen zum konventionellen Bauen und Zusammenleben aus? Um das herauszufinden, haben Architekt Leopold Banchini und Künstler Lukas Feireiss Lloyd Kahn, einen Pionier des nachhaltigen Bauens, in seinem selbstgebauten Haus in Kalifornien besucht. Die daraus entstandene Installation verbindet Kahns Gedanken mit der Gegenwart und wirft die Frage auf, wie Architektur und nachhaltige Lebensweisen zusammengedacht werden können. Wie kann das gelingen? Um Antworten auf diese Frage zu erhalten, hat sich Marilena mit Lukas Feireiss unterhalten. Der Podcast ist der zweite Teil der 3-teiligen Podcastreihe “Wandelmut”, die im Auftrag des Museum Sinclair-Haus entstanden ist.

I'm very pleased to welcome the podcast - builder, photographer, publisher, editor and blogger... Lloyd Kahn! Lloyd is the editor in chief at Shelter Publications, has now published eight books on building; this series is called The Shelter Library Of Building Books. Included are Home Work, the sequel to Shelter, Tiny Homes, and Lloyd’s favorite, Builders of the Pacific Coast.In the mid-‘60s, Lloyd Kahn quit his job in the insurance business and began working as a carpenter, first building post and beam houses, then geodesic domes. In 1968, he became the shelter editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, which led him to publish two books on dome building and then, in 1973, the book Shelter (which went on to sell 270,000 copies). Lloyd’s been writing ever since.Podcast linksShelter Publications Lloyds BlogBook: ShelterBook: Tiny HomesBook: Builders of the Pacific CoastBook: Home WorkBook: Small HomesFilm: My Octopus TeacherNext book - Rolling homesEssays - DomesMy roundhouse build, greatly inspired by Lloyd's books (shameless self promotion)Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/buildingsustainability)

Lloyd Kahn’s first interview on the Tiny House Lifestyle Podcast is the most downloaded episode to date, so I knew I had to have him back on to talk about his wonderful new book, The Half-Acre Homestead. We talk about the benefits and limitations of homesteading in the present and future. While Lloyd is a bit dubious about the viability of living in a tiny house long-term, I think that the lifestyle he showcases in The Half Acre Homestead is readily compatible with tiny house living. The post Lloyd Kahn’s Half-Acre Homestead: Building, Gardening and Getting Started – #130 appeared first on The Tiny House.

During his iconic career, rock and roll legend Eddie Money created a slew of songs that became a part of our culture. The singer/songwriter died in 2019 shortly after revealing he'd been diagnosed with stage 4 esophageal cancer. Prior to his diagnosis, Money checked in with Growing Bolder and described his enduring passion for making new music.

During his iconic career, rock and roll legend Eddie Money created a slew of songs that became a part of our culture. The singer/songwriter died in 2019 shortly after revealing he’d been diagnosed with stage 4 esophageal cancer. Prior to his diagnosis, Money checked in with Growing Bolder and described his enduring passion for making new music.

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast My guest for this episode is Holly Brown of Island Creek Farm, a small permaculture farm located in Huddleston, Virginia. Holly and I sat down at her home on a mild day in October to talk about her origins as a farmer and what it is like to run a permaculture-based farm on imperfect farmland in western Virginia complete with heat and humidity during the summer and the occasional hard freeze in the winter. On less than one acre farmed organically the farm supported herself and two interns financially, while keeping three restaurants stocked with vegetables, provided fifteen CSA shares, and also fed herself, those interns, and her extended family. She even had enough left over to give to local food pantries. She accomplishes all of this while married with two children, and without the use of insecticides, herbicides, or any tilling. I learned all of this in our time together recording the interview and while we ate lunch and spent several hours walking around her farm. That time together was incredibly inspirational to me and gave me a better understanding of what we can accomplish with the right systems and support. My time with Holly really stuck with me, even now several months later, because this was the first time I saw a farm that was integrated and operating in a way that I would want to run a farm when consider creating my own permaculture demonstration site. Her farm showed the possibilities I read about in books like Peter Bane's The Permaculture Handbook, while remaining true to her own ideals. Holly invited me into the home she shares with her husband and two children, a modest place compared to most of the houses I've seen in America, more reminiscent of the ideas you'll find in the books by Lloyd Kahn or Patricia Foreman, though not quite that small. In the time after the interview she and I shared lunch together, a curry consisting of on-farm vegetables with yogurt she made from local raw milk and a salad containing something like 12 different kinds of lettuces. We then walked around and she showed me her successes and failures, including two different gothic arch greenhouse frames, one of which was strong and supportive that Holly demonstrated by doing a pull-up on, and another that wavered in the wind a bit. If anything, visiting Holly gave me hope that we can build productive permaculture farms that feed people. That we can use little urban, suburban, and rural spaces to grow the food necessary, in an ecologically responsible manner, that can make a real difference.  Are there any farms like Island Creek I should visit to bring back more working examples of permaculture in the world? If you know of any, leave a comment below. As long as I am able I will be here to assist you on your permaculture path so please reach out to me if there is anything I can do for you. Email: The Permaculture Podcast Or Write: The Permaculture Podcast The Permaculture Podcast Until the next time, tend to a little piece of land, grow some of your own food, and take care of Earth, your self, and each other.

On a recent trip back to the USA, I got a chance to meet with the inspirational and charming, Lloyd Kahn. Lloyd is an author, a photographer, a builder, and a man of action! He has written over 40 books on subjects ranging from health and stretching to he ephemeral charm of driftwood structures on the Pacific Coast. We talked about his work as a builder, and as an editor of the “Whole Earth Catalogue”, living healthy, and the life-force giving capacity of working with your hands. At 85 years old, Lloyd has more energy, enthusiasm and spark than most people I know! It is with great pleasure that we bring you this conversation with a true treasure of a human being. Share, enjoy, and buy a book!

Lloyd Kahn is the former shelter editor of The Whole Earth Catalog and editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications. He has published a series of books on building including Shelter and Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter. The post Lloyd Kahn’s Advice on Building a Home, Reconsidering a Tiny House On Wheels, and Documenting 50 Years of DIY Dwellings appeared first on The Tiny House.

Lloyd Kahn is the founding editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, Inc., and is the former Shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He is also an author, photographer, and pioneer of the green building and green architecture movements. Music: “Brightside of the Sun,” by Basin and Range; “I Don't Think You Understand,” by Goliath Flores; “Smoke Alarm,” by Carsie Blanton. Find me on Instagram or Twitter. Please consider supporting this podcast on Patreon. This Amazon affiliate link kicks a few bucks back my way.

Host Lisa Kiefer speaks with Lloyd Kahn, Editor-in-Chief of Shelter Publications, home to books about building homes with your own hands, using mostly natural materials. His latest book is Small Homes: The Right Size. He believes small homes are less expensive, use less resources, and are more efficient to heat and cool, and cheaper to maintain and repair. Lloyd Kahn was the Whole Earth Catalog shelter editor in the late 60s and early 70s and has been publishing books on building for four decades.TRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:Method to the madness is next. Speaker 2:You're listening to method to the madness and weekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. I'm your host, Lisa Kiefer, and today I'm interviewing Lloyd Con, the editor in chief of shelter publications. He'll be talking about his latest book, [00:00:30] small homes, the right size Speaker 3:[inaudible]. Speaker 1:Okay. Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to the program and thanks for coming all the way from Bolinas today. Speaker 4:Thank you. How was traffic? It was good because I come over early. I get an a San Francisco at seven in the morning and go to my favorite place, Cafe Roma and I spend a couple hours [00:01:00] there and then I come over to Berkeley and have breakfast with my friend and then I came here. You've been building books and building homes for the last 40 some years? Yeah. How did you get into this in the first place? When I was 12 I helped my dad build a house up in Calusa in the Sacramento Valley and it was a concrete block house and we would go up every weekend. It was about two hour, three hour drive, and we'd work on the weekends and holidays. And my job was to shovel sand and cement into a concrete mixer and [00:01:30] did that all summer. And I liked it. It was 12 and then one day when we got the walls up, they, uh, we were putting on the roof and they gave me a carpenter's apron and a hammer and nails and they let me nail down the siding on the roof. Speaker 4:And I really liked that. I remember that Saturday, sunny, the smell of wood pounding the nails and that feeling of accomplishing something. And so that was my start with building. Then when I was 18, I worked on the docks in San Francisco for a shipwright. San Francisco was [00:02:00] a port in the forties and 50s and a ships would come in and they'd load the cargo and then we would go in and build us a wooden structure inside the ship so the cargo wouldn't shift around. So that was rough carpentry. And then the third phase, I guess was in 1960 my wife and I bought three quarters of an Acre in mill valley that had an old summer home on it. And so I started building, the first place I built would have been in 61 was a studio with a sod roof. Like they now they call it a living roof. Speaker 4:So I just started [00:02:30] building and then I got into a very complex remodeling of a house and I had to learn as I went along. And so I, I wish I could have worked with a, a journeyman carpenter to learn how to build properly, but I just had to figure it out as I went along. And so as I went on and went on building more things and eventually quit my job as an insurance broker and went to work as a builder, I was looking at building from like kind of a layman's perspective, you know, and okay, you don't know what to do here, you're gonna have to figure it out. [00:03:00] And I figured that I could show other people who were starting from scratch, that it's possible to build your own house. And so I eventually got into doing books on building. You had a stint in big Sur. Speaker 4:Yeah. And I read something that you were working with geodesic domes. Bucky Fuller's geodesic domes and you learned, I got a job, was a foreman on a, on a building, a house in big Sur out of a bridge timbers who was a big timber house. He was on a 400 Acre ranch and uh, three of us moved down [00:03:30] there from Mill Valley to build this house. And it was, um, the timbers were really big and heavy while we were building at Buckminster Fuller, came to Esalen and gave a seminar. So we went over and heard him talking about lightweight buildings and we're struggling with this big building. And so the three of us, myself and two brothers from mill valley, we got into building geodesic domes. I went on to eventually get a job at a alternative high school in the Santa Cruz mountains [00:04:00] on 40 acres where we built 17 geodesic domes. Speaker 4:And probably 1967 to 69 or 68 to 70 the the people who ran the school wanted to turn it into a boarding school, so they hired me to come teach the kids how to build as they, they built their own houses, domes. I did two books on dome building at that time and the second one was called Dome Book Two and by the time dome book who sold maybe 160,000 copies, I realized that [00:04:30] domes didn't work, so if you have to admit you're wrong in front of that many people, it was great because from thereafter, I've never been afraid to say I was wrong. Yeah, that's what I said a year ago, but I don't believe that anymore. I thought, well, they tend to leak. They're hard to add onto. If you want to add on to a vertical wall, you just build a roof off of it. Speaker 4:If you want to add onto a dome, you have to tie into all these different facets, all the different triangles that are going in different directions. If you want to subdivide it inside, [00:05:00] it's the same problem. Well, you're, you're cutting up would say plywood into triangles. They're never going to be usable again. You're cutting up the struts, which are the framing members into three and four foot sections. That's, that's not going to be usable and it's torn down. Eventually I did a, a, a p a little publication called re fried domes. It was a newsprint publication. And basically, so many people are asking me this question, you know, what's wrong with domes that I decided to do this? A little newsprint publication, I think it's 64 pages. [00:05:30] So I said, here's my experience with domes. Here's why I don't think they work, but here are the best thing about them was with for me was getting into geometry and understanding, uh, the basic solids, you know, understanding what an icosahedron was and a dodecahedron. Speaker 4:And so here are the model making the instructions, which that, that's really fun. And then here are the chord factors. Here's the mathematics if you want to build domes. So I did. And on our website, which is sheltered pub.com [00:06:00] there's a, if you go to look for domes, you can find all this information there. If you want to know why I took dome book two out of print after it's sold all these copies. And I figured, well if even less than two people read every copy, that's a quarter of a million people and they all think that domes are Kipp. Cool. You know, it was sort of the, it was, I mean I was in life magazine Time magazine. Everybody thought the dorms where the, where the icon of shelter for the 60s, which turned out to be wrong. [00:06:30] And so, well, I've got this pretty big audience. I better show them there are a lot of other ways to build. Speaker 4:And so I took about a year and traveled with cameras and um, studied building in this country in Canada and in Europe and came back and did the book shelter, which was a large oversized book, like the whole Earth Catalog and had about a thousand photographs and was kind of the history of building and, uh, indigenous building, a section on materials, Straw Bale Wood [00:07:00] stone. And the heart of the book was five little buildings where we drew every stick of wood in the building, a flat roof, a gable roof, a steep gable roof, a gambrel roof. It was tiny houses or small houses was the heart of the book. And that was in 1973 and we said, okay, if you're going to build on a piece of land, hopefully you'll go there and camp out and watch which way the moon rises and where the winds come from and the rain. Then when you start [00:07:30] to build, once you just build a little place to start with. So the heart of that book 44 years ago was tiny homes, small homes, and I'm way ahead of your time. Yeah, I think, yeah. Yeah. I mean it really caught on hop forward to 2005 or something, 2006 and there's a tiny house movement and so at that time we did a book called tiny homes and so we sort of hit that right at the right time. Speaker 1:[00:08:00] And Speaker 2:if you're just tuning in, you're listening to method to the madness, a weekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. Today I'm talking with Lloyd Con, the Editor in chief of shelter publications and independent California publisher specializing in books on the building and architecture. This latest book is small homes, the right size. [00:08:30] How did you meet Stewart brand and [inaudible] Speaker 4:get involved with the whole earth catalog after that house and building that house in big surf for the architect a, I built my own house down there and I started building domes after I built my house. I was kind of isolated, you know, 40 miles down. It was right near Espolon and 40 miles down from Monterey Pacific grow. I started getting letters from people all over the country asking for the mathematics on domes. And I thought, well, I'm writing the same letter to everybody. [00:09:00] Why don't I just mimeograph something and I can send it out to, you know, I don't have to write an individual letter and go, well, at the same time I'm learning stuff about organic gardening and making your own shoes and a, you know, a lot of the things that we were into in the 60s. So I'll just kind of put all that together. Speaker 4:And then I met Stuart brand, uh, over in Menlo Park and the December, I think it was, and he was way ahead of me. He had it all organized, he had books on all these things and he was working on the first whole earth catalog. So that's how I met him. And [00:09:30] then after he did the first catalog in 1968, uh, I went to work for him as the shelter editor of the whole earth catalog. And a, a real significance of that for me was I learned how to make books from Stewart and Stewart learned from a newspaper. Well, the IBM composer was how you set type. It was a $10,000 typewriter. It was the next step after hot lead after lineup type. And so in the 50s newspapers, magazines switched over to this. It was a, it was the IBM typewriter, the type that had a font [00:10:00] of ball, you know, like to Selectric. Speaker 4:People are familiar with a selectrix well this was just a high end Selectric. That's how we made books back then. Books are beautiful and I think they kind of that resemble the whole Earth Catalog format. The whole Earth Catalog was 11 by 14 and so with shelter and I've never done a book that big. Well for one thing, they're expensive. But the other thing is bookstore shelves don't accommodate big books like that. They did in the, in the 70s when there were a bunch of books out there that were large. I wish I could do [00:10:30] one like that, but, but our books, our am, each of our books has got a thousand photographs in it. They're pretty graphic. I wanted to ask you, you seem to focus on building your own home, but small homes, all your books, or at least the ones I'm familiar with are kind of about tiny or small. Speaker 4:Can you differentiate between tiny and small and talk about why you think now that small homes are the way to go versus tiny? The media loves tiny homes. They're very photogenic. They go in the opposite direction of the houses [00:11:00] that were getting bigger and bigger. Even children, little five-year-olds. They like tiny houses, tiny homes, because they can relate to them. The book we did was under 500 square feet. Some of them are on wheels. It's tiny homes. Tiny homes. Yeah. And then, and then we did a book called tiny homes on the move, which was about nomadic, tiny homes on wheels or in the water basically. I thought, well, you know, not a lot of people are in spite of all the, there's TV shows on tiny homes, which are basically phony [00:11:30] a, they're like reality shows and there's all this attention. If you, you know, every day there's articles on tiny houses or tiny homes, but it's not realistic that many people are gonna want to live in a 200 square foot house. Speaker 4:If a couple, uh, does that, you're going to have to get along pretty well and maybe each have your own tiny home. Uh, but uh, so then we started, so I started collecting on homes in the 400 to 1200 square foot category. So that's what small homes is. That's what the small homes [00:12:00] book most recent book is. Small homes. Yeah. Right size. And that has a lot more relevance to a lot more people than tiny homes. But tiny homes is still got that cache, you know, it's a buzzword. Cities have started to embrace the idea. Even Berkeley a lot in the northwest and northern California of using them for homeless populations as or for, you know, putting in your backyard because of the high cost of grants. Is this a bad solution in your opinion? No, it's a good solution. I mean, but, but a small homes are really more relevant than tiny [00:12:30] homes. Speaker 4:I mean, I don't know if Berkeley's doing it, but Santa Cruz and Portland, Oregon and Vancouver have ordinances that allow you to build a like a granny flat in the backyard. So your mom's 93 years old and you don't want to spend 60 grand a year for her. You can't in a rest home, you build a little place in the backyard and these cities have made it easier for you to do that without having, just like start from scratch because you've already got sewer, water and electricity there, so you don't need a full blown new building building permit. [00:13:00] So that's, I think that's a really a great thing. And that's starting to happen here too. Yeah, we're working on those. And those are legal. What is the average size of these granny flats that you're talking about? I don't think they are small. No. I would think they'd be in a five, 600 700 square feet versus the, yeah, I mean when you get up to four or 500 debt, that's kind of decent. Speaker 4:If it's, if it's a, if the architecture is good, if the interior's designed well, you know, that's a good size. That's a good thing that's happening. There's a lot of attention being given [00:13:30] to tiny homes for homeless people. I mean there's problems like sewage, I mean cheese I just saw in Berkeley this morning just to really, you know, you know, just look like a third world country with these guys camped out in garbage all over the place and you know, what else are they going to do? Are they going to go, it's not important that everybody live in a tiny home, but it's important that things get smaller, that they go in that direction. The American house, typical American houses like 2,800 square feet. So these, the largest of these quotes, [00:14:00] small homes is about half that size. And also if you're building for yourself, which a lot of our people do, you can build and then you can add on a smaller house is cheaper to build, cheaper to heat and cool. Speaker 4:Um, more practical, quicker to build. I think our people as say opposed to dwell magazine, people are do it yourself, people to all magazines. Very, I mean, I, it's, it's OK. I mean it's, um, there, but they're very sterile looking to me. [00:14:30] There's never anything out of place. My own house and people who are attracted to that kind of lifestyle, our houses might be messy. Uh, you know, they're, they're, they're center around the kitchen there that we hopefully have a vegetable garden. They seem to be very individual there. They're all over the place. Some of them are in cities. The personality of the house, well, some of them are in cities. Like there's a, two families in San Francisco bought a house, uh, and made it into a duplex legally so that they, they split the cost. So that lowers your costs in an expensive [00:15:00] city to have. Speaker 4:And another couple bought a rundown house in La for like $200,000 and worked on it and worked on it and fixed it up. So there are things you can do in cities. And the big thing, I think maybe almost one of the most important things, like back in the 60s we want to define 10 acres in the country and build a log cabin or so and Adobe house. Now I think if I were young, if I were in my twenties, thirties, I would look around in towns and cities at these small homes that are [00:15:30] in marginal neighborhoods. You know, say at Richmond, like I go around and I look a lot these little houses there, they're in Berkeley, they're small. And if you find an area that's maybe just recovering from, from being, you know, drug infested, you know, uh, and, and uh, you know, that been maybe the, the drug dealers have moved out and, and so if you buy, you can buy a small home and fix it up. Speaker 4:And so in this book, I have probably 80 photographs of these little houses and a lot of them are in Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, I, [00:16:00] I say to people, okay, if I were looking around now, I would look in [inaudible], forget Berkeley, forget Albany, forget Marin County, forget Sausalito. But I would go look in Vallejo, San Leandro, Hayward, you know, these, uh, Pinole, uh, Rodeo, you know, I'd go look in these, these, you know, or, or small towns up in the Sacramento Valley. What happened in Sausalito is kind of typical, is that the artists first moved there because it's beautiful and wonderful. And then you have the [00:16:30] lawyers and accountants and people, doctors start paying a lot of money for the places in Sausalito or mill valley. And pretty soon it's not, you know, the artists have to move on. And so those places it's gone. I mean, the house, the cost of homes in effect, the whole bay area, uh, you know, is just absurd. Speaker 4:You know, unless you're making $300,000 a year. So we're at a point we have to quit extracting materials. We have to do that. Yeah, well, all these little [00:17:00] houses or you know, you've got the foundation, you've got to start. And so another thing about the sixties was it was a time, it was the most rich time and probably the history of the world. You could live on such a small amount of money back then, I mean, gas was 35 cents a gallon. There was this period when it was, it was after the war. Everything was booming and so you could take the time off to figure out what you wanted to do. Like if you wanted to change your life, I could work on building a house without having a full time job. Nowadays, it's more [00:17:30] tricky. What I did actually, when I was working as an insurance broker, I went home and built every night and on the weekends, so I was doing both of those things. Speaker 4:You know? Again, it was, you know, you could live on less money back then, so it's trickier now, you know? But I think still if you do it yourself, if you build it yourself, you're going to save 50% to begin with because a building is 50% labor and 50% materials. Jill, if you provide all the labor, then if you don't get a mortgage, you're [00:18:00] going to save another 50% because mortgages, you pay more in interest and you do in principle, prices rise every year, but still, so you can do any varying amounts of the work yourself. Maybe you're just going to hire somebody to do all the work, you know, but where maybe you're going to hire a carpenter and work along with them, you know, hire a plumber and help out. And so there's all shades of a [inaudible] Speaker 2:creates good community too. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Is another benefit. Yeah. [00:18:30] If you're just tuning in, you're listening to method to the madness. A weekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley Celebrating Bay area innovators. Today I'm talking with Lloyd Con. Lloyd is a builder of books in homes for over 40 years. The message in Lloyd Con's books is that you can create your own home with your own hands using mostly natural materials. Speaker 3:[00:19:00] Yes, Speaker 2:a lot of homes. Do you know that you've visited a lot at, what's your favorite small home? Where is it? Do you have one? Speaker 4:I have a favorite. Uh, well I it burned down, but, um, it was, it was on a Hornby island in British Columbia. Why was it your favorite? It was just awesome. It was just, it was built by, well, my favorite builder in the world that I met after 40 years of studying builders [00:19:30] and homes. Turns out his name was Lloyd House. So Lloyd, I mean he's not in the books or anything. He's the most wonderful designer and builder in the world I think. And he built a house. Uh, it's one of those things, you have to see it to understand how, how wonderful and beautiful it was on an inappropriate, just the, the windows, the materials, the light, the setting. And it's in the book builders of the Pacific coast. It's called Stefan's house. Uh, but then I have another friend, my other best friend [00:20:00] in the world, Louis Frazier, as built couple of wonderful buildings. And my favorite buildings are in our books. Louise building is in homework, kind of the sequel to shelter. It came in 2004 and then builders of the Pacific coast, which is mainly builders in British Columbia was 2008 and then tiny homes, tiny homes on the move and then small homes and forthcoming of book on the 60s Speaker 2:well, let's talk about that. I was going to ask you, you've, you've been focusing on homes. What are you gonna say about the sixties? Speaker 4:There are TV [00:20:30] shows, books, magazine articles, museum exhibits right now because of the quote, uh, 50th anniversary of the summer of love and I'm including Berkeley, had hippie modernism. The Victorian Albert Museum in London had a, you say you want a revolution, a, there's an exhibit right now at the Dion. All this stuff has been coming out in the last three or four months and I'm looking at it and thinking that isn't the way I sought at all. And uh, this is all wrong or [00:21:00] this is at least, this isn't my version of it. I was born in San Francisco, I went to high school and the Haight Ashbury and I dropped out of the insurance business in 1965 because I was more interested in the counterculture than I was in my own generation. So I was looking at at all of that from a slightly different perspective. And so I watched, I lived in Mill Valley, uh, and I was going into San Francisco. Speaker 4:And so I thought, well, it may be, it's not that, it's not that these guys are wrong, it's just that I have my own view [00:21:30] of the 60s. And also there was the fact that the 60s changed my life, changed my life. So I'm saying, okay, here's what I saw happen, you know, and here's what was happening in 1963 in 1967, the summer of love, it was basically all over. Ken Keasy said something I read recently said that it's Haight Ashbury was a neighborhood. Uh, the 60s was a movement and everybody's focusing on the Haight Ashbury and the diggers and Peter Coyote. Well, the diggers were hard edge New Yorkers [00:22:00] who got to the Haight Ashbury kind of late and kind of took over. The people I knew left by then I started shooting pictures in the 60s and uh, so I've got black and white pictures. So I'm going to do a book that's different looking from the other books and saying, here's what you know, here was the Monterey pop festival. Speaker 4:Here's what happened there. And here's what happened. When I lived down in big surf for two years, you know, I was part of the 60s I wasn't in the Haight Ashbury and here were the first dances, you know, here's what it was like in San Francisco on those years. [00:22:30] And when this coming out, well, a project like all my projects is people say, well how do you, how do you build a house? And I say start. If you start, most likely you're going to be able to do it because as you go along, you'll, you'll learn as you go and you'll get a momentum. And so working on a book, I'll start on a book and I'll see if it looks like it's happening. And so I've started on this book about a month ago and it seems like it's working today. I kinda hit another octave in it, a working for an hour and a half on it [00:23:00] this morning on my laptop. Speaker 4:So I was an insurance broker for five years, 1960 65 I took a month off the insurance business and hitchhiked across the country to sort of think things out, like my walkabout. And I stayed in New York for a while and went out and visited my cousin who lived in, he was an artist in province town on Cape Cod and I was hitchhiking back into New York and I got picked up by these kids who were going to the Rhode Island School of design. Well you want to stay at our loft? You can hang out there if you want. Oh sure. Well we're going to a Bob Dylan concert night. You want to go? Yeah. [00:23:30] So it was $3 to get in. 1965 October I think. So I go to the concert, didn't really know much about Bob Dylan. I wasn't a folk music fan. The first half he did folk music. Speaker 4:If the cops let me get right up next to the stage, I said I was a reporter, I'm sure. Okay. So I had a camera, second half these guys come out with electric guitars. Oh, what's this? And so, so I shot pictures and a lot of people booed and walked out when he did the electronic music. And so years later I'm looking back at these pictures and I'm looking at this [00:24:00] guy saying, well that's Robbie Robertson. That's Rick Danko. It's like, that's the band. So anyway, so I, I, that's a nice little pictorial part. Oh yeah, it was, it was, yeah. And I, I've gone back and read about that period. And in fact there's, um, some records that have just come out in the last year on new bootleg albums from 1965 to 66 when he was, he started out at the Newport Jazz Festival with Mike Bloomfield playing the guitar. And then, you know, he hooked up with the band. Speaker 4:That'll be part of the book and then, yeah, [00:24:30] it's going to be fun. What you said that you think of the 60s as a movement. Yeah. Do you see any similarities in these small home movements today that you know that the millennials, what I think it is 20 year olds that I love those guys because they are, it's like they're discovering the 60s they're saying, hey, hey, what you guys were doing back then was pretty cool. They're reading the shelter book, which is, I don't know, four decades old and they're like it. So I think, I think that the millennials are a completely different group from their previous generation [00:25:00] and that's what's happening. They're looking back at that stuff and they like that they, they don't want to work for Google or maybe they want to work for Google, but they, they want to incorporate some of these things in their lifetime. Speaker 4:You know, like you don't have to do it all. I mean, maybe you're not going to have a great big garden. Maybe you live in New York, you're going to grow chives on your fire escape big consumers either. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's what's happening with the millennials is that they recognize what was going on back then. And actually it all kind of dovetails [00:25:30] with k. So here's all this, uh, attention now on the 60s with all these exhibits and all these TV programs and let's look at the 60s and figure out what worked and what, and a part of my book is going to be what didn't work. You know, that's kind of fun to think about it. It was stuff that did not work. You know, people are gonna want to get hold of you Lloyd. How can they best do that? Instagram and then a blog called Lloyd con.com and that's k to two Alto, y. Speaker 4:D. K h. N. I've done over 5,000 posts [00:26:00] on my blog. And then we also have a thing called the shelter blog, t h. G, the shelter blog. And then our website is sheltered pub.com we're, we're trying to use social media. I mean basically we, I want to do books and uh, we're, we're, I'm about to do a series of, of books that are print on demand books. The first one's going to be a driftwood architecture, a driftwood shacks, anonymous architecture on the California coast. It'll be like a 48 page color book. And then, [00:26:30] you know, various small books, small, you know, there's, there's a magazine article and then there's a book and then there's a booklet a, there are some things that don't warrant a whole book. You know, like I could do a 32 or 64 page book on Southeast Asia, but I can't do a 200 page book without spending years there. Speaker 4:So there are options now that I'm about to explore with doing small print runs and to get information out there. And how do people find your books? Are they available on earned bookstores? [00:27:00] They're Amazon. We can encourage people to go on to bookstores. Good. You know, they say the old is new again. Well that's not the whole picture. It's like the oldest being reconsidered in light of the new now. So you've got digital recording and then you've got vinyl is making a big comeback because there's a quality to the analog that you don't get with the digital. So I think you have to balance those things. I mean, you can balance those things. So it's kind of fun to think how can I bring some analog [00:27:30] into this digital world? You know, how can I do stuff for myself and look at my hands, you know, to look at our books, really the best way to do it. Speaker 4:Or look at the blogs or look at what I'm doing and, and maybe pick up on some of the, the ways of doing things for yourself with shelter or with food that don't have to be all encompassing that, that that's maybe you're not going to spend full time building a house or farming or gardening, but that you can incorporate some of those things into your life. And [00:28:00] so I'm not responsible for online stuff that people do for whatever they do in the digital world. But I think that the value of our work is that here are things that you can do with your own hands that will make your life richer. And we'll end. We'll be, we'll produce results that will make your life richer, but there will be also good in the doing. And that are also sort of basic, um, human skills that have only been neglected for the last maybe a hundred years. Speaker 4:Like since the industrial revolution, [00:28:30] you know, before that everybody created their own food and shelter. So maybe you go back and you kinda do some of those things, weave it into your life. You know, when you're still checking your email every day and, and your computer is not going to build a house for you. You still need your hands and you still need a hammer. And a saw, you know, could be a nail gun and an electric saw. But it's still, so those things, it's kind of comforting to me that, that that's still the way food and shelter are provided [00:29:00] to, you know, just you, you do it, you know Speaker 2:yourself. Well, thank you for being on the program. That was Lloyd Kahn, editor in chief of shelter publications where he's been writing about small homes. For the last four decades. You've been listening to method to the madness, a weekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley, celebrating Bay area innovators. [00:29:30] You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes university. We'll be taking the month of August off at method to the madness. We'll be back again Fridays in September. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Stuph File Program Featuring TV Writer/producer John Rogers; Chris Nihmey, author of Two Sides To The Story; Lloyd Kahn, author of Small Homes: The Right Size Download TV writer/producer, John Rogers, talks about TV showrunners and explains exactly what the job involves. Chris Nihmey is a mental health advocate, illness survivor, author and teacher who was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder in 2001.  He’s written a memoir called Two Sides To The Story. Lloyd Kahn is the author of Small Homes: The Right Size, abook where 65 builders share their knowledge of building and design. This week’s opening guest slate is presented by 6-year-old Jaxson Miles from Arizona.  He’s the son of Dan Miles, host of Every Friday with Dan & Olivia and also The Friends of Dan Podcast.

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast My guest for this episode is Holly Brown of Island Creek Farm, a small permaculture farm located in Huddleston, Virginia. Holly and I sat down at her home on a mild day in October to talk about her origins as a farmer and what it is like to run a permaculture based farm on imperfect farmland in western Virginia complete with heat and humidity during the summer and the occasional hard freeze in the winter. On less than one acre farmed organically the farm supported herself and two interns financially, while keeping three restaurants stocked with vegetables, provided fifteen CSA shares, and also fed herself, those interns, and her extended family. She even had enough left over to give to local food pantries. She accomplishes all of this while married with two children, and without the use of insecticides, herbicides, or any tilling. I learned all of this in our time together recording the interview and while we ate lunch and spent several hours walking around her farm. That time together was incredibly inspirational to me and gave me a better understanding of what we can accomplish with the right systems and support. My time with Holly really stuck with me, even now several months later, because this was the first time I saw a farm that was integrated and operating in a way that I would want to run a farm when consider creating my own permaculture demonstration site. Her farm showed the possibilities I read about in books like Peter Bane's The Permaculture Handbook, while remaining true to her own ideals. Holly invited me into the home she shares with her husband and two children, a modest place compared to most of the houses I've seen in America, more reminiscent of the ideas you'll find in the books by Lloyd Kahn, though not quite that small. In the time after the interview she and I shared lunch together, a curry consisting of on-farm vegetables with yogurt she made from local raw milk and a salad containing something like 12 different kinds of lettuces. We then walked around and she showed me her successes and failures, including two different gothic arch greenhouse frames, one of which was strong and supportive that Holly demonstrated by doing a pull-up on, and another that wavered in the wind a bit. If anything, visiting Holly gave me hope that we can build productive permaculture farms that feed people. That we can use little urban, suburban, and rural spaces to grow the food necessary, in an ecologically responsible manner, that can make a real difference. From that she, and the conversation with Rick Williams, inspired me to do even more, in this space and in the soil. We can create a bountiful world for our selves and all life on earth. Trips like this to visit Holly at Island Creek Farm, and the Virginia tour as a whole that allowed me to speak with Trish Wright, Rick Williams, and Lee and Dave O'Neill, are all possible because of listener support. Your gifts to the show allow me to keep this podcast going and to meet with people and bring back all the information and photographs that go with it. Please consider making a one-time or ongoing contribution by going to: www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/support. As long as I am able I will be here to assist you on your permaculture path so please reach out to me if there is anything I can do for you. Email: The Permaculture Podcast Or Write: The Permaculture Podcast The Permaculture Podcast The next episode, out on Wednesday, February 18th, is a conversation with the timber framer Patrick Shunney about how to get started in timber framing, and his appreciation for the skill and artistry of the craft. Until the next time, take care of Earth, your self, and each other.

Donate to The Permaculture Podcast Online: via PayPal Venmo: @permaculturepodcast Photographer John, Layne, and I had an incredible time at the Mother Earth News Fair. Thankfully we had three days to enjoy ourselves, from Friday, September 12th to Sunday September 14th, 2014, or we might have been a little overwhelmed, there was so much going on. During our time there we had a chance to meet with or talk to a number of people. If you have a chance to attend one of the Mother Earth News Fairs, as they are held in multiple locations throughout the country, please do. They are well worth your time. Here are some of, but by no means all, of the highlights. First up was Michael Judd, author of Edible Landscaping with a Permaculture Twist. We had a chance to interview him and hang out some throughout the show. Michael was very generous with his time and even more dynamic in person than when we sat down an interviewed in the past. If you are near Frederick, Maryland, he is someone worth looking up. As I live not too far from Michael, I want to go visit again and do another formal interview. You can checkout his design company and find more information at: Ecologia Design. Next we sat down with Tradd Cotter who was just as engaging in person as he was in the interview that came out in early September. We sat down for a while and talked about medicinal mushrooms, which was the second of our videos from the fair. Once the camera was shut off he hung out with us for another hour talking mushrooms and we dug deeper into why it's important for people to own the knowledge to change the world. He also joked with Layne and John when they showed up to photograph one of his presentations. If you get a chance to take a class with Tradd or see him speak at a conference, do it. It's well worth your time. John, Layne, and I also have an invitation from Tradd to go visit him in 2015 and tour the facilities at Mushroom Mountain. There were also Jason and Sera Drevenak of the North American Bushcraft School. Located in Hedgesville, West Virginia, they are not too far from my hometown of Hagerstown, Maryland. Together they offer a number of primitive skill workshops and classes which are right in line with the re-wilding that Ben Weiss and Wilson Alvarez advocate. Jason is a gifted and engaging teacher who lives this. Jason and Sera tan their own hides from road kill, and forge their own bushcraft knives. Of all the workshops I saw, Jason's on primitive firemaking drew one of the largest crowds I of any of the non-keynote events. People stood around the edges of the stage area four and five deep. I'm planning to go down and take some classes at the North American Bushcraft School sometime, or at least go visit. I also spoke with Matthew Goldfarb of Fruition Seeds. He and Petra Page-Mann (no relation to me that I know of), have one of the coolest plant breeding programs around that I know about. I heard about their work when talking with Matt Stillerman and Michael Burns at the Fingerlakes Permaculture Site Tour, and after seeing their company in the program wanted to grab them for a few minutes. Matthew and Petra are working to create open-pollinated heirloom varieties that are adapted and resilient in local conditions, unique to the bioregion in which they are developed. I purchased several packets of the Insectary Blend of seeds to plant next year as part of our 2015 garden. Three Rivers EVA – The Western PA Chapter of the Electric Auto Association – had a variety of electric vehicles on-site ranging from custom built cars, trucks, and bicycles, as well as factory products including a Tesla Model S. Sitting up near the electric vehicles was Tara Whitsitt of Fermentation on Wheels. This is a food and fermentation education project that travels the country teaching people about nutrition in a converted bus. If you've read any of the books by Sandor Katz, you have an idea of the jars and crocks filling the bus. She had kimchi, kombucha, water and dairy kefir grains, and many many others in a well-designed stable rack allowing everything to remain in the open and on display. Once she's settled into an area for a few days I want to sit down and have a chat with her. Uncle Mud was running ongoing cob and plaster natural building workshop that was very hands-on and kid friendly. One of the pictures I took here was of a small girl putting plaster on the wall. The man speaking to those around him encouraged her to pull and play while he talked with the other people around him. As a parent I liked the openness and willingness to allow her to learn and experiment. I also met some others folks along the way who are doing good work and I've reached out to them for interviews, including Dan Chiras, of The Evergreen Institute and author of the Natural Home, and Lloyd Kahn, author of numerous books on tiny houses and hand built homes, including the incredible Shelter. While at the fair I also had a chance to sit down with Jen Mendez of PermieKids.com and we talked about permaculture, education, and podcasting for a while. She'll be joining me on the show as a guest. Some interesting products and organizations from the event. Airhead Composting Toilet. I liked this unit for the small size and easy to empty liquids container. Compared to some other companies the price was rather reasonably at under $1,000. If I were going to purchase something for a tiny-home installation, of what I saw at the show, this is the one I'd go for. Brooder Bottle Cap. This is a simple ball valve design that fits to a plastic soda bottle, whether 20oz or 2 liter, to water chickens and other animals. It strikes me as an appropriate technology because of the simplicity and durability, I also have been reading about a move in commercial chicken operations to move towards bottle feeding and this is an inexpensive way to do so. Al, the owner, was generous with his time explaining the idea behind the products as well as how to train your chickens to use them. He also wants to create a 501©3 that can produce these watering bottle caps for distribution to developing countries and disaster areas. Retail at the show was $5.95 for a pair. Chatham University, located in Pittsburgh, PA, was onsite and handing out information regarding two interesting degree programs. A Bachelor and Master of Sustainability. If you are involved in permaculture and would like some additional education to support your work, something I've found useful in the credentialed society in the United States, this is a direction worth investigating. Another suggestion for a program is the one I'm enrolled in, which is a Master of Park and Resource Management at Slippery Rock University. Patrick and Matthew of Go Sun Stoves were there demoing products. I'd talked to Patrick last year so it was good to see him there and to meet Matthew. They both met at a Permaculture Design course and worked on developing their innovative solar oven. I want to pick one of these up and spend a year cooking with it through all seasons and conditions and see what living with this type of solar cooker is really like. With the idea of using natural and renewable resources, an interesting wood splitter onsite was the WoodOx Woodsman. Having watched my father put an axe into his foot, twice, as well as splitting wedges fly when struck off center, these three and four way splitters are tools that safely handle the task of preparing firewood for a self-sufficient homestead. Mushroom Sources: At the event were two purveyors of mushroom spawn and supplies. One was mentioned by Michael Judd when we sat down and spoke, which is Smugtown Mushrooms out of Rochester, NY. The other was Back Bone Food Farm in Oakland, MD. If you'd like to try someone else, here are other options. Finally, I'd like to give a personal thanks to Brandy Ernzen, the PR Manager for Ogden Publications. She made the entire experience of working the Mother Earth News Fair easy and simple. That ends the report from the Mother Earth News Fair by the crew at The Permaculture Podcast. We shot some other video along the way, which I'm working on as time allows. Keep checking out the YouTube channel for the show, as well as the Facebook page. If you enjoyed this type of show, help us create more like it by supporting the podcast. Find out how to make a one time or ongoing contribution by going to www.ThePermaculturePodcast.com/support. Until the next time, create a better world each day by taking care of Earth, your self, and each other. Get In Touch E-mail: The Permaculture Podcast The Permaculture Podcast with Scott Mann The Permaculture Podcast Facebook: Facebook.com/ThePermaculturePodcast Twitter: @permaculturecst (Episode: MENF2014)

Lloyd Kahn is a builder of books and homes. Editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, Lloyd  is the author of many books about handbuilt shelter including Home Work, Tiny Homes, Builders of the Pacific Coast and the classic book Shelter that documented handbuilt housing around the world. Lloyd was the Shelter editor of the early Whole Earth Catalogs and has been writing about building and people who build for much of his life. In this interview with Jill Cloutier, Lloyd talks about why he became interested in in the art and craft of shelter, the benefits of creating your own home, the resurgence of interest in handbuilt homes and his new book Tiny Homes On The Move:Wheels and Water. Read more about Lloyd Kahn at his personal blog. Read more about handmade homes at the Shelter Publication blog.

Lloyd Kahn The Half-Acre Homestead You want to be more self sufficient, but you only have a small piece of land. What can you do and where do you begin? The reality is that you can’t be completely self-sufficient (even with a large acreage), but self-sufficiency, like perfection, is a direction. Join host Michael Lerner for a conversation with Bolinas’ Lloyd Kahn—editor-in-chief of independent California publisher Shelter Publications and author of Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter—about the tools and techniques he’s developed or settled on during 40 years of raising food and animals, foraging, cutting firewood, and other urban homesteading activities. He’ll talk about what works and doesn’t, the tools he’s found most helpful, and why he still has chickens, but no longer goats or bees. Lloyd Kahn Lloyd is an author, photographer, and pioneer of the green building and green architecture movements. With a degree from Stanford University, he began work as a carpenter in the 1960s, eventually building four houses. Influenced by Buckminster Fuller, in 1968 he started building geodesic domes. Kahn next worked for Stewart Brand as Shelter editor for the Whole Earth Catalog. In 1970 Kahn published his first book, Domebook One, followed the next year with Domebook 2, which sold 165,000 copies. In 1971, he bought a half-acre lot in Bolinas, California, and built a shake-covered geodesic dome (later featured in Life magazine). After living in his dome for a year, Kahn decided domes did not work well: he stopped the printing of Domebook 2 and disassembled and sold his dome. He then went in search of other (non-dome) ways to build – across the United States, Ireland, and England, and the book Shelter (1973) was the result. Kahn’s next book, Tiny Homes On The Move: Wheels & Water, is set for publication in May 2014. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.

Lloyd Kahn What Really Happened in the Sixties? A longtime Bolinas resident, Lloyd was living in San Francisco in the 1960s and has a powerful narrative about what he believes really happened between 1963 and 1967. He has some wonderful visual images that capture that iconic moment in time. Join Michael Lerner in a conversation with author, publisher, and Bolinas resident Lloyd Kahn about the decade and shared some slides from Home Work—evidence that the power of the 1960s lives on in the buildings visionary home builders are still creating today. Event attendees Bill Braasch has a slideshow of the event on his blog. Thanks, Bill! Lloyd Kahn Lloyd creates visually exquisite and conceptually visionary books about the buildings we live in. His most recent book is Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter. Lloyd Kahn is the editor and publisher of Shelter Publications in Bolinas, California. He was formerly the shelter editor for the Whole Earth Catalog, the editor of the 1973 book Shelter. Shelter Publications has been in business for 37 years and has also published the international bestseller Stretching, by Bob Anderson. Their latest book is The Barefoot Architect: A Manual On Green Building. Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.