Ecology Professor at Home in Straw House

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/tech/2005/sep/03/090301224.html

MONROE, Maine (AP) - Miles off the paved highway and at the end of a long, bumpy driveway that cuts deep into the woods, Mick Womersley puts the finishing touches on his solar panel-topped home. It's not your ordinary rural dwelling, even one designed to be ecologically sound.

Womersley, a human ecology professor, and his wife Aimee Phillippi live comfortably in a house built of roughly 200 straw bales.

Their home bears no resemblance to the one blown down by the wolf in the children's story. Strong and solid, the walls have insulating capacity several times that of conventional homes, offering more than ample protection from winter temperatures than can persist in the single numbers for days.

Coming from a source that renews itself annually, straw is cheap, and it's not an attractive food source for insects. And its proponents note that once the tightly packed straw is covered with stucco, it catches fire at a higher temperature than wood.

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dang it. I like looking at strawbale homes. I like looking at rammed earth homes even more.

One of the men's magazines I found laying around at work (maxim / stuff / FHM clone) had a one page article on 'living off the grid'.

I tend to think that while such alternative building materials are 'neat', they aren't the answer to all of our problems . . . 3' thick strawbale walls don't work to well in urban areas, and generally can't be built more than one story. Without even trying, urban citizens use roughly half the energy that suburban & rural citizens use. For example, it's a 40 mile round trip between Monroe, ME, and Unity, ME.

regardless, they're neat - one of my favorite architects who use them is http://www.arkintilt.com/

their bit on straw-bale: http://www.arkintilt.com/process/strawbale_process.html