Bové falls for the big fat joke of the building business

“Eco” houses:

Fittingly, M Bové insisted on a house that is “100 per cent ecological”. Conifer walls, copper guttering, non-chemical paints, varnishes containing no pollutants and so on.

Almost all the “natural materials” used in construction, he told Le Monde, came from Germany because France lags behind. The lavatories function without using up water and require him to slop out into a”guaranteed smell-free” compost bin. Solar panels are to thank for 40 per cent of his hot water.

Having done much with green building for more than a decade, the only conclusion that I’ve come to is most everything people want in a green building has more environmental impact than doing it right the first time, and for good.

Banish the transient organic fluff, and you won’t spent the time, money, and energy rebuilding in 20 years. Come to think of it, sheep-boy might realize that his “survivalist” house built by him and others among these “communitarian” types are little more than a piece of their own cognitive dissonance. Something they might only grasp after they’ve destroyed the arable landscape that they’ve fanned out into.

Crank up the pedal-powered CD player and listen to the Joan Baez geriatric collection, because it’s time to hit the wall of delusions, and make sure we don’t capitalize on any of the efficiencies created by technology, a.k.a.: knowing more than we did yesterday.

It is all very well running a peasant farmers’ group using slow internet connections and having to nip indoors to make and receive calls. But a presidential campaign is a little more demanding, even for fringe candidates. “It takes us hours to send three e-mails,” complains M Bové’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Ricez.

And who else should have shared the couple’s sense of inconvenience but Peter Yarrow. It seems surreal that someone from the 1960s American folk group Peter, Paul and Mary would want much to do, beyond leaving on a jet plane, with new-fangled contraptions.

Wise move it is, to compost and give back to you and yours your own pathogens. How about a nice cistern of standing water with undigested transients to go with it?

Hell, while you're at it, why not get rid of a WHOLE MILLENIUM of human progress, and leave mankind’s survival to the fickleness of agriculture and have a short brutish life like they did in the good old days when they REALLY denuded the landscape just to subsist and stay warm!?