Home-space and Work-space: Yurts

Access to a comfortable living space is a basic need, one that does not have to cost the earth. We built our first yurt over 20 years ago; we built our second 10 years later and made a high quality Mongolian yurt with fitted insulation panels, a design suitable for our temperate UK climate. It is a good home and has no mortgage or large overheads. If you need to move, your home space moves with you.

 The 1930’s Civilian Conservation Corps demonstrated how to use a diversity of tents and temporary wooden buildings for short term shelter and workspace during training camps. We have the initial resources to set up small camps using our own tents to house a communal kitchen and workspaces. Going beyond this much longer term housing can be provided in the form of Yurts.

 Yurts are a very low impact portable dwelling.

Have a very low embodied energy.

Can be made from locally available materials

Can be made and maintained by DIY methods

Have a low energy requirement to heat in winter and you can get them very warm

They encourage low consumption living

They are relatively low cost compared to inflated conventional housing

 There is an additional advantage in that living in a yurt brings people much closer to the environment. The surface of the planet becomes your home and you do not see yourself as being detached from nature.

Wide scale application of low impact dwellings in the context of action on climate change can make a very significant contribution to a substantial, sustainable and rapid drop in carbon emissions. In the future the re-ruralisation process will require a growing housing need for rural landbased workers. Created by the movement of large numbers of people from the urban into the rural economy. As the objective is to cut greenhouse gas emissions it would not be practical for people to commute, landbased workers need to live close to where they work. The housing is then in the wrong place, i.e. in the urban environment. It makes no sense to cause large carbon emissions in making new housing of the conventional type. There is also the issue of cost for conventional housing which has been inflated beyond reason. The answer is to use low impact dwellings.