Sustainable compromises: a yurt, a straw bale house, and ecological living, paperback/alan boye

Living simply isnt always simple.

When Alan Boye first lived in sustainable housing, he was young, idealistic, and not much susceptible to compromise--until rattlesnakes, black widow spiders, and loneliness drove him out of the utilities-free yurt hed built in New Mexico.

Thirty-five years later, he decided to try again.

This time, with an idealism tempered by experience and practical considerations, Boye and his wife constructed an off-the-grid, energy-efficient, straw bale house in Vermont.

Sustainable Compromises chronicles these two remarkable attempts to live simply in two disparate American eras.

Writing with hard-won authority and humor, Boye takes up the how-to practicalities of building green, from finances to nuts and bolts to strains on friends and family.

With Walden as a historical and philosophical touchstone and his own experience as a practical guide, he also explores the ethical and environmental concerns that have framed such undertakings from Thoreaus day to our own.

A firsthand account of the pleasures and pitfalls of living simply, his book is a deeply informed and engaging reflection on what sustainability really means--in personal, communal, ethical, and environmental terms.

About the Author: Alan Boye is a professor of English at Lyndon State College in Vermont.

His most recent book is Tales from the Journey of the Dead: Ten Thousand Years on an American Desert (Nebraska, 2006).