Life Straw at a Glance

Life Straw at a Glance

Half of the world’s poor suffer from waterborne disease, and nearly 6,000 people – mainly children – die from diseases contracted from unsafe drinking water every day.


LifeStraw® water purifiers have been developed as a practical way of preventing disease and saving lives, as well as achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe water by the year 2015.

LifeStraw® and LifeStraw® Family are complimentary point-of-use water filters – truly unique offerings from Vestergaard Frandsen that will help people obtain safe drinking water at home and outside – paving the way to accomplishing the MDGs.

Help the disaster victims of the Haitian Earthquake. For a donation of only $6.50 each, you can purchase a LifeStraw and have it deliverewd to a needy person in Haiti.

Can LifeStraw filter out cow dung from water? Watch the You Tube demonstration.

Mike Reynolds and Earthships

An Earthship is a type of passive solar home made of natural and recycled materials. Designed and marketed by Earthship Biotecture of Taos, New Mexico, the homes are primarily constructed to work autonomously and are generally made of earth-filled tires, utilising thermal mass construction to naturally regulate indoor temperature. They also usually have their own special natural ventilation system. Earthships are generally Off-the-grid homes, minimizing their reliance on public utilities and fossil fuels.


Earthships are built to utilize the available local resources, especially energy from the sun. For example, windows on the sunny side admit light and heat, and the buildings are often horseshoe-shaped to maximize natural light and solar-gain during winter months. Likewise, the thick, dense outer walls provide effective insulation against summer heat.

Internal, non-load-bearing walls are often made of a honeycomb of recycled cans joined by concrete and are referred to as tin can walls. These walls are usually thickly plastered with stucco.

The roof of an Earthship is heavily insulated - often with earth or adobe - for added energy efficiency.The Earthship was designed as a structure that would exist in harmony with its environment and be freed from the constraints of modern shelters which rely on centralized utilities. It is important that the Earthship create its own utilities as well as use readily available and sustainable materials. In order to be entirely self-sufficient the Earthship needs to be able to handle the three systems of Water, Electricity, and Climate. While these systems are not exclusive to Earthships, a properly designed Earthship must have these systems.

See a You Tube video about Mike Reynolds, vision.

Las Pozas

Las Pozas ("the Pools") is a sculpture garden built by Edward James, more than 2,000 feet above sea level, in a tropical rain forest in the mountains of Mexico. It includes more than 80 acres of natural waterfalls and pools interlaced with towering Surrealist sculptures in concrete.

Las Pozas is near the village of Xilitla, San Luis Potosí, a seven-hour drive north of Mexico City. In the early 1940s, James went to Los Angeles, and then decided that he "wanted a Garden of Eden set up . . . and I saw that Mexico was far more romantic” and had "far more room than there is in crowded Southern California.” In Cuernavaca, he hired Plutarco Gastelum, then a young manager of a telegraph office, as a guide. The two found Xilitla in November 1945

In Xilitla, Plutarco married a local woman and had four children. They all lived with "Uncle Edward", as the children called James, in a house Plutarco had built, a mock-Gothic cement castle, now a hotel - La Posada El Castillo.

Between 1949 and 1984, James built thirty-six concrete follies - palaces, temples and pagodas, including the House on Three Floors Which Will in Fact Have Five or Four or Six, the House with a Roof like a Whale, and the Staircase to Heaven. There were also plantings and beds full of tropical plants, including orchids - there were, apparently, 29,000 at Las Pozas at one time - and a variety of small casas (homes), niches, and pens that held exotic birds and wild animals from the world over. Massive sculptures up to four stories tall punctuate the site. The many trails throughout the garden site are composed of steps, ramps, bridges and narrow, winding walkways that traverse the valley walls. Construction of Las Pozas cost more than $5 million. To pay for it, James sold his collection of Surrealist art at auction.

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Stop Killing your Soil!

On a project that I recently completed the soil is some of the worst I have ever seen. I had added to the existing plant palette a year ago and in spite of normal soil amending practices had watched the plants grow smaller every month. I asked the gardener to fertilize the garden. He proceeded to dump fistfuls of granulated fertilizer around the trunks of the plants and killed off a good percentage of the young plantings. After that he was prohibited from ever fertilizing anything again. Later on, he was also prohibited from pruning anything. His job got even easier as we removed most of the sod.


When we stripped the lawn, we blended the sod and roots back into the hard pan to add organics and then purchased a massive amount of Humic Compost from Agri service inc. and blended it along with many bags of WormGold worm castings, ‘Live Earth Bio-Basics’ (soil enzymes) and ‘Soilbuster’ (pelletized gypsum). We purchased a Biostack composting bin and a worm composting bin for our client from Solana Center for Environmental Innovation so that the client could continue to add rich ammendments to the soil as time progresses. The soil had been sterilized through years of chemical fertilizer use, it would take some time to bring it back to life.

The planting theme is eclectic and blends succulents with tropicals. The irrigation is drip and thus we are able to add plenty of water to the Palms, the Sugarcane and Gingers and almost no water to the young succulents as they establish themselves. There are some small areas with groundcover and for those areas we have installed ‘Netafim’ soaker tubing. This moistens the soil with no spray at all.

When the planting is complete the ground will be top coated with Forest Fine, another product from agri service designed to dress the raw dirt and decompose easily over the next year. In six months worms will be added so that they may begin to do their magic and bit by bit the transformation will be complete.

Bomarzo, the park of Monsters & Nymphs

The Park of the Monsters (Parco dei Mostri in Italian), also named Garden of Bomarzo, is a monumental complex located in Bomarzo, Lazio, Italy.

The gardens were created during the Italian Renaissance, in the 16th century. They are composed of a wooded park, located at the bottom of a valley where the castle of Orsini was erected, and populated by sculptures and small buildings divided among of the natural vegetation. It is named so for the many larger-than-life sculptures, some sculpted in the bedrock, which populate this predominantly barren landscape. It was comissioned by Pier Francesco Orsini, a patron of the arts, greatly devoted to his wife Giulia Farnese ; when she died, he created the gardens. The design is attributed to Pirro Ligorio who also built the Villa D'Este in Tivoli near Rome

My Current Project- Courtyard with a Glass Bottle Wall

In Southern California there has been a water shortage over the past few years. As a result, there has been interest in reducing or eliminating lawn areas and replacing them with water-wise solutions. One such project is the Ray Residence in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, CA. Originally, there was an expansive lawn area encompassing the vast majority of the front yard with a single Willow tree in the center that shaded the majority of the lawn.

The solution was to strip the lawn and create a courtyard with an arched entry gate and a garden wall of stacked and mortared in place assortment of glass bottles. Foundations were excavated, reinforced and poured and a base of 8” CMU concrete blocks were installed. As visible in the photos, the CMU’s were cut to undulate creating a flowing base for the bottle area of the wall.

To match the CMU’s, the bottles were cut to 8” lengths with a tile water saw utilizing a diamond blade which created cylinders that are closed at one end and open on the other. Bottles that were too short were pieced with others and therefore closed both inside and outside.

The glass cylinders were mortared into place using a blend of three parts masonry sand to one part plastic cement plus Davis Concrete color ‘Goldenrod’ at the rate of ½ pound of color to ½ bag of plastic cement. One cup of concrete glue was added to each batch.

Although we had been saving bottles for months and encouraging our friends to do the same, we soon ran out of bottles. We figured out that we needed around 1300 bottles and the project soon came to a stop as the supply of bottles dwindled to a trickle. We eventually connected up with a local bar and restaurant that was willing to collect and store bottles for us. Because it was a bar as well, we started getting more interesting colors and shapes. From them came one gallon jars that had contained olives; Absolut Vodka bottle colered in Paech and Mandarin; Jagermeister green and rectangular bottle; Sky Vodka blue bottles; pink and blue Sake bottles and the list goes on.

To add interest to the court yard we covered the porch wood siding posts with metal lath, added Salmon colored Idaho Quartzite and stuccoed them with flared bases that flowed into the Quartzite patios below. On the side property line block wall we added a wall fountain with a wind god head that spews water into a shallow basin and surrounded it with Glacial Turquoise rock cobble. To unify the space, the court yard Quartzite patio has irregular bands of the Glacial Turquoise rock cobble with small pebbles interspersed between.

Amending the Soil: We are still in the process of planting the court yard and the space to the street. The soil is some of the worst I have ever seen. When we stripped the lawn we blended the sod and roots back into the hard pan to add organics and then purchased a massive amount of Humic Compost and blended it along with many bags of WormGold worm castings, ‘Live Earth Bio-Basics’ (soil enzymes) and ‘Soilbuster’ (pelletized gypsum). The planting theme is eclectic and blends succulents with tropicals. The irrigation is drip and thus we are able to add plenty of water to the Palms, the Sugarcane and Gingers and almost no water to the young succulents as they establish themselves. There are some small areas with groundcover and for those areas we have installed ‘Netafim’ soaker tubing.

Cal-Earth & Super Adobe

Superadobe (sandbag and barbed wire) technology is a large, long adobe tube. It is a simple adobe, an instant and flexible line generator. It uses the materials of war for peaceful ends, integrating traditional earth architecture with contemporary global safety requirements. Long or short sandbags are filled with on-site earth and arranged in layers or long coils (compression) with strands of barbed wire placed between them to act as both mortar and reinforcement (tension). Stabilizers such as cement, lime, or asphalt emulsion may be added. This patented and trademarked technology is offered free to the needy of the world, and licensed for commercial use.
This concept was originally presented by architect Nader Khalili to NASA for building habitats on the moon and Mars, as “Velcro-adobe”. It comes from years of meditation, hands-on research and development, and searching for simple answers to build with earth. It comes from the concerned heart of someone who did not want to be bound to any one system of construction and looked for only one answer in human shelter, to simplify.

For more information visit calerth.org