ECOLOGICAL HOUSING

What is ecological housing? Ecological housing is one of the most modern and popular ways to stay BETTER than just ‘green’. Ecological housing has the purpose of reducing negative effects on the environment, and going further than that into actually aiding the environment. Ecological houses are built with the goal of sustainable development, in other words using resources and technologies that focus on renewability. Ecological communities are an incredibly rapid-growing industry. Ecological housing can be used on individual home projects, or to create entire estates or communities.

Ecology is defined as the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of life as well as the interactions between organisms and their natural environment. This is what we humans are trying to accomplish with ecological housing – to find a more harmonious way to interact with our natural environment here on planet earth. If we lessen the damage now, there will be a greater opportunity for the human race to thrive in the future.
     Below: Ecological housing takes on many forms, from sunken housing to tree houses, to alternative materials such as cob (far right).

Ecological housing, applied to the global housing market, concentrates on many technologies; a new one, for example, is 'energy conservation housing'. In energy conservation housing, the process called exterior surface cooling involves the heat flow on a building moving from hot to cold areas. This minimizes the energy that we use to heat the interiors of our buildings. It is a new development that is being worked on in order to create energy-efficient plans for our global housing market and to boost even more the efficiency of our ecological housing.

Ecological housing is smart housing, meant to use materials and processes that are easy on the environment and energy usage, and even contribute to a healthy environment.