Earthship Design Principles:

1)Thermal/Solar Heating & Cooling

2)Solar & Wind Electricity

3)Contained Sewage Treatment

4)Building with Natural & Recycled Materials

5)Water Harvesting

6)Food Production

Some more little houses we like. Making a small house to live in using the cheapest materials is the best green house alternative for people with time and money constraints.

My first introduction to little houses happened many years ago. I saw a Japanese Tea House. The whole concept of living in small space, so common in Japan, was quite appealing to me.

Later on, as far apart as Amsterdam, Holland, Bangkok, Thailand, and Broklyn, New York, I saw floating homes.
The concept is quite appealing, but the costs can be quite hight.

Then we have the humble trailer/ RV / camper home
and it’s recent offspring, the tiny house on a trailer.

With all these examples, the idea that smaller is better and you can do it yourself started to blossom in my mind.

I also started becoming more and more aware of certain opressive regulatory forces in society.

For example-

The Smallest House in Great Britain

can be found on the Quay, in Conwy, Wales. It has its own entry in the Guinness Book of Records. This house is also known as the Quay House.

Its dimensions are 3.05 metres x 1.8 metres.

It has been lived in since the Sixteenth Century. It was even inhabited by a family at one point[citation needed]). It was lived in until 1900, when the owner was a 6ft 3 inch fisherman named Robert Jones. The rooms were too small for him to stand up in fully and he was eventually forced to move out when the council declared the house unfit for human habitation. The house is still owned by his descendants

article at lowtechmag

It’s a marsh that you put your sewage in, and it cleans the water.

The Water Purification Marsh at Aröd was the first construction of its kind in Sweden, i.e. an artificial wetland, shaped in a manner to retain the nutrients phosphorus and nitrogen from agriculture and household on terra firma by aid of a biological multitude of plant and animal organisms,

And another source:

http://www.vattenmiljo.se/pres_eng.htm

One problem with this concept is that it requires lots of land. A reed bed might be a viable sewage treatment alternative for a small family dwelling.

Of course the easiest is a composting toilet.

an EcoHouse in Britain, website lists detailed tips on making your own ecological house.

This is a story about freedom.  A family decides to build a simple cheap ecological house that will let them concentrate on living.

We will be making a documentary and keeping a blog to document our experience.