Sustainable Compromises: A Yurt, a Straw Bale House, and Ecological Living by Alan Boye (review)

Handily, the title of this book succinctly notes its content and focus—nothing hidden there or within. Alan Boye, a recently retired professor of English, frankly shares with the reader a memoir of his brief stay in a yurt in the New Mexico tablelands in the early 1970s and a recent several-year process of designing and building a straw-bale home in Vermont. His writing is personal, engaging, and informative. Its strongest structure comes from the careful interweave of distant New Mexican memories, detailed step-by-step learning about his new dwelling, and appropriate facts about the sustainability of daily human living. He aptly balances the use of factoids about water use, the life cycle of plastics, and electrical power with remembrances of people and communities, thinkers and books, and his life and influences upon them.

This is not a book about the Great Plains per se, as he has written elsewhere about the region (e.g., Tales from the Journey of the Dead: Ten Thousand Years on an American Desert and The Complete Roadside Guide to Nebraska), but Boye, a native Nebraskan who moved to New Mexico soon after graduating in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, displays a Great Plains native’s sensitivity to his environment and to reading people, communities, and their motives. This context is subtle but important, because he presents the idea of sustainability by tracing its human dimension.

The insertion of the adjective “sustainable” to modify the noun “compromises” gets at the heart and real value of this book. Compromise is not currently a human action receiving much positive attention. Why would any dyed-in-the-wool environmentalist advocate for compromise when it comes to the sustainability of our planet generally or our home specifically? Working from personal experience and thinking (yurt living, home building, and Thoreau teaching), Boye describes sustainability as an ideal about “living in better harmony with the world.” Once told by a gypsy palm reader that “you have good ideals, but you will always compromise them,” Boye confronts the basic human tension between good intentions and reality. Yurt living and bale building provide many concrete examples of his compromises, but to his credit Boye understands that “the idea of sustainability itself—if we can sustain something that is always in flux” is to “develop an environmental awareness to give us more options.”

Sustainable Compromises: A Yurt, a Straw Bale House, and Ecological Living represents one of a couple dozen books in the Our Sustainable Future Series from the University of Nebraska Press. The editors of that series should be congratulated on including it. Boye’s book brings a human voice and specificity to sustainability lacking in the series’ other volumes and, unfortunately, in most of today’s sustainability writing. Perhaps that is why Boye highlights writing by Thoreau, Emerson, Leopold, and others. As he so well relates in the book, sustainability is an individual and personal action based on ideals that must necessarily include compromise when combined with the paradox and reality of the dynamic give and take between physical environment and the social community.