Cohokia and Homeless Ideas of Anchorage

With about a foot of new snow Sunday night the city of Anchorage has taken on it’s seasonal appearance of flakiness compounded as ground cover. Just three more months of winter to go on the homeless calendar; that is December, January and February followed by the warming up month of March when several minutes of daylight are added each day as the world’s precession on its axis tilts the northern areas more toward the sun.

It’s amazing how sensitive the planet’s surface temperature is to that annually tilt away in to the shadow, its cold and back to warmth and light. Just a few degrees annually of temperature range difference and most life on earth would be gone even before human developers kill off most of the species and ecological health.

So far this year there have been 15 deaths of homeless people outdoors in Anchorage. Cynics might wonder if the city government cars are putting homeless dead trophy stickers on like fighter aces of yore, yet we know that social government today is simply stupid and incapable of good governance. Even so,we doubt that we would find police cruisers or other city vehicles with 15 dead man or woman silhouettes on the driver’s doors.

Reading of the ancient American city of Cohokia (where St. Louis is today) I was a little inspired by the home and public building construction methods of the Cohokian culture. So much so in fact that I got the idea of building eco-friendly earth homes not only in single family units but in condominiums.

New Cohokia was a planned community of more than 10,000 people that suddenly appeared in 1050 a.d. The Cohokians built the third highest pyramid in the Americas; played an interesting game called chunky and constructed a Woodhenge circle of huge cypress logs 420 feet in diameter for measuring the sun’s cycles etc. I think it as likely that a few Albs or Vikings arrived to take a favored leadership role as much as a few Aztecs showing up with visionary schemes. New Cohokia and all these grand ideas appeared suddenly amidst a more agrarian, simpler society. Nothing like this is likely to occur in contemporary America to make a sudden transition to a new low entropy economy. No community wants to give up its present way of life without compelling reason. The powerful and privileged gaming on green and black networks of social control are least willing to work for social change directly ending poverty.

http://cahokiamounds.org/

Low-entropy condominiums of a post-developer high-entropy technology in regard to entropy concepts are not common in the United States today. Eighty percent of the income of Americans earning more than 10 million dollars annually is not from wages or salaries. The U.S. Housing market is fundamentally designed largely to enrich the non-working class investors. The Bush TARP program to bail out banks and mortgage lenders prevalently was an increase in the inefficiency of rational ho9using design. A practical tarp placed over a rope above a tent will help slide the snow off to the sides preventing collapse of the tent below. The Bush 2008 TARP policy administered by Mr. Paulson was another taxpayer transfusion of their future security to the globalists excluding rational national interest from U.S. Government thought.

The Cohokian city of New Cohokia suddenly grew about 1050 a.d. on the Mississippi River flood plain. It had hundreds of clay-dirt pyramids with one reaching 130 feet high. The layout of the city was rigorous.

Setting building with floor level down about three feet in the Earth, and with earth embanked up against the walls of the smaller dwellings aloud use of natural summer heating and cooling of the Earth versus the atmosphere’s opposite tendencies. Though the Cohokians did not cover their roofs with dirt, they did use mats and sod for quality insulation. Larger 100 unit one level condominiums could use several of these forms at low cost as well.

The desirability of producing low maintenance cost, high quality, sound proof, secure housing structures en mass naturally directs the frugal toward adapting Cohokian culture construction paradigms of heating, cooling and cost effectiveness in modern forms of condominium. The Neolithic Irish Alban culture also constructed Earth mound ceremonial building over stone post and lintel infrastructure. Combing Cohokian and Irish Neolithic (e.g. Newgrange) building concepts could reduce construction cost significantly compared to modern mass-produced, high maintenance apartment-type dwellings.



I have felt that a good condominium unit should encompass the features of a peace rural home insinuated within a verdant ecosystem of minimal displacement. Cohokian-Alban post-modern condominiums with verdant community interior courtyard ‘designed wilderness’ with water and woods and a front side wilderness entry with stone walls fanning out to end with intersecting trail and opposite wood with residual fossil fuel auto parking beyond might be a very quite and enjoyable living environment. I imagine the walls between units would be reinforced concrete one foot thick. Such housing units should sell for fewer than $50,000 dollars in suitable climates and areas without many earthquakes. In locales with common earthquaking a Cohokian ‘sapling’ roof construction might replace the Earth mound.

Viewing the Cohokian saplings planted in the ground in post hoes and lashed together at the top to form a gabled roof structure, and hip roof form in some versions, stimulates the innovation of a variety of materials to readily assemble low-cost dwellings. Steel, aluminum or PVC pipes could be made into quick and ready forms approximating a Cohokian culture paradigm. Advanced composite carbon-fiber building elements with non-slip joining ends could enable nail free assembly of an easy hurricane-proof housing unit. Since the main problem of a hurricane for the poor is surviving the high wind, circular survival henges with or without a roof made by setting posts into the ground would be useful things to build for emergency wind retreat and ordinary gardening areas. The entry ways should be doorless yet protected by a small outer windbreak wall such as might a picador duck behind to screen out a charging bull after placing a sharp object in its shoulder.

For some reason the Cohokian culture and that of the Irish Alban people migrating to America ahead of the Vikings is a good source of practical housing concepts even here in Anchorage today.