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If that mortgage payment seems heavy, you might consider a straw-bale
dwelling. No precision engineering required, and it’s cheap. DIY Futures edited
by Nicholas Albery et al (Institute for Social Inventions, London, £14.85,
ISBN 0 948826 40 1) is a motley collection of ideas for a better life. Could
your tower block support a market garden on the roof? Should we build a mobile
mountain range to give Ireland a Mediterranean climate? Could a nylon mesh
capture fog to water crops? Well, yes, is the answer to the last question as
Chilean farmers have discovered. Worth dipping into.