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Comment by jdonaldson | Hacker News Reader

Are yurts as popular in the rest of the country as they are in the Pacific Northwest? They seem to be a mainstay of many campgrounds out here. Since they were designed according to the needs of the Mongolian climate, I'm wondering what it is about them that makes them suitable for the Pac NW climate.

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They're one of the formats of 'glamping' accommodation all over Europe, along with treehouses, gypsy carts, safari tents and tipis. I don't think anyone serious is really claiming them to be 'sustainable', for any mainstream definition of that word.

Yurts are essentially light, durable, relocatable dwellings. Traditionally they were moved between summer and winter pastures - while not 'breaking the ground'.

As you mention an idea of serious sustainability -- which is surely an important concept at this time -- what is it about holidaying or even living in yurts that you find non sustainable?

'Sustainability' (as a mainstream scientific concept) is not about a few people minimizing their direct footprint on their environment. It's (among other things) about scalable systems, how we manage societies' impact on the environment without depleting certain aspects of it. Everybody living full time in yurts or peat huts is not 'sustainable' - for one, the vast majority of people don't want to live in such primitive circumstances (for example, having an (open) fire in a large tent is fun every once in a while, but becomes a serious health hazard when done for extended periods of time). Another aspect is that there are simply too many people (or too little land, depending on how you look at it...) for a nomadic lifestyle to make any sense. 'Sustainable' solutions for today's problems acknowledge that people live and need to live in densities beyond what can reasonably be accommodated for by 'back to the land' lifestyles, and that hundreds of millions of people are clawing their way out of such circumstances - regardless of some (relatively) wealthy Westerners' views on the moral superiority thereof.

Essentially my point is that this sort of 'yurt living' (in an environmentalist context, not a holidaying context) is promoted as part of the, say, permaculture lifestyle - let's all get a few acres of land, grow our own potatoes and lettuce, and make do with whatever primitive methods we had 100 years ago. Completely ignoring aggregate level ecosystem service accounting, or even the basic observation that for most people living in a tent is not acceptable. So it's more a remark on the lifestyle view on sustainability that is associated with 'living in a yurt' than actually living in a yurt (or similar 'alternative dwelling') itself. 'Living in a yurt' isn't just 'I don't live in a house'; it means 'living without running water, sewer systems, insulation or efficient heating in very low population density systems, with a focus on self-sufficiency, in 'connection' with the land and in small-community social contexts.

The aspirations which some people manage to realise of living in modest, simple, more biostable, more biophillic surroundings dont deserve to be categorised as retrograde.

The glamour and possibilities of an intimate experience with natural materials and settings is part and parcel of cultural and technological development towards the goal of mass coexistence with natural systems, through a variety of places and architectures.

Even ignoring the benefit of investing attention and sense of identity in biophillic aesthetic and ideology, the typical enthusiast of yurt living or similar is at this stage no less ecologically viable than the rest of us - who are currently occupying space and resources and polluting directly and indirectly plenty.

Rural biodegradeable cabin dwellers might not be able to live quite as eco-lightly as urban dwellers might be able someday in a specially arranged ecologically optimised municipality, but such optimised municipalities dont exist yet.

Experience reveals we dont all benefit from living with plumbed water and toilets -all of the time. Poverty is more complex than the presence or absence of such facilities.

The history and development of permaculture technology does not deserve special cynicism and is never criticised with representative data.

I rarely see them in the UK, outside of festivals and the occasional hippy farmer.

Not sure which part of the UK you're in but the North of England and South of Scotland have a fair few campsites with them. They can be set up with stoves and comfortable beds so fit into the "glamping" bracket.

Ah that explains it, I'm in the south.

I've seen the glamping sites with yurts in the lake district before, but I assumed they're few and far between. Guess I was wrong.

They're all over the place:

https://coolcamping.com/glamping/yurts

https://goglamping.net/glamping-yurts/

http://yurtshire.co.uk/

80+ more sites here too https://www.campsites.co.uk/search/yurt-holidays

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