SEE PASSIVELY HEATED UNDERGROUND HOUSES CAN BE BEAUTIFUL TOO!

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Sure, MOTHER has already told you about ultra-low-cost semi-subterranean and underground solar-tempered houses. (William T. Beale's 16' X 30', $6,000 Athens, Ohio guest house, for instance . . . or the Andy Davis $15,000, 1,200-square-foot "cave" dwelling up in Armington, Illinois.)

And she's told you how incredibly energy efficient such beneath-the-surface homes can be. (The Davis family, as you'll recall, heated their place during the catastrophic winter of 1976/77 for a grand total of $1.29.)

And she's pointed out many of the other good things about underground houses. (How quiet and peaceful they can be . . . the protection they offer from tornadoes and other storms . . . the fact that they can be brighter and far airier than most aboveground dwellings . . . the ease with which they can be cooled during the summer . . . and so on and on and on.)

In short, it has become all too obvious to the editors of this magazine—and to a great number of other folks who've seriously studied the situation—that subterranean homes are very definitely going to become more and more important as we all hurtle into a resource-poor, harsh-climated, overpopulated, and crisis-ridden future.

Despite all that, however, we are well aware that most members of our society have yet to discover underground housing—and the many benefits it offers—at all. And that the growing section of society which has become aware of subterranean dwellings . . . well, still generally tends to think of them as somehow "not as good" as the flimsy, overpriced and over mortgaged, expensive to heat and cool, aboveground, stick buildings almost all of us now live in.

This attitude is not entirely rational, of course, but then very few people any longer maintain that the human race is always rational. Think back to your old high school days: Remember? If the freshmen in a school started a fad . . . that was usually as far as it went. But if the seniors in another school started wearing the very same new style of clothing or using the same distinctive new greeting or whatever . . . it wasn't long before the fashion had spread to everyone in the building.

Now we've kinds, got a hunch that that's what's been happening with underground houses so far. Almost all the subterranean dwellings (at least the ones we've heard about) constructed up to this point . . . have been built by "ordinary" people, for themselves, on a very tight budget, and off in an out-of-the-way spot somewhere. Which is to say that the trend is still being promoted by "freshmen" . . . good people (darn good people! ), but the kind of folks that—at least in this field—our society chooses not to take too seriously.