This is not your usual solar treatise. Rather, it is one aimed at very commonsense building new homes taking into account a holistic view of all the factors involved.
     The authors co-founded the first commercial solar energy corporation in the world - International Solarthermics Corporation (ISC), located in the small mountain town of Nederland, Colorado back in 1970.
     After years of research, instrumentation and testing to determine the most effective designs, ISC licensed dozens of manufacturers under a number of patents to produce and distribute solar equipment.
     Most were relatively small to medium-sized entrepreneurial operations, but the largest was a Fortune 500 company: Champion Home Builders of Michigan.
     These manufacturers, in turn, established a network in excess of 3000 dealers nationwide.
     The authors traveled the United States and Canada at that time lecturing to large groups of folks interested in solar energy in addition to appearing on local television and radio programs to pioneer this new technology.
     The huge seminars always resulted in a number of questions from the attendees wishing to learn more about this topic.
     Since the first publication of Building in Harmony with Earth and Sky in 1994 as a free virtual book by WebWalker Virtual Press on the internet, it has been greeted with anger from some solar "experts" who focus upon one or another aspect of solar siting or construction techniques to the exclusion of all others.
     But they have been in the minority, thankfully, among the hundreds of thousands of downloads over the ensuing seven years.
     So take this book in the spirit it is written: as one more group of ingredients for your considerations as you plan and design your own dream home.
     And if you are an enthusiastic advocate of one of the alternative construction techniques, such as straw bale, dirt and tire, or underground, combining them with passive or active solar, don't be offended if it is pointed out that the majority of people in the country don't share your enthusiasm. That, in fact, they may be unwilling to make the lifestyle sacrifices or aesthetic compromises that you are and may even think that this architecture is unpleasing to the eye.
     Thus the emphasis here on traditional construction techniques updated with modern insulation and low emissivity windows and worries about solar heat gain on a year-round basis.
     This small book is simply intended for the practical person wishing to learn facts that can be verified, based upon real-world research and development.

About the authors.
     In the late sixties and through the seventies, John Keyes was personally responsible for 44 U.S, and foreign patents in the fields of solar energy and energy conservation. He was also responsible for the very first patents for hybrid automobile engine design.
     He also authored three best-selling books pertaining to solar energy at that time: Harnessing the Sun, The Solar Conspiracy and The Consumer Handbook of Solar Energy, all published by Morgan and Morgan of New York.
     The authors co-founded WebWalker Virtual Press in 1994 and made available at no charge a dozen of their books co-authored under a variety of pseudonyms. These virtual books, along with a number of childrens' classics which they have prepared for the internet have been downloaded at the rate of tens of thousands each month.
     They are classical music afficionados with an abiding love for Vivaldi, Bach and Pachelbel (among others) and have sequenced into digital format a number of virtual CD's which are also offered at no charge from WebWalker. Because classical music is not terribly popular, the downloads of the virtual CD's seldom exceed 1000 a month.
     John, who built his first computer in 1954 (which possessed the grand total of 8 bytes memory!) assisted in the building of one of the first search engines on the internet - Infohiway.com - at a time when there were less than 20,000 websites worldwide. He taught HTML, DHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, Perl and Javascript programming at the Art Institutes of Colorado in Denver and has authored fourteen textbooks in these disciplines which are also available online at Webwalker.
     The authors also host Autoscripter.com, which is a website for web developers and designers around the world.
     Finally, they can't stop themselves from continuously stick-building new mountain homes, one at a time, employing the energy conservation and solar heat gain philosophies described in this book.