Stones

In keeping with the spirit of this blog, I am going to put something about stone.
Should houses should built of it? Obviously yes. Stone is beautiful. Stone is everywhere. It lasts for ever. A demolished stone building is another building waiting to be assembled. There are very few more ecological building materials. (OK, wattle and daub, adobe and cob walls biodegrade gracefully - certainly more gracefully than web 2.0 pages degrade for the notorious older browsers, but they don't last for ever and they need lots of repair. They are great but not as useful as stone.)
Devil's advocate;-
On the minus side, there are obvious problems with destroying landscapes by quarrying. Quarrying is also a really dangerous job, carried out by people of all ages all over the world with serious effects on their life expectancy. Stone building is slow and requires skilled craftspeople, so it tends to be costly.
But:-
These are mainly problems of social organisation. The appalling conditions of quarry workers are social choices. Building in stone could be subsidised to make it a viable building material. Buildings that can be thrown up using factory- built plastic parts in a few months are liable to fall down in a couple of years or need so much maintenenace that the initial savings are wasted. Do we really care if building companies can make a fast unfeasibly large buck? (Hang your head in shame, PFI).
The siting of quarries is subject to planning laws. In any case, stone moved from one place to another is still stone. It can soon becaome the basis for new ecosystems and rearranged landscape. The quarrying skills that our ancestors developed over thousands of years are being lost.