Foreword

THERE IS AN OLD CHINESE SAYING, “If we don’t change direction, we will surely end up where we are headed.” The world we inhabit and are irreversibly interconnected with is in deep trouble; every natural system on earth is in decline, some precipitously. We, as human beings, must choose to claim responsibility for the cumulative results of the choices that have brought us to this critical point in the history of our planet. It will take enormous effort and courage to move beyond our ordinary way of doing things; it will take each and every one of us, acting on choices that arise from our deepest inclinations to affirm life.What’s at the heart of our human existence is that there is an essential part of us that yearns — even clamors — to champion the breakthroughs necessary to restore and sustain life.

There is no area of life needing dramatic change more than the way we in the “developed” world go about housing ourselves — housing that is often toxic to both the planet and its inhabitants. In the United States, our buildings account for 40% of all material and energy use, 35% of greenhouse gas production, and 28% of municipal solid waste. Since the 1940s, floor space per person in new homes has nearly tripled. Our houses demonstrate many unhealthy habits: use of energy-consumptive, unhealthy, manmade materials; ecologically destructive misuse of natural materials; decades of mortgage loan debt, the payment of which requires excessive amounts of time and energy — energy needed for ourselves, our families, our communities; the family’s almost complete disconnection from the design/building process of their homeplace; and, overarching all, our seemingly insatiable need for way more than enough to meet our basic needs.

As leaders of the straw-bale construction revival, we constantly asked ourselves how we could best demonstrate and inspire a move from egocentric to ecocentric buildings. As champions of natural building, the transformative power of our work together resides in developing our ability to inform and inspire others — to build our technologies and workplaces into bridges of learning and demonstration for the legions of people who can’t imagine how we can get from here (serving the imperatives of a consumer-driven, growth-oriented, anthropocentric world) to there (creating just, sustainable societies that bring the human species into balance with itself and the planet). Real champions dedicate themselves to reflecting hope out into a distressed world — not blind hope, but hope that rises out of developing and teaching real and do-able ways to meet our basic human needs within a restorative and sustainable framework.

Our hats are off to champions Dan Chiras and Cedar Rose Guelberth, who have spent years gathering information, learning, teaching, trying out new ways of doing things, discarding what doesn’t work, improving those things that do work, collaborating with others in the natural building community, and, most impressively, making the effort to turn their knowledge into usable and available tools for all of us.

The Natural Plaster Book is an open invitation to the champion in all of us; to add its hard-earned information to our tool kits, try it out in our homes and communities, modify, add, detract, collaborate with others, teach, learn, share — to join in the step-by-step, conscious, choice-filled, joyful, and hopeful journey from here to there.

 

Judy Knox and Matts Myhrman

Out On Bale

Tucson, Arizona