Earthbag Building in the Mainstream Press

Here are two new articles that show the growing awareness of earthbag building and natural building as a whole. Thanks to Gail Moore and Troy Griepentrog for alerting us to these articles.

What Right Do You Have to Be Here on Planet Earth? by William H. Kotke
We Are Now Ready To Overthrow The Pathological Patriarch
Millions of us are now ready. They call us “alternatives,” “cultural creatives,” “hippies,” “radicals,” un-Russian, un-British and un-American. Out of the intuition of the masses has come the new culture. The new culture emphasizes gender balance and consensus government.

We now have Permaculture as a balanced way of getting our nutrition from the earth…

We now have a huge alternative building movement of straw bale, cob, rammed earth, earth bag, adobe, and much more that rely on local materials. We now have alternative solar homes that can heat and cool themselves without outside energy.

We have “alternative” people who are expanding the human potential by perceiving and communicating with the life force of the planet.

People living with nature, on the land, in ecovillages with an artisan economy are the picture of social stability and self-sufficiency. With this means we can establish a culture that can prevent hierarchy and can prevent the creation of surpluses that would support militaries, dictators, emperors, shopping mall addicts and centralized governments

Earthbags: Why Hobbit-Holes are Part of Green Building’s Future
There’s a decent post by Holly Richmond on Grist.org that summarizes some of the history and advantages of earthbag building. Her final point is flawed, however, where she quotes architect Peter Berman who says building with earth “won’t scale”, and that it “send[s] technology backwards.” With 1/3 to ½ of the world currently living in houses made of earth, what scale are they talking about? Earth is already the most predominant building material in the world. Why couldn’t more be used since it’s the most abundant material in the world? And what direction do we want to go in? Are they suggesting we use high tech, high embodied energy materials that most can’t afford? That doesn’t sound like progress to me.