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Building beyond oil - an evening with Bruce King

Building beyond oil – an evening with Bruce King.

Chris Bird

About fifteen people gather on a Saturday evening to talk about ecologically sound and sustainable building. The venue is Jim and Kate Carfrae’s stunning straw bale house in Totnes but, for tonight at least, neither our hosts or their home are the main attraction. Around the room are builders, architects, people with an interest in natural and sustainable building. Paul MacDonald sips from a glass of red wine as he takes a break from building the massive straw bale ‘barn’, probably the largest in Britain, which will house his new saw mill. Seated nearby is Rob Somerville who built an eco-house in Hertfordshire before moving to Totnes. But neither Paul or Rob are the main focus of attention.

Tonight’s guest, visiting Devon to see it’s wealth of earth buildings, opens his website with a quote from Thoreau, the pioneering American environmentalist. That quote is well worth repeating.

“What is the point of having a good house if you don’t have a decent planet to put it on.”

Bruce King, Director of the California based Ecological Building Network (EBNet), founder of the Green Building Press and author of three books on building with earth and straw, has taken that quote to heart and aims to reconcile the human need for good housing with the planets need for building methods to be sustainable. For many years King and his colleagues have been at the centre of efforts in the US to give straw bale, rammed earth and other sustainable building methods a solid foundation.

Bruce King in his element - mudking

Quoting the World Watch Institute, King points out that “buildings account for one fourth of the world's wood harvest, two fifths of its material and energy usage, and one sixth of its fresh water usage. These demands will be exacerbated as population growth compels us to multiply the total number of buildings on the planet over the next generation. We clearly must find a way to provide safe and decent shelter for all without ravishing the global ecosystem.”

“About a year ago,” says King, “I read a paper by Rob Hopkins on Peak Oil that really convinced me that this is a key problem. I now talk about ‘building beyond oil’.” In a recent article King quotes another iconic American to illustrate the problem:

“We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources . . . But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil and the gas are exhausted.”

US President Theodore Roosevelt, May 13, 1908

The discussion is free ranging. One minute King is explaining how the Roman’s built such enduring structures, the next he is talking about building homes from surplus shipping containers or working with venture capitalists hoping to make “gillions of dollars” from developing plant based spray-on insulating materials that can make our homes thermally efficient.

As somebody comments, he is certainly no purist and thinks there is a limited role for straw bale or earth buildings in the developed world. “I spoke at a meeting in Hong Kong recently”, he says, “it’s the most densely populated place on the planet. A twenty story building would be a small project. What does sustainable building mean in that type of environment? A living roof would be pointless because it’s such a small part of the building so maybe we should be thinking about living walls.”Discussing earth buildings Kings says, “You have to be either very rich or very poor to build with earth. Either rich enough to take the time off to build such a home or poor enough to live in a community where people still work collectively on earth buildings.” But he agrees the future must be about rebuilding local economies and communities where such collaboration thrives. “It has to be that way,” he says.

The conversation covers hempcrete, rammed earth building – King calls this a ‘Poster Child’ meaning it can be beautiful but very expensive – alternatives to oil for pipework and electrical insulation, bamboo and the crucial importance of skilled building workers.The room is rich with possibilities that become visible only once you move away from reliance on cheap fossil fuels to provide the energy and materials for building and, like transition itself, buildings of the future become an attractive option rather than just an unwelcome necessity.

I like the quotes peppered throughout Kings website and articles and make no apologies for ending with another: