Green building in ecovillages: Diana Leafe Christian shares the ups and downs of building simply

New Life Journal, April-May, 2002 by Diana Leafe Christian

Many ecovillage builders use earth as a building material, which also offers lessons to be learned. For example, we learned how to mix earthen plasters (and lime and earthen plasters) with the right proportions of clay, sand, fiber, wheat paste as a binder, a little vegetable oil for smoothness, and a touch of iron oxide or yellow ochre for color; lime washes for interiors; and earthen paints, with flecks of mica for natural sparkle. But we found out that while these look wonderful as interior surfaces, the super-fine dust that seems to settle on everything makes a place harder to keep clean, and some folks are allergic to it. So we ended up covering our kitchen's lime-washed interior with an acrylic sealant, and at least one family has done the same in their cottage.

We also used earth in the soil cement floor of the kitchen and one cottage. But the kitchen, which receives a lot of foot traffic, started to crumble in places, so we replaced it with concrete. It's possible that we have too much silt in our subsoil for this flooring technique, which works fine in other locations. The floor in the cottage, on the other hand, where only one family walks in stocking feet, is just fine.

Much of building sustainably is experimental, and so offers a chance to invent new methods with local materials. Some of our logger-builders created a wall system using the mill ends of logs most lumber companies discard, and found ways to make building materials out of thin trees that most loggers overlook. They're investigating the use of clay slip and wood chips for wall infill, which apparently offers similar insulative value and thermal mass as straw-clay walls, but would be easier, quicker, and cheaper to use (not to mention that a forest bioregion like ours has more wood chips than straw). One member created an alternative cement for the concrete floor of our sauna, using fly ash (from coal burning plants, not waste dumps!), citric acid, lye, and borax. That floor is as hard as a rock.

Another ecovillage goal is to explore what "sustainable" means in the larger sense of the term. At Dancing Rabbit, for example, residents don't just seek to live in natural buildings, but also to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, so they build strawbale cabins and distill their own biodiesel fuel from used fryer oil. And although we want to live in natural buildings, we also want to grow as much of our own food as possible on our 40 to 80 acres of bottom land, now covered with trees. Like ecovillagers everywhere, we don't want to live in one place and use rivers of fossil fuel to work someplace else. So we don't just ask ourselves how can we live in sustainable natural buildings. We ask how can we clear forty to eighty acres for agriculture, use as much of our trees as possible for building materials, generate a village economy and make a living at home--and live in sustainable natural buildings.

What Is an Ecovillage?

One of the most widely used definitions of ecovillage (by Robert Gilman of the Context Institute) is a human-scale, full-featured settlement in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development, and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.