Living Craft owners were recently proud to be speakers, sponsors, planners, and attendees of the 2017 Rocky Mountain Natural Building Conference, co-hosted by the Colorado Straw Bale Association and Common Earth. It’s been a fun and exhausting process through which we learned a lot, both about hosting a conference, as well as all the learning opportunities from speakers and other attendees of the event.
This year’s event was a blast, where we finally had a chance to meet other straw bale and natural building enthusiasts and reconnect with our mentors and friends from past natural building endeavors. The scope of the conference was broader than similar events put on by COSBA in the past, as we were striving to connect straw bale with other building techniques and ideas which can offer their own unique benefits. Speakers and attendees included earthen and adobe builders, hemp builders, building scientists and passive house experts, timber framers, architects, permaculturists, and landscape and greywater systems designers.
Frank was the emcee for the event, and Ben and Frank gave a presentation titled: Natural Building in the Urban Environment – Low Hanging Fruit. Cheryl was on a panel with several of her mentors and peers, discussing Intergenerationality in Natural Building.
Other highlights were Deva Racusin of New Frameworks Natural Design Build discussing building science and the important role of natural building materials and techniques in the green building movement. There is a huge opportunity for natural builders to promote building homes that not only have low energy use during their operation, but are also made of materials that sequester carbon within the structure of the building itself. By using plant based materials like straw, wood, cellulose, and hemp, instead of carbon emitters like steel, concrete, and mineral wool, the immediate carbon footprint of the building is significantly lower. This is absolutely essential to fight climate change in the moment, rather than waiting for benefits to offset inputs after 20-30 years or more. His business partner wrote a great article that goes into more detail about sequestering carbon in buildings.
The Friday night panel discussion with Deva, Mike Wird, Brian Fuentes, Emily Niehaus, and Derek Roff was also a really fun and informative discussion. The crowd was able to get involved by asking question via a website, which other audience members could vote on to lead the topic of conversation to areas of highest interest. Mike’s discussion of leverage points was inspiring and artful, as was Emily’s reminder that we all have more to give, as her upcoming role as mayor of the town of Moab illustrates.
An impromptu 5×5 panel on Saturday night allowed some of our friends for CASBA (California Straw Building Association) to share the results of wildfires on several straw bale homes which were impacted in recent wildfires across the state. We are truly impressed again and again by the durability of straw buildings with lime plaster, as several homes were left intact even after other non-straw structures nearby were damaged or destroyed.
Finally, COSBA and other anonymous donors, along with event attendees, were able to raise a significant donation to Liz Johndrow’s Pueblo Project, a non-profit that teaches local Central American people how to build with adobe and clay, and improve their homes’ durability, beauty, and comfort with these simple and affordable techniques. She’s hosting a natural building conference of her own in Guatemala this year.
There was too much fun to fully recount here, but Living Craft would like to fully extend our gratitude and love to our community for joining us on this amazing weekend. We hope to continue to work with all the folks we met and those we didn’t get a chance to talk with.
‘Til the next one, friends! #RMNBC2017