Housing

   

(Gibbs-Smith; 2003; $39.95; www.strawbalecentral.com)

The following is an edited excerpt (with permission) from the "Introduction" to the book.

Click the book cover below to order online and support HopeDance!

A WONDERFUL IRONY about strawbale home owners is that they often started out as complete skeptics. "Doesn’t it rot? Doesn’t it burn? What about the Big Bad Wolf?" We converts who’ve heard this before have learned to smile patiently. After all, it was little more than a decade ago that modern-day pioneers seeking affordable, ecological, beautiful housing built the first code-approved strawbale homes. Now they are found in every state in the United States and all over the world.

It’s not surprising that so many have been won over by the amazing potential of the humble bale. Individually, stalks of straw seem fragile, but hundreds together, compressed and baled, make a sturdy building block. Stack a bunch of these blocks together and walls can go up in a hurry. Roof and plaster it, and you have an energy-efficient house-the concept is simple and attractive. Plus, soft, sculptable straw bales can be shaped into cozy spaces, forming a home that feels like an embrace.

This home not only feels good, but you can feel good about it; straw is commonly underutilized-composted or burned as an agricultural waste product. The "staff" of the staff of life, straw is available at a cheap price wherever grain is grown. Replacing conventional "stick frame" walls with bales can cut by half the amount of timber needed in a modern home, reducing demand on forest resources. And stacked like giant bricks to form a thick wall, bales offer super insulation from the heat, cold and outside noise, providing a quiet, comfortable living space with modest lifetime energy requirements.

Strawbale home owners from New Mexico to Nova Scotia, California to China, live comfortably with energy bills that are a fraction of their neighbors’.

Constructed with care, these homes have successfully endured snow and rain, earthquakes and hurricanes.

Historical Precedents

Building with bales began over a century ago as pioneers began to settle in the sand hills of Nebraska. Finding themselves in a sea of grass on a treeless prairie, they utilized the relatively new technology of horse-powered baling machines to create a stable building block from an abundant local resource. By simply stacking up interlocking bales and plastering them with mud or cement stucco to create sturdy homes, the pioneers saved their precious trees for roof structures. But as soon as railroads came through, bringing brick and timber and other supplies, Nebraskans began building "real" homes, and strawbale houses faded into history.

Enough examples of strawbale construction survive, however, to give modern builders evidence of durability and confidence in the structural stability of bales.

The Strawbale Revival

While the occasional strawbale building went up in the intervening decades, it was in the 1970s and 1980s that homesteaders , permaculturists and alternative builders, motivated by the potential for affordable and sustainable shelter, began rediscovering the concept of building with bales.

This led to more research and experimentation and a journal called The Last Straw, which began gathering information from old and new strawbale pioneers, publishing techniques and success stories, and fostering communication and cooperation. ‘Within a few years, advocates in both Arizona and New Mexico were lobbying their building-code departments for permits to build bale buildings. They also initiated testing programs to prove the durability of the emerging technology.

By 1993, unplastered, load-bearing, three-string bale wall systems had successfully passed compression, transverse load and racking sheer tests in Tucson, Arizona. And in Albuquerque, New Mexico, plastered, load-bearing, two-tie wall systems withstood a simulated 100-plus miles-per-hour wind force and a two-hour ASTM 119 fire test. The surprised lab technicians reasoned that straw resists combustion when compressed into bales and sealed with plaster because the fire is starved of oxygen. These laboratory results qualify a plastered strawbale wall for a commercial fire rating.

The impressive results of these testing programs helped persuade cautious code officials, and in 1994, Tucson and Pima County, Arizona, adopted a "prescriptive standard" for load-bearing bale construction, while in New Mexico, state officials okayed strawbale building guidelines for post-andbeam structures with straw bales as infill. For better or for worse, these two codes now form the basis of most permitted structures in the United States.

During the last decade, advocates have developed book, video and Internet resources for learning about strawbale construction, and helping to educate building officials.

Straw-building associations in New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, California and the Midwest offer professional advice and hands-on workshops. In California, architects, engineers and politicians recently hammered out the most progressive code language yet, and a state-funded testing program administered by the Environmental Building Network will soon answer more structural questions and offer insight into the relative strength of earthen plasters.

A Home for All Climates

In the meantime, architects and builders have successfully adapted strawbale designs to local climates, from the desert Southwest to the rainforests of the Pacific. The few thousand strawbale homes built in North America in the last decade are generally proving to be durable and comfortable. Strawbale’s user-friendly construction techniques can also empower tentative owner/builders to get involved with building their own dream homes.

This is also a house that considers seven generations. Unlike most manufactured building materials, straw is very low in "embodied energy"- the energy required to harvest, process and deliver a material to market. Combined with solar orientation, natural plasters, daylighting, and appropriate ventilation, a strawbale home blends energy efficiency and aesthetics with a healthy indoor environment. It seems that this new/old building technology is poised to enter mainstream consciousness.

So, what does a strawbale house look like? The answer is truly-whatever you want. From southwestern Santa Fe style, to north-country alpine approaches, to sleek urban designs, today’s architects and owner/builders are thinking beyond the box and shaping bale structures in response to climate and regional traditions and to suit their personal aesthetic preferences.

Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, HopeDance Magazine and South Coast Permaculture Guild will be sponsoring a Book Signing tour in Southern California from San Diego to San Francisco in the last week of Oct. and the first week of Nov., 2003. See the ad below and also contact 805-962-2571 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for tour info dates in San Diego, Laguna Beach, LA, Ojai, Santa Barbara, SLO, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, San Francisco and Santa Rosa being planned or go to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

  Author and photographer Catherine Wanek organized the building of a strawbale greenhouse in 1992 and has been an advocate ever since. She produced and directed the Building with Straw video series and spent five years publishing and editing The Last Straw Journal. The coauthor of The Art of Natural Building, she lives in Kingston, New Mexico.     

Recent studies indicate that the number of homeless people in the U.S. has risen by between 35% and 45% within the past two or so years. Furthermore, the number continues to rise.

That would mean, if there had been 10 homeless persons in the U.S. in the year 1999, there today would be 13 or 14. If there had been 100 homeless, today there would be 130 or 140. If there had been 100,000 homeless people in 1999, then there would be about 140,000 today.

It is estimated that 3.5 million is a reliable annual estimate of the number of perennial homeless heads in the U.S.

The reported population of Montana in the year 1998, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures, was 480,907 citizens. Vermont had 590,883 citizens. New Hampshire, 1.185 million. Arkansas, 2.538 million. Oklahoma, 3.35 million.

In fact, 27 States of the Union had reported populations, as of 1998, which did not attain or exceed the current homeless head count in the U.S.

Twenty-seven of the United States. More than half of the 50 United States had fewer citizens than the current homeless head count. In the United States.

Don’t give me that look. I know that numbers are existentially meaningless to us if the problem isn’t right in our faces. We’re not about to round up the homeless and give them a State of Their Own, although arguably they could use one. And besides, if the Homeless weren’t right in our faces, why would we do things like criminalize homelessness and panhandling, and build shitty shelters in poorly-lit, off-road locations, and publish letters-to-the-editor written by prissy fat-assed white ladies who quiver every time a badly-dressed man with a sunburned face takes a break in a public park?

Homelessness is obnoxious. So is domestic abuse. So is drug addiction. These problems seem unable to be solved or conquered. As a crisis hotline worker, I "deal with" all sorts, including people who need food and a safe place to sleep, and people who are caught up in horrific, repetitive cycles — sometimes of their own making — and who need a safe haven, free counseling, a little goddamned support, so on. Sometimes I walk away from my hotline shifts, feeling like Marcia Gay Harden screaming at Ed Harris in the film Pollock, "You NEED, you NEED, you NEED, you NEED!!"

Let’s put that aside for the moment, though, because there’s something else that needs to be recognized here: specifically, the fact that recent dramatic swells in homelessness statistics (and poverty, in general) indicate that something fiscally sinister is looming over our heads in the U.S., and it ain’t just a sudden dip in the availability of Spare Change. Who are these New Homeless? Where do they come from? Hmm.

The City of Berkeley reports a 40% increase in its homeless population over the last two years. New York: 42%. Do you believe it?

According to one very recent article: "the 2002 U.S. Conference of Mayors reported a 19% increase in requests for shelter due to homelessness, in 25 surveyed cities. Requests for shelter by families increased by 20%." Do you believe it?

In a nation where approximately 30% of the population is either living beneath or a step above (whatever that means) the formally recognized poverty line, how can we not believe these things? For years, the literacy rate of the U.S. has been so embarrassingly bad, in comparison to those of other First World nations, that the statistics have been routinely embellished, fudged, or finagled in published statements about it.

Here’s the real kicker of a question, though: Is This a Crisis? Yet?

If it is, it’s a tricky one. It’s not like, say, The AIDS Crisis, which got a ton of press and even more prescriptions, and which kind-of went away but isn’t as scary anymore even if the threat is still as bad as ever. It’s not like the AL QAEDA Crisis, which swept away Common Sense in a gigantic thunderstorm but only simmers steadily now in the frontal lobes of Fox News addicts. It’s certainly not like the SADDAM HUSSEIN Crisis, which was, well, fabricated but effective.

This Homelessness Crisis — if it is a crisis, you decide — is about people who need simple things, like Food. Jobs. Safety. Respect. Support. Tolerance. Recognition. Help. Money. Institutional mentoring. Medicine. Systematic hope. A government that cares about families and about normal people with regular human needs.

1998 Population of the City of Dallas, TEXAS: 2,050,865.

2003 Population of the State of Homeless: 3,500,000. And counting. They’d take Regime Change over Spare Change, I wager.

As a crisis hotline worker, I should NEVER have to say to someone homeless, "I’m sorry, I can’t help you."

I do say it, though. I say it right to their invisible faces, through the phone.

  Aspen Rains is a sci-fi hobbyist and former film critic for Tehran Magazine. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 2001 with a degree in Philosophy. After a three-year exile in Los Angeles, Aspen escaped north to SLO County to start a new life and contribute something meaningful to human society. In between his two jobs, he finds time to volunteer for a crisis intervention hotline and for the SLO Literacy Council. He is currently putting together a definitive volunteer guide for use in SLO County. His email address is This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .     

The New Strawbale Home Wednesday, 19 August 2009 14:59

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