Green Construction?

The straw bale ag building is hard to construct.  I mean HARD.  Yesterday found me in sitting in front of the still only partially completed building, cutting umpteen million linear feet of high tensile steel into bale staples, and pondering why we are using straw bale construction.  I mean, what were our reasons for getting into this kind of construction?

“Green” leaps to mind.  This place is supposed to be Green!  That’s why we chose this.  That’s why all four of us signed up for the Straw Bale 101 seminar up at the Solar Living Institute in Hopland and got all charged up about erecting our next ag building using straw bale construction.  Right?  Or was that it?  I started thinking back to that seminar.

Here’s the way the seminar is described:

http://www.solarliving.org/store/product.asp?catid=13&pid=2109

Well, OK, the seminar doesn’t really say straw bale is “Green,” but it IS listed under Sustainable Living.  Yes, I do think Green is what we had in mind.

And indeed, what could be greener than using this delightful, pure, sweet-smelling agricultural byproduct of the local mega-monoculture, Rice, for a second purpose beyond just holding up the rice heads in the fields?  We would be putting to use something that otherwise would be trucked by the rice farmer to the local inceneration site, a double whammy on rice’s carbon footprint.  Our alternative would preserve the straw intact, rather than spending petrochemicals to try and convert it into some other form.  The pure unadulterated bales would live soundly inside the walls of our building, in permanent peace.

The first thing we learned in the seminar at Solar Living was that there are all kinds of problems with simple straw bale structures, the kind where you just stack the bales and call it done.  Those are called “load bearing” structures, where the straw bears the load of the roof unassisted by any wood.  These structures are the kind that can be done by the seminar attendees in a couple of days.  They are also the kind that are prohibited by Code in many California counties, and where they aren’t prohibited, the county will often require extensive engineering to prove they’ll stay standing.

So, we concluded we need to frame our structure with wood.  Strike One against Green, and add several months onto the life of our project for framing, on weekends, three hours from home.  (And let’s not even mention the footprint made by our truck on the weekly six-hour roundtrip commute for framing work.)

“Well,” said we, “we can at least minimize our use of Demon Cement, by using pier and beam construction for our foundation rather than pouring a cement pad!”

Great!  no concrete in the foundation!

Well, almost no concrete.  We’ve achieved a Green advantage!

Au contraire!  Because we next learned, when planning ahead for our lovely earth plaster that we’d learned how to mix and apply (in the idyllic afternoon sun, adjacent to the organic garden) in the Solar Living seminar, that you actually have to MINE the earth plaster from the earth!  And our earth is HARD!

Also, we do not want a gigantic hole left behind from where the earth was taken.  The alternative, to essentially strip mine the earth, is definitely AntiGreen.  There ARE guys out there who mine their own earth for earth plaster, and one of them offered to give us some.  We’d need many truckloads.  We would have to drive VERY far.

So, stucco.  Suboptimal.  First, it inhibits the ability of the bale walls to breathe, which they’re really supposed to be able to do in order to maintain best permanent health.  And, second ...  It’s made of cement!  Demon Cement!

What’s the Green scorecard like?  We are getting Ds.  And, the project hasn’t taken a weekend or even a couple of weeks like the freestanding, loadbearing, earth plastered little bale building that’s so rosily described on so many websites.  Rather, we are in our second year and barely going to make completion before this year’s rains if we’re lucky.

And there are more ways our project is jeopardizing the Green agenda!  The thing needs tools—lots and lots of special tools that we don’t already have!

Acquiring each tool requires a mindful act.

Sometimes we forget to act mindfully.  Many tools have made a long journey before arriving at your local Home Depot or local independently-owned hardware establishment.

I recall how Drew and I had spent 20 minutes earlier that morning selecting a hose nozzle to replace the broken one, looking at about 20 different models—1 made in USA, 2 made in Taiwan, the rest made in China.  And the only model made on the same continent (presumably) as our project has no cool features, just one lever to squeeze for one kind of spray.

This kind of thinking makes my head want to explode and makes me feel weary.

“Doing will fix that,” I think, and I stand up to do.

Dan

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