[Lapg] Demonstration farm in rural California draws attention with its crop of unique building experiments. By: Arnie Cooper | January 28, 2010 Miller-Mccune Magazine

Sat Jan 30 09:14:05 PST 2010

Straw Homes That Would Have Foiled the Wolf
Demonstration farm in rural California draws 
attention with its crop of unique building 
experiments.
By: Arnie Cooper  |  January 28, 2010  |  05:00 AM (PST)  |   Comments

http://miller-mccune.com/science_environment/straw-homes-that-would-have-foiled-the-wolf-1721

In the United States, the embodiment of 
permaculture can be found at a 450-acre parcel - 
the Quail Springs Permaculture Farm - tucked into 
a piñon- and juniper-covered canyon in Southern 
California's Cuyama Valley, 32 miles "as the 
raven flies" from the Pacific Ocean and about 60 
miles northwest of Los Angeles.
Here at the base of two "sister mountains" on a 
windswept desert-like terrain sacred to the 
area's native Chumash Indians live 14 permanent 
residents, mostly teachers and "land stewards," 
along with a handful of interns. All work to 
restore a landscape laid waste by a century of 
clear-cutting and grazing, while also hosting 
seminars and workshops on topics ranging from 
safe water and green building to creating a 
carbon economy.

It's applied permaculture, a design science 
focused on integrating sustainable shelter, 
energy, food and water for human settlement.
The idea took shape back in the mid-'70s when 
Bill Mollison, a University of Tasmania lecturer 
in environmental psychology, and student David 
Holmgren began collaborating on how to combat the 
ills of modern industrial agriculture. Their 
solution was "permaculture" - for "permanent 
agriculture" - which they outlined in a 1978 
book, Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture 
for Human Settlements. Originally focused on 
farming methods, permaculture has since evolved 
to embrace all aspects of human survival.

At Quail Springs, days are spent perfecting 
greywater systems, creating food forests and 
building bio-swales to keep the limited rainwater 
from eroding the topsoil. But what's really 
capturing attention are the buildings constructed 
with natural products like straw bale, adobe and 
bamboo.
But don't expect to see this 
eco-village-in-the-making take final form in your 
lifetime - or your children's or your 
grandchildren's - and certainly not in the 
lifetime of the farm's founders, husband-and-wife 
team Warren Brush and Cynthia Harvan.
Brush says the undertaking will take 200 years.

"The elders in my life have always shared the 
idea that a village can't be started in one 
generation," he explained. The 44-year-old Santa 
Cruz native says seven generations are needed to 
bring the necessary cohesiveness between the 
people and the land.
"That kind of long-term thinking and relationship 
with place changes how you do everything. And 
that's a lot of the impetus for what's driving us 
to use natural as opposed to conventional 
building processes."
No wonder Quail Springs emphasizes exploring 
methods and materials that not only preserve 
natural resources but that can last centuries. 
Indeed, Brush can be heard frequently citing one 
rather disarming statistic from the American 
Contractor's Association Web site: "The average 
home built conventionally today will only last 40 
years before needing to be rebuilt."
This won't work if you have a 200-year plan.

The Beginning
Quail Springs' story begins in 1997 when the 
couple established the Wilderness Youth Project 
at a Santa Barbara shelter for homeless families. 
The idea was to help young people experience the 
personal and practical benefits of exploring the 
natural world, using a ranch owned by one of the 
donors. The site (adjacent to Quail Springs) was 
perfect for helping kids practice animal 
tracking, food foraging and other survival - or 
as Brush terms it, "origin" - skills.

After several years, Brush - a pre-med student at 
the University of California, Santa Barbara, who 
ended up majoring in botany - noticed that 
participants were asking for more. "They wanted 
to know how to apply the ethic of earth and 
people care to a modern context in the middle of 
Santa Barbara or L.A. That really unlocked 
something with my wife, Cindy, and me. We both 
had this overwhelming feeling that there needed 
to be this next step."

In May 2004, with the help of the locally based 
Zannon Family Foundation, Brush in purchased 160 
neighboring acres and began his nonprofit grand 
oeuvre.
To help fulfill its need for healthy, 
eco-friendly housing and "foster" as Brush says, 
"independent, entrepreneurial ways of approaching 
how we keep ourselves alive," they brought in 
Justin Kirmse and his partner Lyn Giesecke in 
2008 to found the Living Craft Project. For 
Kirmse and Giesecke, the goal was clear-cut: to 
teach the art of natural building and authentic 
living. This meant pursuing "the simplest path 
between the land, our hands, our relationships 
and what physically sustains us - shelter, water, 
fire and food."

That also requires a commitment to move away from 
toxics. Brush cites Paula Baker-LaPorte, a Quail 
Springs consultant (she and her husband have been 
promoting "EcoNests" made of clay, straw and wood 
since 1994) and author of Prescription for a 
Healthy House, who says the typical home uses a 
minimum of 10,000 toxic chemicals when all the 
paints, glues, carpets, caulking, etc., are 
factored in.
And though the endeavor may sound dreamily 
utopian, the project is as pragmatic as it gets, 
offering hands-on instruction to transform anyone 
interested into the ultimate do-it-yourselfer. 
Last summer the Living Craft Project launched its 
first apprenticeship project with six apprentices 
in their late teens to mid-30s from the United 
States and Belgium. After getting certified 
following a 72-hour permaculture design course, 
Kirmse and Giesecke worked with the team to 
construct a 350-square-foot straw bale structure 
(with 100-square-foot light clay-straw attached 
bedroom) for a young family that stewards the 
land at Quail Springs.

Meeting the Building Code
Known for its low-cost, easy availability and 
high insulation value, straw-bale construction 
got its start in the United States in the early 
1900s following the invention of steam-powered 
bailers in Nebraska. And though it flourished 
until construction became industrialized in the 
1950s, it enjoyed a resurgence in the 1970s.
Unfortunately, straw-bale construction is illegal 
in several states, including California. At Quail 
Springs, local officials have postured over unmet 
building codes, especially those dealing with 
earthquake safety.

Jim MacDonald, director of the Ventura County 
Building and Safety Division, said that one of 
the problems is that building codes are just now 
starting to catch up with green building 
techniques. "I'm all for alternative building 
materials, but I have to be satisfied that it 
complies with state law. Unfortunately, this 
presents some difficult rigors to applicants."

It doesn't help that Quail Springs is located 
just 11 miles from the San Andreas Fault, the
seismic spine of the Golden State.

Brush, though, says engineering tests at the 
University of Nevada's Large-Scale Structures 
Laboratory found that load-bearing straw bale - 
the same type built at Quail Springs - 
demonstrated the highest earthquake resistance of 
any buildings they'd ever seen, and want to see 
the construction fostered in the more rattling 
parts of the globe like Pakistan.

So not only isn't Brush concerned about the Big 
One - he's looking forward to it.
"We said codes or no codes, we're gonna build 
this because we're near the fault line, and we'd 
love to see it go through an earthquake and be 
able to have that data for other people to learn 
from."

His go-to-it attitude isn't uncommon among 
alternative-home gurus; witness the legal 
travails of Earthship inventor Michael Reynolds.

Not that Brush wants to continue going rogue. 
With the backing of David Eisenberg (chair of the 
codes committee for the U.S. Green Building 
Council) Brush is working with local politicians 
to put pressure on the state to adopt legislation 
exempting Quail Springs and other research 
organizations from building-code requirements. 
Several local universities, including California 
Polytechnic University and the University of 
California, have partnered with Quail Springs to 
test out buildings and sustainable systems that 
would otherwise be illegal.

"We really want to work with the building 
department in sharing the data that we're 
gathering. I'd love to be able to sit down with 
Jim MacDonald minus the barriers he has of trying 
to enforce a code that is no longer relevant to 
our times ecologically," Brush said.
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