Connections

If you had just one thing you could teach your children what would it be? This was one of the topics that became lunchtime discussion during the cob workshop. This was a month when 19 strangers became friends, and the month when the kids were called poor for choosing to give gifts they had picked from the land. June was a month of learning that your life story was the one that you told to yourself. June was the month of connections.

Yes you’re right, this will be a lengthy read…! The last couple paragraphs detail some of the building code issues we are encountering and some of the news for the Eco-Sense project.

Just a few thankyous first. So many friends helped us out this month and we would like to thank you all. For the workshop much was donated to help with the food. Lifestyles Market donated a lot of organic food, Ryan and Christie from Café Fantastico donated all the organic fair trade coffee, The McMinn’s donated organic Highlands beef, Janet, a neighbor and cob workshop participant, spent a great deal of time to help organize as well as making endless yummy sandwiches with her own eggs, and the Italian bakery donated lots of different breads.

June started off with a weeklong workshop of 15 amazing people. These hardy soles with even hardier feet made over 260 batches of cob, while learning the intimate details of the clay, sand and straw. Working with the natural materials was meditative, grounding, and relaxing despite the hard work. We had architects, university students, planners, software engineers, retirees, psychologists, landscapers, and builders, encompassing ages from early twenties to mid sixties. We had chosen the group of people who were a broad spectrum, a group that would share these skills and experiences with others. The diversity changed to cohesion as everyone danced away making cob. The people were like the cob; separately the clay, sand and straw won’t make a building, but when combined something magical and synergistic happens. As the week drew to a close, the bare feet were exchanged for foot gear, gloves appeared on sore hands, the walls sprouted up, and friendships grew. One the seventh day, our last as a group, and after the openhouse, we all held hands in a circle in the building we created. We felt connected as we shared a little story about the structure and experience. After we all said our bit, we had a quiet time just standing there holding hands…then I looked down, and in the centre of our circle on the earthen floor was our puppy Boo’s squeaky toy. We burst into laughter as the appearance was once of worshiping a squeaky toy. Our building was essentially welcomed with laughter.

As the workshop progressed, the equivalent of a “barn raising” had taken hold, where members from the community had gathered to share labour, stories, food, ideas, and themselves. Interestingly, this group of 19 people was not really a community until we started working together. Some of our new friends talked of using this experience of working together with hands and feet to construct an earthen building in their own municipalities to build community centers. Working and building together to create a building that may serve the community for half a century. What a testament for future generations to see. A shared legacy!

The lessons learned from cob… wow very labour intensive. More importantly were the lessons learned from working TOGETHER as a team. Disputes that arise on contemporary buildings sites where the trades grate on each other did not materialize. In natural building everyone works with each other. In one week of building, laughing, and telling stories, no one argued. The garbage created amounted to a couple small handfuls. The garbage from the shared meals was also very small since all food was cooked from scratch and not processed and packaged.

A young university student noted that the most important lesson he could teach his kids was to make connections. Very simple yet amazingly wise.

Two years ago Ann and I decided that gifts could be home made and not “manufactured”. We even made our wedding rings. Our kids recently went to a party and for a gift they chose and picked a bouquet of flowers (5 types of roses, ocean spray, lilies, asters, wild grasses). After the party it was mentioned to the kids that we must be poor because we did not buy a gift. This really made us think as our first emotional response was to show that we are not poor…that we have money…then we switched from defensive to aggressive about how our society views money. This thought then eroded back to our own need to prove that we are not poor. Why did we have this need? We are still contemplating this one. This is a learned response and kids learn it really young. What does poor mean in our society? No food or shelter? No money? No culture? No education? No friends? No Community? We live in a strange society where value is placed on money, and not on “values” themselves.

Back to connections…Think how wonderful it is to have a new stuff, your SUV, a new appliance or gadget, a boat, a big lawn, the closet full of unused plastic toys, video games, and all the other cool new stuff. Next, how upset we are with cancer, childhood asthma, obesity, mass extinction, global warming, receding glaciers, and hurricanes. Make the connection… excessive consumption of fossil fuel energy and manufactured stuff leads to sickness for us and the planet. Cause and effect! Sometimes I get quite sad and overwhelmed by the challenges facing the planet and in particular the dire consequences predicted by economists and scientists if we don’t change our ways. It won’t be long until this condition will be labeled GWDS (global warming distress syndrome) and there will be a pill to treat it. We do tiny things to make us feel better and convince ourselves that we’re doing our part for the environment and then blindly carry on consuming the planet like some virulent form of disease. Oops, sorry…starting to rant.

The connection between energy and building a home is also worth mentioning. It ultimately takes a great deal of energy to build a home whether it is a wood, concrete, and drywall home, or an earthen home. How long do these contemporary houses last… 70 years? An earthen home may last as long as 500 years. When comparing costs it is important to amortize over the life of the structure. In a few weeks 10-15 people could build a single family dwelling using fewer resources, but more burned calories. This may seem very labour intensive but it must be viewed for the full life of the building. The energy to build homes comes from somewhere…why not from people. The food consumed becomes the energy, and the exhaust or byproduct is community.

The sun as we may (or may not) believe will eventually run out, but it is safe to say that in the next several thousand generations it will be there. We have been told that if we have hydro services on the property, we have to hook up. It is the law! (This is disputable and there are several precedent setting cases where this has not been enforced) When we asked why, we were told, “the sun is not reliable.” HA! Most of our readily available energy (except perhaps nuclear) ultimately comes from our sun. Oil is essentially ancient sunshine. What energy makes the plants grow? What energy makes the rivers flow? What makes the wind, the rain? It sure as heck isn’t BC Hydro! Scientists and economists are virtually all pushing for green energy. It is good for the economy, the planet, our health…good all the way around, (except the status quo of the oil industry).

Next month we will have the breakdown of expenses for the creation of this workshop. Cheap? Definitely not, but interesting to see where the costs lay. For example, the cost to change our building covenant so that we could build on previously filled areas rather than disturb the pristine hill top has come in at $4,150 plus lots of time and personal energy.

The building code has been challenging in many ways. The inspector has required more geotechnical reports, structural engineering reports, compression tests and reports on the ecosmart concrete we used despite the countless reports and testing results already available, compression tests on our actual cob mixture, and is requiring that our locally harvested and milled Douglas fir beams be graded. The inspector is simply following the law. Our problem is not with the inspector but with the building code laws. This legal web of laws took many years to create and is so complex that it will also take many years to make small changes. The problem is that we need to make changes NOW to allow sustainable and energy efficient homes. When we inquired about the rational for many code requirements we were told that the laws protect any future owners of the home and their anticipated needs. The laws seem then to make a prediction of what the world will be like in 10, 50, or 500 years. Hmmm! I think that with almost all of the world’s climatologists, biologists, and economists agreeing that the world is going to be a very different place in the future that a case could be made that the building code is no longer protecting the interest of future home owners.

Another challenge is to get standard course of construction insurance. This project doesn’t fit into the box and it is proving extremely difficult to get liability insurance if we don’t already have a house. We currently have a liability extension from the Wise Island house insurance but since that insurance is now seasonal the company doesn’t want to extend to this land. Any suggestions?

This project is continuing to gain much support and public interest. This weekend we are doing another radio interview with Richard Habgood for “Breakin Ice” on CFUV. Next week we are doing an interview for a Shaw TV show called “The Daily”, and then on July 16th CBC radio Canada from Quebec will be visiting us for a show called “Subcultures”.

And the last bit of news is that we are getting ready to sell the home on Wise Island. If anyone is interested please check out the pictures on our web site.

Wow, that was a long update… But one final thought…

One fellow in the workshop said something that affected us both. He thought the most important thing he could teach his children was how to tell yourself the story about your life. You have the option of telling a story that is sad or happy, one with regrets or no regrets. He said you might as well tell yourself a happy story because the story you tell of your life is the story of your life… you create your own reality. So, despite being shunned by the odd person, family member, frustrated by the building code, and darkened by some of the doom and gloom that is predicted by many scientists about global warming, the story we tell of our life is exciting and challenging. It is a story that our kids share in and are proud of and it is a story that we enjoy sharing.

Thanks,

Ann and Gord