What You Want is What You Need

Now, no one says to themselves, "Let's degrade this piece of land with an unloved place that wastes energy, traps people indoors most of the time, and will be worn out in a decade or two." But that is what actually happens.  

A great deal has been written about how this curious situation came to pass, that the richest, most powerful culture ever to exist is unable to build communities they enjoy. But the focus of this essay is not how we got to this place, but where we go from here.  

As a culture, we're pretty clever with stuff, and it shows in how we frame this issue: most of the conversations going on now about mending our ways are focused on technical fixes.  

Within this realm of reform are the practices known as "Green Building" that include awareness of the toxicity of materials used, their embodied energy, and whether they can enter a cycle of reuse when they're no longer in the building. It also seeks to minimize the use of fossil fuels and maximize the use of renewable energy sources. Solid, quantifiable improvements in our current practices.  

But reformations only in materials and energy use keeps our flawed thinking about place making intact, allowing us to create environmentally intelligent buildings that still are not good places. And this is, indeed, is happening; there are new office parks that maximize daylighting and natural ventilation, but are still afloat on a sea of lawn and parking lots; the vast majority of the ecologically designed houses celebrated in magazines these days are off by themselves on rural properties, which means, as the owners aren't usually part of the local production economy, that suburban patterns of land use are being tacitly approved of as well. Green Building is making buildings less toxic and less wasteful, but it has little to say about creating good place.  

Natural Building sets nature, not the current mode of building, as its baseline. Instead of asking, "Is this item or practice an improvement on what is currently used, environmentally speaking?" It asks, "Is this item or practice as integrated into the material and energy flows of nature as it can possibly be?"  

Such integration is maximized by using local natural materials as much as possible. We can use them confident that they originate in, and return to, the cycles of the locale. The resulting buildings display the use of earth, wood, stone and straw, and celebrate their minimal processing and hand application. Some critics dismiss this as an attempt to pretend the twentieth century never happened, but in fact its avoidance of industrial materials is a truer reflection of what our culture wants than the celebration of factory materials so beloved by contemporary architects. (After decades of hearing from architects that modern architecture is the "true expression of the age," most people are still buying as much history and natural materials in their homes as they can afford.) And twentieth century information, in insulation and passive solar design, for example, is very much a part of Natural Building.  

The use of local, minimally processed materials demands much more labor in the creation of the buildings, and the resulting handmade character is what registers as old fashioned. We have begun to realize, as a culture, that something essential to us as humans is missing in the current products of industrial building, and Natural Building uses the time-tested ingredients of natural materials and human handwork to regain it.  

Thus far, work in Natural Building is mostly in isolated rural locations, where the sense of place is derived from embedment in nature. Think for a minute: Most of us have read descriptions of beautiful natural homes, usually beginning with their natural settings; how much do you read, much less see in the pictures, about the human communities these places are set within? The message implicit: if you want to feel natural, turn your back on the built environment, and look out into nature.  

And of course we want to be surrounded by nature. As creatures who lived outdoors for thousands of generations before there were doors, we are hard-wired to the natural environment.  

But we are also social creatures; even we Americans require the proximity of our kind. As understandable as our revulsion is at the current mess we make of our communities, if we turn our backs on this fabric , we only degrade it further, and engage in the dangerous pretense that everyone is content, or able, to drive everywhere. If sustainability requires that we look at the big picture, we have to recognize that the basic sustainable human unit is not the individual home but the extended family or neighborhood. As we learn what cooperation with Nature looks like, we are also relearning the fabric of meaningful community.  

We are fortunate that the town-creating knowledge of our forebears is already experiencing a dramatic revival. Titled "New Urbanism" or "Smart Growth," this work has had a huge effect on the design of new urban infill and suburbs, seeking to apply to current living the traditional patterns of layout that we enjoy so much in older cities and towns. Just as people respond positively to Natural Building, new communities built according to the principles of New Urbanism have been extremely well received, actually becoming tourist attractions. More importantly, their precepts are being incorporated into law with amazing rapidity, and major builders are also getting the message, "this stuff sells really well." At a smaller scale, the movement to create intentional neighborhoods with shared facilities, known as Cohousing, has been perking along for many years, demonstrating the desire for real interdependent neighborhoods is deep enough that people will band together to create it for themselves from scratch. This often arduous process has been made easier in recent years by the commitment of one Colorado developer to helping make Cohousing projects all over the country a reality.  

And the principles of how we knit our communities together are becoming better known, as projects demonstrate just how much people prefer a design approach that fosters community to the conventions in building that ignore it. The two themes of better connection to the natural world, and better connection to each other as social creatures, are just beginning to come together, in an approach that has been called Reconciliation Ecology. This involves bridging the current separation of "natural" from "developed" landscapes with a model that melds natural features and human intervention, as is found in traditional countrysides worldwide. These are neither wholly natural, nor wholly human environments, but an interweaving of the two.  

We now know enough about the requirements of natural environments to extend this integration from rural and agrarian landscapes to the higher population densities of our neighborhoods. With this approach, the substantial "leftover" areas in human environments -the vacant bits around our creations, at many levels of scale- are opportunities to invite nature, and natural processes, into the built fabric. This is community gardens on vacant lots, to be sure, but a whole lot more: runoff from roofs and roads is now beginning to be considered a resource to be enjoyed and utilized in neighborhood landscaping, for example, instead of a waste product to be piped away for disposal. Marshes are now being created from scratch to function as wastewater treatment facilities. Organizations supplying native plants for suburban landscaping are having a hard time keeping up with the public demand in some regions of the country.  

While there are certain sensitive areas that function best as natural reservoirs when human impact is minimized, there is no functional necessity to consign nature to reserves; in fact, the evidence suggests that species diversity, as a measure of ecological health, has a direct, lineal relation to the total aggregate of land available, instead of just that land in contiguous "islands" of nature.  

And in our daily lives, there is a great deal of delight to be gained from the dissolution of this conceptual boundary separating us from the workings of the world. We can have it both ways, with both human and wild neighbors.  

In the current effort to transform our culture before it irreparably degrades the earth, we must remember we have on our side the tremendous power of the deep human need for connection. Material gain can anesthetize this need, but never fill it. However hard to recognize in the people around us, if we can demonstrate that our ecological approaches address this basic human hunger, we will have the force for transformation required.