photo by paulhami
Green building is all over the news these days. And it encompasses a whole host of goals and approaches. If you’ve read much about green building you might have come across the term “natural building”. It sounds similar but has a very different meaning.
Green building
Green building’s main goals are to conserve energy and resources while improving indoor air quality. It doesn’t say what specific materials are best to build with. The emphasis is on developing a more sustainable and healthier way to make homes—so we don’t run out of materials and don’t live in off-gassing buildings.
Natural building
Natural building focuses on making our homes out of non-industrial materials. More like a bird’s nest or beaver’s dam. Log houses, straw bale walls, real adobe earthen blocks—these are the stuff of natural building. It draws ideas from the homes of American pioneers, native Americans and other early traditions from around the globe.
I suspect it all started in the back-to-the-land movement some hippies took up in the late sixties and seventies. Over the years since then it has grown in variety and sophistication. Straw bale homes still make up only a small percentage of new homes, but you can find dozens of books on the subject.
Differences and similarities
You might think experts in green building and folks committed to natural building are one and the same. Or at least have a lot in common. Well it’s not necessarily so.
Most experts in green building take a more technical approach, measuring heat loss from a house, using low VOC paints and non-formaldehyde cabinets, maybe installing foam insulation. They look for new and sometimes high tech solutions.
Folks who are into natural houses are most interested in the main material a home is made of—walls, roofs, and floors. The materials they like are natural so there aren’t any toxics to reduce. For example, EcoNests are primarily built with straw, clay, and solid wood timbers.
Of course, they can be plenty of overlap between the two schools of thought. You can put solar panels on the roof of a log house. However, building a passive house using straw bales could be tricky. Straw bale walls need to release moisture and passive houses need to be nearly air tight.
On the other hand, some natural houses use more energy than a modern green home. And a green home might be made of concrete, steel, and plastic—not the most natural materials.
I hope I’ve made the differences between green building and natural houses a little clearer.