It's building in a way that uses the resources at hand as much as possible and it's a movement that steers away from the idea that we need a lot of manufactured products in our homes. Obviously we have some, like glass, and it's hard to make that on your own, but you can find it and recycle it. Natural building is essentially scrounging. And if you do it yourself, you can build for so little. It's a labor of love and you can apply your own sense of aesthetics to it. The cob cottage people in Oregon have really promoted a wonderful aesthetic with natural building - the Hobbit look. I think that's really beautiful. We built one in a town just south of Austin. We designed this thing and we didn't even know where we were going to get our roofing materials from. But we'd already built the foundation, and we knew the shape of the building, which was kind of a kidney shape. We were putting up the walls - making cob by hand - when someone asked me if I knew where there was a ridge beam. So I said I'd seen one down the creek and I took about six people down there with me and we brought back this long live oak that had been washed down in a flood. It was about 24 feet long with these beautiful curves in it. We just took a few branches off and set that tree up there and that was our ridge beam for the house. There was still some root on it that was still intact and we actually left the root hanging out on one end. Now that's natural building!
