Is The Renewal Of Community A Side Benefit Of Sustainable Building?

Yes, green building bonds people together in a community in a number of ways. Straw building is a great community building effort. First of all, you use a by-product that's very efficient to build with and very sustainable, so you're not using non-renewable resources from your community or anyone else's. It creates super-insulated walls and even ceilings, if you choose to build straw built ceilings. It's also very novice friendly so that people who've never actually built anything can actually get together in a workshop setting and actually work on their own houses or on a friend's house in the community. An entire community can come together and build a house. The walls for a straw built house can go up in a day or two, so that's a really nice community-building aspect of straw building. It's the best way that I've seen. Cob building is another one that's often done that way. Cob is a mixture of sand, straw and clay. It's similar to adobe, only you sculpt it. It's a very slow process, unfortunately, but it's a good community builder. People really get their hands dirty with it, and that's something really neat to do in a community setting. But you have to build something pretty small if you're going to see results from building with cob.