Natural Building Exchange from Siberia to the US
by Alyson Ewald, October 30, 2003
This is a report on the trip that Susan Cutting and I led this month for a group of Siberian natural building and sustainable energy activists. The exchange was made possible through a grant from Trust for Mutual Understanding to SEN.
This exchange came about by accident. We had planned all year to bring a group of strawbale experts over to Siberia this summer to help put up the first strawbale house in the Altai. Towards this end, we had created a partnership with Builders Without Borders (BWB), selected three exchange participants, discussed the details of accommodations and building materials with Fund for a 21st Century Altai, and sponsored their translation into Russian of the latest version of Build it with Bales by Matts Myhrman and Steve MacDonald.
On July 25, only a month before we’d planned to go and just as BWB was about to release an internet bulletin inviting international volunteers, we received an email from Tatyana Artamonova of the Fund for a 21st Century Altai (the Fund), saying that a “major force of circumstance” was building up against the trip. In particular, there had been rainy weather all summer that was threatening to continue all fall; the regional government was persistently ignoring their request to purchase the land where they wanted to build the structure; and most importantly, the more they studied Build it with Bales, the better they comprehended their lack of preparation to put up this building. They needed to call off our plans and figure out something else.
After talking with Susan and with Dr. Owen Geiger of BWB, we decided to propose what we had originally planned to do this spring: bring over a group of Siberians to the US to see, touch, document, and experience natural building, then plan to do the construction project in Siberia later, funding permitting. The Fund liked the idea, so we immediately went into full speed organizing.
A flurry of emails followed, as we chose dates, planned an itinerary, selected participants, and shepherded them through the visa process. Two of the people we invited, Sergei Spitsyn and Sergei Fominykh, did not yet have foreign passports and due to their busy schedules and remote locations didn’t have time to file for them. The Fund sent Tatyana Artamonova, environmental photojournalist and SEN project organizer; and Lyudmila Zaytseva, editor of their magazine, manager of the book translation, and freshly hooked natural building enthusiast. Viktor Fedyanin, a participant in last year’s solar exchange and head of the Center for Unconventional Energy and Energy Efficiency, also enthusiastically agreed to come. And Igor Ogorodnikov, after thinking over our request for a recommendation, wrote us, “this time I think I need to go.” Head of Ecodom, a nonprofit committed to demonstrating eco-housing and lobbying the government to implement environmental housing policy nationwide, Igor had written several books citing North American examples, but had never been to the US. He asked if his new wife Valentina would be able to accompany him, paying her own way, and we agreed.
As this was all coming together, and as Susan returned from her successful composting toilet construction project, another happy coincidence came to light. Sergei Shafarenko, an environmental activist working in the Kazakhstan part of the Altai region, and a longtime colleague of our friends at the Fund, was in the States doing some work on the Aarhus Convention and told us he would love to come to the Colloquium. SEN found the money to cover his participation fee, and he received a travel grant from IREX. Sergei was a wonderful addition to our group, with his deep sense of humor, his willingness to translate for Tatyana when she was sick, and… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Finally we arrived in Kingston at the Black Range Lodge, and Catherine Wanek and Pete Fust came to greet us. We settled in our rooms and unpacked a little, then went out to get a sense of where we were. The place felt like a grownups’ playground, with creative activity going on everywhere you looked. The Black Range Lodge is a sort of rustic hotel that houses Builders Without Borders and, previously,The Last Straw Journal. It’s surrounded by like-minded neighbors who are experimenting with natural building and ecological renovations of the buildings that have survived since a silver rush to that mountainside in the last century. All around the Lodge are finished and half-completed structures ready to be added to and played with. In the course of our time there we got to explore a good number of them and talk with the people who had built them.
Susan and I raced around the whole week, translating for the Russians, helping them make contact with the other participants, and fitting in our logistical tasks whenever we got a spare minute when we weren’t actually swallowing food or using the bathroom. We learned the words for mica, wheat paste, trowel, and pallet all in the first afternoon. One of us would look up a word while the other kept translating. I’d never before done as much simultaneous translation as I did there (i.e. muttering my translation of a slide presentation to the circle of Russians while the presenter was steadily talking), and it was grueling. At the end of each day I felt wrung out like a well used sponge. And I was thoroughly happy.
We attended talks on passive solar construction, Alizes (wall finish coats), cob houses, global eco-housing traditions, creating community infrastructure, earthbag buildings, bamboo artistry, an Israeli project to build a strawbale health clinic, photovoltaics in the developing world, and building codes. We saw and participated in demonstrations of earthbag construction (a circular root cellar), finish plastering, strawbale ceiling insulation, pallet trusses, cob ovens, Papercrete (a cement-based plaster incorporating shredded paper), the water cycle, fire and rocket stoves, tamped earth floors, wastewater systems, and tree planting. Every evening there was a big slide show and then drumming and singing around the bonfire for the night owls (I only made it once).
Among the new potential partners we met there was David Eisenberg, well known particularly for his work with codes and officialdom, who would like to help Igor with permit problems and political strategy. He’d love to go to Russia. Johnny Weiss of Solar Energy International expressed interest in working further with SEN. SEI works all over the world to promote renewable energy and natural building. Catherine MacKenzie of Winnipeg, Manitoba, a young woman builder, is interested in how their experience in Canada might be relevant for Siberian builders. Alfred von Bachmayr is interested in working with Russians on permacultural design, holistic solutions, and integration of systems. Matts Myhrman is interested in working on the early stages of the project next year.
In a meeting with Matts Myhrman, Judy Knox, David Eisenberg, Owen Geiger, Alfred von Bachmayr, Melissa Malouf, Susan and myself, we had a productive brainstorm about possibilities for upcoming Russia work. Owen emphasized BWB’s educational mission and desire to focus on actual projects. David, Alfred, and Matts are interested in going over to do “theoretical” stuff with the Russians, working on code, planning, how to teach others about strawbale, etc., and also to do “advance reconnaissance work” for the later American construction team. This advance group would all be free to come June-ish. Then we could have the “practical” team of Melissa, Paul Koppana, and Jeff Ruppert, plus whatever paying volunteers we can round up, come in August for the actual construction of a strawbale building. The question is what kind of building and where.
We said our good-byes to Sergey and the Black Range staff and were packed up and on the road by 1 AM. Susan and I took turns driving through the desert in the wee hours, and I must say that was one of the most fun segments of the trip for me. We discovered we both knew many obscure songs from the seventies by heart, and we sang them together for hours.
BWB is an international network of ecological builders working together for a sustainable future.