What is Environmental Building?

Series Summary

Environmental building is also known as "green building." Environmental building is the practice of building homes that are more environmentally friendly as well as healthier and more efficient for the building owner. Green building can benefit in building costs, operating costs, improving health, and is more environmentally safe.

In this video series see how to plan an environmentally sound home from a professional environmental decorator. Learn what kinds of materials go into building and environmentally friendly home in this series of videos. The expert will focus on building straw bale houses. Straw bale is actually the dry leftover part of the plant after harvest. Wheat, oats, barley, rye, rice and others are mostly used in straw bale houses to construct walls which are then covered by stucco. She will go through all the steps of building a home from this material. To learn more about environmental building watch this video series.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Shelly Jones. I’m an environmental educator for the city of Fort Collins, Colorado. I’ve been giving classes on straw bale for about ten years now, about five years in the city. Had an interest in straw bale construction and all types of environmental construction for a long time. There’s so many benefits for all of us if we just know about it. So today I’m going to give you a brief little quicky on how to build straw bale. So, I kind of want to start from reading something from one on my favorite books, which is called The Straw Bale Book. It’s kind of like the Bible in my mind. it’s by Athena Swentzell Steen, Bill Steen, and David Baybridge. It’s a great book, you could build a house- a straw bale house from this book if you wanted to. But I liked it and there’s a little part in here I wanted to read- it just says, “The straw appears small and light, and most people do not know how really weighty it is. If people knew the value of the straw, a human revolution could occur, which would become powerful enough to improve the country and the world.” But I thought that was just a powerful little statement. Anyway, there’s lots of books on the market about natural building and straw bale in particular. You can go to different websites and look them up. Here’s a couple here that are actually really good- a video that actually shows hands-on what I’m going to show you, but in full length- it’s actually pretty lengthy and I think a couple hours. And it’s How to Build Your Elegant Home with Straw Bales. So anyway, that just gives you a bit of insight there. We’re going to get started- I’m going to show you next all the tools you’re going to need to do this. "