Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and spent their first winter with exposed straw, inside and out, finishing their home
as money and time allowed] and to feel the “rightness” of the intuitive, uncompli-
cated methods used in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, especially for cash-challenged
people anywhere who have no decent shelter.
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The straw-bale community is concerned that the very factors that have
contributed to the success of straw bale as a sustainable system have the
potential to make it into a commodity. Some feel that commercial applica-
tion of the techniques would be a welcome sustainable asset in contribut-
ing to less deforestation and energy consumption.The more cautious, such
as Myrhman, worry that the tradeoffs may come at a great price, indeed at
the price of the community building network that is part of what makes
straw-bale building not just another building technique. In some parts of
the country, straw bale has become so accepted that alternative building is
regarded as “something other than straw bale,” while some R&D officials at
the Department of Energy feel that the method is still too labor intensive
and fraught with moisture issues to be taken up by the commercial build-
ing industry, as entrenched as they are with the timber companies.
Whichever path the future brings, it will probably not be a clear one in
either direction, but pockets of one or the other, depending on local net-
works.This is a movement in which networks are everything, and the prac-
titioners recognize it.
NETWORKS INSIDE NETWORKS INSIDE NETWORKS
I have traced some of the components of the straw-bale movement, the
network of people, things, and intangibles that are created by and create a
network. Even so, I have only scratched the surface. Basic components that
helped initiate the contemporary revival were baling technology, with its
own developmental history, conjoint history with historic straw-bale build-
ing, and more recent developments in agriculture that have kept the small
square bales available.
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There were also the folklorist's account of the
Nebraska Sand Hills straw-bale homes, a one-page publication, an archi-
tect's experiment in another publication, and some people. That network
alone did not launch the straw-bale movement. Even more crucial was the
ethos of the time that had people primed with various economic, cultural,
and political/ecological reasons to try something different—the elements,
essentially, of the “green building” movement. That the first experimental
