Broadcast August 12, 2022
Featuring: Mollie Curry and Sara Carter

Mollie Curry moved to Earthaven in 1996, becoming one of the first village residents and getting involved in natural building. She’s taught natural building workshops since 1998, covering cob, plastering, straw bale, straw-clay, earthen paint, earthbag, and carpentry, as well as permaculture. Mollie has been involved in many of the natural building projects at Earthaven, as well as teaching and doing projects in other locations, which has informed her building experience. 

Mollie Curry shares what she learned in her nearly three decades of experience designing and building natural buildings at Earthaven and around the country.

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Working together, doing something physical that’s not too hard and not too dangerous, is actually a really great way to make and deepen connections. It is the heart and soul of natural building. It really is. And I just got chills, so you know.

Welcome to the Earthaven Ecovillage podcast, where we meet people and hear ideas contributing to Earthaven Ecovillage Village’s living laboratory for a sustainable human future. In this episode, our host Sara Carter talks with Mollie Curry about natural building.

Arriving at Earthaven

I think it was about 28 years ago that I first came to Earthaven. I was working with the Permaculture Activist magazine, and the guy who was doing that magazine was a founding member of Earthaven living with another member. So that’s how I found out about Earthaven. 

I thought, hey, I could go and learn to build my own house because they’re starting to build things out there. I went to some meetings and stuff. I was way into permaculture, obviously, but I never built anything.

Buildings at Earthaven when Mollie arrived

There was the open air pavilion. There was an old cabin that was here when they bought the land and the mud hut had been started.  Some of the founding members had gone to a natural building class and they started building this with different building methods: cob, straw clay, waddle and dab with an earthbag foundation. They were putting the knowledge they had just gained into action. It wasn’t anywhere near finished, but it was begun. Yeah, it had a roof.

I was really attracted to building a natural building, which I don’t even know if I’d heard that term before. I’d never even heard the term intentional community before, but I just kind of fell in love with the people and the whole culture going on here and with this project and what was happening here. It was pretty awesome and pretty primitive beginnings living in a tent. But pretty quickly we built the composting toilet. One of the other first things that got built. There was a couple that built a little house called the Zen hut. And then we were starting on the kitchen. So, the composting toilet, they were building their little house, composting toilet and the hut hamlet kitchen were getting built that first summer that I was here.

Engaging with natural building

I picked up natural building pretty quickly because I was a wilderness ranger before I came here, and I did a lot of trail work, and so I had a lot of knowledge about just how physical things work, my body with tools, that kind of thing. So even though I didn’t necessarily have the exact skills, I had kind of a precursor of that kind of skill set. 

It was a pretty male dominated thing, and there weren’t very many other women here living on the land. Patricia was probably the only other one that I can think of at the very beginning, more came. But, yeah, I was involved in conversations about design and understanding what was going to happen and doing it, but not all of it. There were some personality things that caused me to focus more on the garden at times. I was just like, I can’t handle that dude. But that worked out. 

I focused on working on the mud hut, which was being built, and it was my project to finish that. That was my assigned project, but I was helping with other stuff, but my focus was on the mud hut. And so other people would walk by. There were lots of visitors coming, even at that early time, and I would be like, hey, you want to do some cob with me? They would hang out for an hour or two, and we would make cob and pile cob on the wall, and I would teach them how to do it in a very simple manner. And that was fun. 

There were definitely times where I stood around in a group of men, wonderful men, and I remember one time in particular, I’m sure this has happened to many people, where I came up with some idea and I said it out loud. We were all standing around, and then no one said anything, and the conversation went on. And then, a minute later, some guy said the same thing, and everyone was like, oh, that’s a great idea. I was like, these are Earthaven dudes, and it’s still happening. Just because we have the really great intentions doesn’t mean we can actually put them into practice immediately. But I was just kind of slack jawed when that happened. Turns out it’s a lot of work to change culture. But that’s why to be here, we got to change ourselves to change the culture.

Why Mollie was attracted to natural building

There are different reasons I was attracted to doing natural building. One was the DIY nature, especially back then. There weren’t very many people anywhere that you could just hire to do something like that. But I thought, I’m going to build my own house and I want to know how to do it myself and that way it’ll be cheaper and all that. 

I was already an environmentalist and it made so much sense to not build a building out of toxic waste, basically like vinyl siding. I worked for the Forest Service when I was a wilderness ranger, so I saw the commercial logging in the Pacific Northwest. And what was happening here is conscious management of the forest for different things. One, we were making clearings so that we could live in it, but trying to use those trees to build out of. There is just such an ecological bent to people that are into natural building. And that is the main reason. Use renewable resources: straw bales, for instance, soil from where you are or close by. You can use things from the earth that then if you neglect the building, will go back to earth without causing a toxic waste dump in the site of the former house. That really was attractive to me.

And the creativity aspect… I really didn’t know about at first, but then I found out about cob and sculptural stuff and being able to shape mud and build just about anything you want. Even if you build a conventional house, you can do cob details on the inside, like curved corners on the inside of the walls or a sculptural kitty cat or whatever you want, like shelves up near the top of the ceiling. There’s so many things that you can do with it. I’ve definitely built functional bas relief. And I’ve built sculptural bas relief. Bas relief. It’s just sculpture that is stuck to the wall, basically. I fell in love with the mud and then I fell in love with the straw also, eventually, but my first love is definitely cob and plaster and earthen paint and the clay-y stuff.

Feminine aspects of natural building

It’s very feminine as well. Working with cob. There are traditions all over the world of not only women, but men also, but a lot of women plastering and basically doing mud work. And sometimes I’ve called myself Messy Mollie because I tend to wipe mud all over myself. Not on purpose. But I’ve seen some amazing pictures of women in the southwest and in Mexico who are wearing full dresses, what I would consider fancy clothes, and not getting mud on themselves while they are plastering with their hands.

It blows my mind. Home building can be a very feminine thing to do. And I think it’s great to have both genders come together and it’s heavy work. 

Things Mollie learned doing natural building

One of the things I really learned early on is that a five gallon bucket of mud is really heavy. No reason to fill a five gallon bucket up with mud. I’m not macho. I don’t need to carry that. I can fill a smaller bucket or two people can carry a five gallon bucket full of mud. A two person bucket carry is awesome. So it’s like I might not have as much upper body strength, but I have a brain, so I can figure out how to do things that are too heavy for me, even if sometimes that’s asking somebody to help. 

I’ve learned a lot about building because a lot of natural building is just building: foundations, roofs, frames, post and beam, that kind of thing. One of the things I think is most important that I’ve learned by my experience at Earthaven is to insulate your foundations or any part that’s buried. We’re building a lot of times on hills where part of the building is dug in to the hill and there’s concrete block or some other form of water resistant material. It’s not going to rot. Insulate that or you will get condensation on the inside because of our humid climate. And that can create mold. So condensation. 

I’ve learned a lot about moisture when it comes down to it. Dealing with liquid water and humidity are huge learning curves. There’s still lots of debate even in building science about how to deal with humidity in houses, how to deal with liquid water. 

But, you know, having a breathable house, they even have recognized it in conventional building by Tyvek and all those house wraps are breathable. They’re like Gortex. They’ll let humidity out and not let liquid water in. Well, that also is done by lime plaster and earthen plaster. So you don’t want condensation happening in the middle of your wall and you don’t want it happening in the inside of your building because that part that’s underground is ground temperature. And then liquid water happens there. 

And drainage is so important. Drainage, roof overhangs. I’m a real big fan of gutters bringing water down to the ground instead of water flowing off the roof and then just blowing onto the wall or even just close to the house, making moisture around your house. You can get away with less need for dehumidification, air conditioning or whatever. If you have good drainage and there’s not a bunch of vegetation holding moisture around your house, airflow, those are some big ones. And in a place like this where we’re using solar and microhydro power. A lot of those times those systems are shared with multiple people, multiple families, or in my case, the power is shared with a whole neighborhood. We really can’t support people running dehumidifiers and air conditioners. I lived here for eleven years like that and I definitely saw mold be a problem in some cases and not in others. 

How to prevent mold without dehumidifiers and air conditioning

How do you prevent mold without having to use dehumidifiers and air conditioning? How do you prevent it from the ground up in the building itself? In the building itself and in your stuff. And air flow is big, light is big, and blocking out the humid air by closing windows at the right time, that’s one thing. And what I really saw was having easily cleanable surfaces and not having too much stuff makes a huge difference. It’s just like mold grows on dust. It will. And if you can’t clean the dust very easily because you have rough cut lumber. I lived in places with rough cut lumber. They were really hard to clean and so it was easy for mold to get a foothold, places like that. 

In the tiny little eleven by eleven hut that I lived in, the only things that molded were leather. Leather attracts moisture somehow, and mold can grow on it and otherwise I think there was just so much airflow and light in that building that nothing else really molded that I can remember. And it was totally in the shade and surrounded by vegetation. Well, there’s south facing windows that got lots of sun, even in summer.

Mold is definitely an issue, and I will say, unfortunately, in my 100-year old conventionally built house in town that I live in, we’ve resorted to a summer air conditioner. There was just mold growing on the walls in that house. So I guess my point there is it’s not unique to natural buildings. Mold will grow on paint, latex paint, mold will grow on whatever the finishes are on our wooden walls, in our house, the wooden paneling in our house, especially in this kind of climate.

Learning about the height to width ratio of a building

Well, this is an interesting one that I think that all the builder people at Earthaven learned by trial by fire or trial and error or whatever you want to call it, which is the height to width ratio of a building. So there’s a couple buildings here that have big outdoor bracing because we were like, oh, well, smaller footprint, build high. That way you don’t have to build as big of a foundation. That really makes a lot of sense to do that. But these buildings and then we wanted solar access, so they weren’t very wide. So they were tall and narrow. So three stories tall, but only basically one story deep, a little bit more than that. And that did not work structurally. So it ended up feeling like those post and beam structures were too wiggly, both for mental comfort and like, oh, is this thing going to fall down? And also because plaster’s going to break if you have a lot of movement in the building. So those braces were added after the fact of the frame going up. 

And then we did more research. Someone did the research, it wasn’t me. I was like, oh, that exceeded the height to width ratio that we should have paid attention to. And then after that I was like, oh, well, we won’t do that again. Unfortunately, both of those buildings were being built at the same time, so it was like only discovered when they were both already built. But yeah, that was a really great lesson. I love the build high thing. Take up less space, have a smaller roof, have a smaller footprint, and you have to consider that structural parameter when you’re building.

Building the road as we travel and life is a big experiment

That makes me think about a quote that I attribute to Paul Caron. I don’t know if he got it from somewhere else, but the sort of Earthaven motto of “we build the road as we travel.” And sometimes if we did a little more research into how to build the road, it would have served us better.

I would say, though, that it is all a big experiment. This is kind of my motto, life is a big experiment. Natural building is a big experiment. This community is definitely a big experiment. No matter what we’re doing, we build the road as we travel. And there was tons of research. I’m not sure if I could say it was actually pre-Internet, but it was not like it is now.

We were looking at books and getting calculations. There’s books that have calculations about spans of beams and with different species of wood and all that. So much stuff to research. So somehow that one got missed. Or maybe it was because it was on a really steep hill, it seemed like it was only two story, but then it was almost a story below it. Sure, it might not have clicked mentally, but yeah, I feel like it’s all the experiment. We do build the road as we travel. 

And also another little motto, which is what I thought you were going to say, is the wonky hut, which is a straw bale, is a great example of this one. We used to talk about making a little plaque that would say “how to do everything wrong and still have it come out right,” because mistakes were made in the building. That was the first straw bale that was built here. Well, actually, maybe the council hall was the first straw bale. I don’t know if they were. I can’t remember. But yeah, the roof overhang didn’t end up being long enough.

They added some roof on. The straw bales up near the top are kind of wonkily stacked, and it actually gives it a lot of charm and character. So it’s still a good house. It looks pretty funky and it’s still a great little house. So I’m sure it has its issues.

What was it that was hard to get into about straw?

“Oh, God, it’s so pokey, itchy and scratchy.” No, I don’t think it was that hard to get into. It was just that I loved mud, and that was the first thing that I was doing. So I really got into building a straw when I got together with my husband, Steve, and he and his wife deceased, were some of some straw building pioneers of what we like to call the straw bale revival, because straw bale building actually started over 100 years ago back in Nebraska, the sandhills of Nebraska, because white settlers, who were moving west,  were building sod houses, but the grass was not holding that sandy soil together. And that was right about the time of the invention of the straw baling machine. So a baler. So they suddenly had all these bales that were laying around and they were like, those look like great building blocks to protect us this winter, and we’re going to build a real house eventually. But then some people, I’m sure did, but others were like, this is a great house. Why do something different? And they plastered them and made them last.

Steve and I met at this event called Build Here Now, which does relate to Be Here Now. It was at Lama Foundation in New Mexico. That was one of the places I went and got some early training. I really wanted to learn how to do earthen paint. There was a woman that was going to teach it there, another friend. And I had already been teaching natural building before I ever took a class. I was like, I maybe should take some classes. I know enough to do this, but maybe not some other things to teach what I was teaching. 

We met there and ended up teaching apprenticeships there. We built a straw bale sauna and a bigger building. We didn’t design these. We just were the teachers of the apprenticeship doing the wall systems. So the roofs were already… Actually the roof was not up on the sauna. We did the whole sauna. 

You have morning circle and everyone comes together who’s at this event. It’s like a volunteer event where people are learning and teaching natural building. It’s a really cool event. The leaders of each project will say, okay, over here today, we’re going to be doing this. And it might be a straw oriented or straw bale oriented thing, or it might be putting the roofing on or something. And other people are like, we’re replastering the dew drop, which was a little office building that they had. And so there’d be a little competition between the mud people and the straw people. And they would be, “you don’t want to do straw bale. It’s itchy and pokey. Come with us and do the smooth, sensuous, mud job.” And the straw people will be like, “you’re going to get so dirty.” It was just fun and games. 

But yeah, I fell in love with straw because of its insulation properties. It’s a renewable-resource carbon sink that’s going to moderate the temperature of your building. We’re about to build a straw bale house in West Asheville, and I’m very excited about doing it for ourselves.

Mollie and Steve’s work now

We met before that workshop, but we got together several years after we met. He had a natural building company that was straw bale focused. And he had written some books and did a video, the first straw bale video. And I had my own little natural building company. And when we got together and fell in love, we decided to join our companies. We have really focused a lot on education, like teaching apprenticeships and classes and stuff, and also doing jobs. Sometimes we will teach a crew to do it, do whatever the step is. Like, a couple of times we’ve gone and just taught each step as it is occurring, like how to stack the straw bales, how to make cob, how to make plaster and apply it for each project. So we’ll go and basically consult like that. And we also do a bunch of consulting just on people’s designs. Sometimes people want to know,  they’re trying to figure out what they want to do and just having a conversation with them about the different methods, kind of the pros and cons, what might be appropriate to their situation. And then my favorite thing is doing, like, sculptural cob and plaster and earthen paint.

Partly I love doing it because it’s fun for me, but also creative. But partly I like doing it because you can do it in a conventionally built, latex-painted house, basically renovate a quote normal house. So it’s a way of incorporating the earth into a quote normal house. And you don’t have to build a whole straw bale or straw clay or waddle and dob or whatever house. You can actually bring the mud inside in a beautiful way. And it has a great feeling. Clay actually gives off negative ions and so negative ions are positive vibes. So you can really bring that into your space and transform it just by doing pretty thin plasters and paints. And if you really want to go for it, like cob details. I love the curving corners. I love just the sculptural fun stuff, like around windows or mantle pieces or that kind of stuff. You can also bring in a lot of personality into the space in that way. 

The house Mollie and Steve plan to build

We’ve been designing it for what seems like a long time. It’s going to be a post and beam, straw bale insulated, so straw bale walls, house in the middle of town in West Asheville on an infill lot. And we have gone back and forth about how big it is. It seems big, and then we’re like, but it’s not too big. But is it too big? All the design details. We’re going to have a little earthen floor in the bedroom and the upstairs, which is like a south facing thing. So it’s passive solar as much as we can make it. The narrow end, because of the lot, has to face south. So I’d rather have it 90 degrees. But that can’t happen. There’s natural building purists, and we are not that. For instance, we’re going to have a concrete basement. Some people will be like, you need to build that out of stone. It’s like, no, we’re not actually.  I’m really excited about building something for ourselves and having classes and apprenticeships that are going to help do that. And friend and family volunteer work days.

Natural building as a community building experience

Part of what’s really cool about natural building is it can be a community building experience. And I think that is another thing that really attracts me to it. My dad makes the joke about Tom Sawyer. Ho ho ho, you’re going to get people to wash your fence, paint your fence, or whatever. But people actually really want to connect in that way. And working together, doing something physical that’s not too hard and not too dangerous, is actually a really great way to make and deepen connections. It is the heart and soul of natural building. It really is. And I just got chills saying that.

Mollie’s website is mudstrawlove.com.

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Released June 28, 2021
Featuring: Paul Caron and Diana Leafe Christian

In this podcast, Earthaven co-founder and village philosopher Paul Caron shares how he got involved with the other Earthaven founders, innovations in round-pole timber framing that enabled building Earthaven’s iconic Council Hall, and what the Earthaven project is all about for him.

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Introduction

The main thing that we’re doing and trying to show people isn’t growing organic food, it’s sharing resources, coming together as a group and deciding how to make our lives better by cooperation. This is the thing that our culture is constantly tearing down in order to sell products to more people.

Hello and welcome to the Earthaven Ecovillage podcast, where we meet people and hear ideas contributing to Earthaven Ecovillage’s living laboratory for a sustainable human future. In this episode, our host, Earthaven member and communities expert Diana Leafe Christian talks with Earthaven co-founder and village philosopher Paul Caron about the origins of Earthaven Ecovillage and the design of our iconic council hall.

A bit about Paul

Well, my name’s Paul Caron. I come from Michigan originally and I’ve moved around quite a lot. My life story is a bit complicated, but for a long time, I had  making a community in mind and mostly the choices I made in my life are to that end.

How Paul helped found Earthaven Ecovillage

OK, so first I came to this area already with starting a community in mind, and I had had been actually thinking about this for a long, long time since I was about 20. That was in the early 80s. And I moved into a community that was already formed, which was up the hill from here, and the vision there was “let’s all buy land together because it’ll be cheaper.”

But I had a different idea. Something more public and more radical. And there were several other people that were more of the page that I was, but because of the way it was set up, there wasn’t a way to actually do what I wanted to do. But we did hike around and there’s a hiking trail that comes through this land goes down the hill around and up the other side. And as we would hike through here, I was like, this place seems like the possible place for this vision and then I met people from Earthaven who were  already formed as a group and they were looking for land. They didn’t own land, but they called their forming group Earthaven.

They had been through several iterations of people and had gone through lots of preparation about the vision and the agreements, which is a good idea if you want to form a community to do all that first. The worst thing to do would be to buy land and then try to figure out what you want to do.

People from the group came and looked at this land and they were somewhat unimpressed because they had seen many pieces of land and they had a pretty strict list of what they wanted and what they didn’t want. One thing that they wanted was cleared land and structures, which this completely isn’t. There was one hunting cabin with only three walls. And what they didn’t want was neighbors that drove through, which we do have. But one thing that they wanted was good bold water. That’s how real estate people talk about streams. We have really nice water here.

They had seen many pieces of land, I don’t even know how many hundreds over a four year period. And they had never found anything that was exactly right. And the group was to a point, I believe,  where if they didn’t do something pretty quick, it was going to dissolve from lack of momentum and not finding that land.

Valerie Naimen, who was kind of the leader of the group, a person who had initiative and also freedom since she had real estate and didn’t have to work a job. So she pretty much led the land search and did a lot of tracking around. That’s why they were able to inspect many, many pieces of  land because they had someone full time trying to find this land.

There was the community next door, some of us who were into the more what you would say, eco-spiritual persuasion. The other people were just more like mainstream work-a-job-living-in-a-house types.  We started having a solstice and equinox round of gatherings that we would do consciously every solstice and equinox, a whole bunch of different people in that group. So it was like a whole weekend concentrated group ritual, you know, a party basically, and learning how to do that, not really trying to follow any particular tradition, but just putting our own ritual together. Well, just about in the middle of that whole thing, I hooked up with Valerie of the Earthaven forming group.

That ritual cycle was extremely magical and a lot of beautiful, intense experiences were had by all. Well right in the middle of that we started negotiating to buy this piece of land. We basically had to convince a group of heirs, so it wasn’t just one person, but it was a group of heirs, some of whom wanted to sell the land, some of whom wanted to keep the land. It had been on the market and then it was off the market and the older heirs wanted to sell it and the younger heirs wanted to keep it.

And so it took a while. But what happened was Valerie actually sold her house and moved into an Airstream on the border of this land on another friend’s property that bordered this land and put down an escrow and made an offer. And she did this personally.

You know, who’s in, who’s out. And also, it’s ten thousand apiece today, it’s 11 tomorrow. And this was very effective. Nine people put up money. This was September 11th of 1994. And by the end of the year, which is when we closed the deal, we had 14 people. And so we put out a big down payment and started buying this land.

Developing the land

So when you folks bought the land and now we have a physical Earthaven not just an idea of that name, but a real life property and people. The first thing to do was to develop the physical infrastructure, roads, bridges, footpaths, buildings, and my understanding is that you have been instrumental in this all along. You’ve been engaged in the spiritual and organizational and every other aspect of life.

And you, Paul, have also been perhaps the first and most significant person working on physical infrastructure. You build roads, you build bridges, you build buildings. So one of the rumors about Earthaven is that you were instrumental in the design of the council hall, our main meeting hall and the design of the whole community center complex. Would you tell us about that?

Yes. So the year before we bought this land, some other land was bought that borders both the community I was in, Rosy Branch Farm, and and this property that was with like minded people that were also friends of mine. And so that ritual cycle that I was saying about before we had the last installment, we did that for two years, so we had eight rituals.

The last installment was done on that other piece of land. And during that time, I started thinking about this whole community complex and I started thinking about a community building. And originally I was thinking post and beam. And mainly my vision was about using peeled poles, round poles, instead of square timbers.

Inventing a system for round-pole timber frame construction

And the thing is, because it’s a juvenile forest here, there’s lots of poplar trees that are about the size of a post and beam, which is about a foot thick or so. But if you cut it into a square post, they’re not big enough yet. But if you use the whole thing round, yes, it’s big enough to make structures out of. And so therefore, I started focusing on a system that would that would be able to do this.

Well, as you can imagine, making mortise and tendon joinery, etcetera on round poles is not the same as on square timber.

And so I had to invent a system. To be able to do it, repeatable cuts, where if things are square, you just measure and everything’s square. Then the other thing is that because in a round pole situation. What the system ended up being, is that the only straight line that you really have is the center line of the round pole.

So if you can put the round pole in a situation where you know where the center line is, like a lathe. then you can measure from that center line and make repeatable cuts and measure angles and do everything. And the other thing with that system is that 90 degrees is no longer a special angle. So you can make post and beam frames that aren’t all square, which is so satisfying to me because I was completely bored with square even numbers and all this, so the first idea I had was a big square timber frame and I mapped out a structural grid for it and everything.

But we had to go through a decision process, a design process to figure out what this big building was going to be our community center where meetings would be.

Well, and just like this is the thing. Valerie had done lots of research into communities and had come up with this fact that exists, which is that people who get a piece of land, if they just go start building houses and figure they’ll build the community center later, they never, never do it.

One of the main agreements that we had in the first was that we would wait to develop individual home sites until a certain amount of community infrastructure was finished. And we thought, well, a year or two we’ll build this community. But anyway, so the first thing we did was,  we surveyed the land. That was the other thing. It was we won’t start building houses until we have a total site plan for the entire property, a permaculture-based site, because several of the founders were permaculture teachers and designers.

Envisioning the community building

And the the intention of the community was to be a permaculture demonstration. So, anyway, what we did was we went out to Hunting Island in the fall. I think it was September or something like that, August, September, late part of the summer, early fall and Hunting Island at that time, I think it’s not that this way anymore because of the hurricanes took the beach away. But when we went there, there was a really wide beach.

And out on that beach, we basically drew in the sand a plan for a building and, you know, walked around in it, figured out how big the rooms have to be, blah, blah, blah, etc.. Well, we got back here and then we drew it all up on paper and then we started talking about it. And there was a crisis of confidence in the group because most of them were not builders and it seemed like too big. Too complex of an idea, and we got, like, paralyzed.

Well, so what happened then was in the meantime, in my mind, I had created this idea of the ultimate meeting hall. So what we were going to do with this other building was have a smaller meeting room that would do for now and some other facilities, office and stuff like that, and so then when we got to this place where we just, you know, it was kind of hard to figure out how to go forward.

Designing the Council Hall

Well, the thing is, we didn’t have any money. We had spent all our money buying the land. I mean, we bought this land for four hundred and twenty and sixty eight thousand dollars plus interest.

Ultimately, I think we paid about 570,000 dollars and we did this in seven years. Yes, it’s actually pretty amazing. But anyway, that’s another whole story. So when we got to this point where we couldn’t decide how to go forward, I brought forth the plan for the ultimate meeting hall, which was a round building, very simple to build, because it only had three parts. It had posts, it had beams. Some of the beams had crisscrossed, you know, diagonal knee braces and some didn’t.

And that was all. And so we cut down a lot of poplar trees and we peel the bark off of them and we made all the parts.

Oh, yeah, 13 posts, so the thing about 13 is that I was bored with even numbers and so 11 was too far, the span between. To divide a circle into 11 was about 11, 12 feet or something like that.

Well, the circle was 30 feet in diameter where the poles were that right? Thirty five, 35. And I think you have said in the past that ergonomics about how people meet in meetings is they need to be able to see each other clearly. Yeah. And so across that much span with chairs put in in from the circle of pillars is about the right amount to still identify people. But you can get the maximum amount of people around the circle.

I believe that I got this from one of the patterns in a pattern language by Chris Rog’s, right where there’s a distance beyond which you can’t recognize the facial expressions of people that well enough to have a meeting.

So anyway, we designed the the circular building based on that. Anyway, so 11 was too big and too far a span between and 15 was too small, so it had to be 13 and that’s what we did.

Well, what happened, my original design had like a… So the circle of pillars goes 15 feet high and it has four feet that sticks above and then beneath. And there’s windows around the upper and then below those windows, a roof goes out to a wider circle, circular wall. But I originally thought it would go all the way around. But then in the committee that we were actually finalizing the design, someone suggested, well, wait a minute, it should have more windows on the south for solar gain.

Yeah. And so and then I was like, oh yeah. So we can just, you know, make the five sections that face toward south be… No, no. And so I call that the wings.

The outer circle of more space outside the pillars around the back, the north and west and east are the wings. Yeah.

Yeah. And actually all the time I actually was thinking of the play of the space as a theater.

Like in theater. In the round. Yeah. Like a dinner theater place where people are having dinner in the wings and looking in the actors doing their act.

Exactly. And so we haven’t done this yet. But we will, we may in your lifetime and mine. We’re going to have theater in there.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so I  mention this at every opportunity.

We can keep the dream alive. So we now have this beautiful, beautiful community center called the Council Hall, and it’s largely due to your planning.

Well, yeah, I did plan the thing and I supervised the construction, but I barely did any of the work. I mostly just waved my arms around.

About Earthaven as a demonstration that something else is possible

Well, you have you had visions back then and you helped to manifest your visions with the help of the forestry co-op and before that, just general labor making the council. You have visions not just physical, but philosophical and in other ways for the future of Earthaven too. Would you share that with us?

Well, the thing about the community that I want to make clear, which I also mention at every opportunity, is that this is not just a place for us to have a nice life in the woods. It’s about it being a demonstration so that people in general can get the idea in their head that you don’t have to go on the mainstream path and just do what everybody else is doing, which seems  to be unsatisfactory and seems to be what many people think is their only option because they haven’t been to a place like this or the other ecovillages out there.

And so it’s meant to be a demonstration that something else is possible. Well, the reason why we need something like this is because our mainstream culture is unsatisfactory in certain ways. Basically, the idea of happiness and success is about consumption of luxury goods. Well, this is an elite activity. You can’t have everyone consuming luxury goods. We don’t have enough earth to satisfy the number of people that we have in that way.

The other thing is it isn’t really satisfying. In other words, consumption of luxury goods satisfies you in the moment and then makes you desperate later on because you want yet more. Because what the culture is telling you is buy things, then you’ll be happy. Oh, wait, you’re not happy now. Well, just buy some more.

So, well, the thing is, it’s like people don’t have a model that suggests that there’s some other satisfaction.  It’s like the idea that money doesn’t buy happiness is a well shared cliché, but people don’t think deeply about it and they don’t really believe it because they don’t act on that.

So I think what you are sharing with us is that living a satisfying life in the good company of friends on land you own and control the destiny of and you can fulfill your shared values, tends to bring more happiness than buying yet the latest toy?

Well, yeah, the idea part of our founding documents uses the the phrase “elegant simplicity.” And it basically is the satisfaction of living together, sharing resources, having a common culture which yet allows enough individuality for everyone. I mean, this is a dance that we have to do. It’s basicallythe main process that in reality is going on. That’s the dialectic between the individual and the universal.

So we are doing community activities well. We also need to balance that out with just living our lives.

Yeah, well, and for that reason, we chose not to be an income sharing commune type community.

The economic system here is called independent income. So we just have certain things that we all pay together to have done together and then the rest of our lives are whatever we want to do.

Yes, we each earn a living and save money or spend it or share it or borrow it or loan it as we wish, but we pay dues and fees to Earthaven. We take care of the roads. We take care of the tractor. We take care of the community building. And you know a lot about this. And you’ve helped shape what this place looks like.

Paul’s visions for the future

Once you told me that everywhere you look at Earthaven, you see what could be there and what might be there in the future and what you would like to hope that could be there and that you want to help make happen.

I have visions. I have visions for every part of this land, and they’re not necessary. I mean, you know, it’s all optional. This whole thing is optional. That’s part of the point of it. We were hoping that people can see this and then look in their own lives and go, what options do I have? So it’s not like we’re trying to tell everyone how to do it. Basically, we’re just trying to tell everyone that you can do it.

And you figure out what you need to do. The other thing I say is that ecovillage needs to come to every city block. This is not a rural hippie in the woods type thing. We’re doing this because it was the easiest thing to do when we were doing it.

And, you know, it’s sharing of resources, coming together as a group and deciding how to make our lives better by cooperation.

Thank you for listening

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