Natural Building and a New Sense of the Earth is a DVD about the creative liberation from the institionalization of housing. Let me explain. In our country housing is a complex and very expensive matter. It involves architects, contractors, carpenters, electricians and plumbers, building inspectors, and on and on not to mention the industries that create the building materials in the first place.

And it is expensive. The average two bedroom listing price in Klamath Falls is around $185,000. If you don’t have that kind of cash in your cookie jar you can try to get a mortgage and that will double or more the price. With that kind of bill I can look forward to spending my entire working life paying for it.

Now let’s imagine that I take straw bales and adobe and I fit them into this complex instititionalization of housing. Everything stays the same except that I use the straw bales, for example, to make the walls. Then I have a house that costs roughly the same, but might be thermally more efficient, and save me money on my utility bills.

But the deeper meaning of the film you are going to see is about something more exciting. It is about the liberation from the insitutionalization of housing that has grown so extreme that it actually prevents many people from owning their own homes or makes them labor for many years to pay for them.

Lets imagine you could take a shovel, dig up the land beneath your feet and make a house out of it. No architects or contractors, no mortgage. Just you and your shovel and your spouse and your kids and your relatives and your friends and at the end you are in your own home with the time and energy to enjoy it and life you would like to lead because you are not out there trying to earn the money to try to pay for it.

Is this some complete fantasy? Let’s see:  Natural Building and a New Sense of the Earth