Natural Building Tourism -What is it ?

In 2015, I helped convene a tour of southern India with a focus on natural building.  I felt that with my experience traveling across many countries for over a decade and having undertaken workshops and training in natural building in a few places, I felt it was time to bring it together and to an Australian audience. With no experience in running tours, but plenty in wrangling volunteers and organising people, I found 12 people to come and join me on a tour of 3 different natural building sites, and we traveled, lived, and worked side by side for 3 weeks.

As the quote in the article below from Marcel Proust reminds us, “the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”  The ai of the tour was not about bringing our ‘knowledge’ to a traditional culture with its own thousands of years’ worth of building homes with earth, dung and straw, but to learn together and communicate needs that we have across the oceans to work towards making tangible change in communities both here and over there.

One of my close friends, Ahmed, had been travelling around doing natural building workshops across Australia and I felt he would be a perfect co-convenor for this new trip.  We worked so well together, with one of us managing the well-being of the volunteer participants, and the other managing the site and travel logistics. We slept in a range of locations, some more austere than others, and had our own 14-seater minivan that toured us from one site to another.

Ahmed has gone on to establish Forage Foundation that continues to do critical work in Nepal, and here in Australia as they continue to promote community resilience and right relationship in the face of systemic and climate instability. As they are looking to revive their tourism in the wake of the pandemic, I thought it time to revisit the idea of ‘sustainability tourism’ and think about what is means in a post-capitalism world where cost of living pressures are growing, and the housing crisis continues to spread across the globe.

What is Sustainable Tourism?

Sustainable tourism is defined by the UN Environment Program and UN World Tourism Organization as “tourism that takes full account of its current and future economic, social and environmental impacts, addressing the needs of visitors, the industry, the environment and host communities.” In many cases, said tourism seeks to ensure local communities are benefiting from tourism, economically and socially.

When we traveled, we drew on individual connections, and found ourselves working with local communities and providing them with essential support, both immediate and ongoing as we allowed them the freedom to continue to pursue natural building and permaculture programs that are often not lucrative and hard to sustain. Ticking many of the 12 aims of sustainability in tourism (as defined by the UNWTO): economic viability, local prosperity, employment quality, social equity, visitor fulfillment, local control, community well being, cultural richness, physical integrity, biological diversity, resource efficiency, and environmental purity we found it provided a vital means of spiritual and inter-personal connection.

Later this year, Forage Foundation is going to be undertaking a project with a local Nepali Permaculturist Bhupin Pun as well as an array of international builders, electricians and craftspeople for an unforgettable natural building, immersive cultural experience!

These experiences not only cross cultural and social boundaries, but encourage a form of tourism that gives to the community while taking away unbelievable memories and connections to a new family.

Head to our events page for more info.