Natural Building and Higher Education

For years there has been an issue with finding good help in the natural building trades.  Many people can’t locate good tradies (hello @naturalbuildingaus) and/or have to go and learn many of the skills themselves in order to feel confident that they can take on a building project and manage the many different skills, tasks and specialties involved.

What if this wasn’t the case?  Where are there reliable tradies that are continuining to upskill and moreover, take on apprentices to grow their business?  How can we look towards growing this industry, which has so many pluses and positive attributes including making more carbon-responsive homes that are mutable and can work with climate change, and helping to grow an industry that provides work (there is a lot of work out there for skilled plasterers, mud brick makers, and carpenters)?

I wanted to take a minute to look at the education opportunities out there, and look to other countries that might be a bit ahead of Australia when it comes to re-building (pardon the pun) the natural building industry by encouraging more young people to take on a trade and get involved.

1)  Workshops

For years, or at least most of this century, if you wanted to learn natural building skills, from strawbale building, to how to mix and make lime plaster, to pounding tyres for an earthship wall, the only place to learn was peer-to-peer.

We are trying to build up a directory of workshops at Naturalbuildingaustralia.org that can provide an ongoing, if non-unified, training schedule for the wanna-be natural builders among us who want to upskill, learn from those with years of experience in situ, and get an understanding of the industry as a whole. The more workshops that are listed on the site, the more we can encourage others to join up and learn informally, and locally, to help build up the network and skills-base for the future.

While there is nothing wrong with learning on site, indeed many of us who have grown up through the past decade or so in the natural building space in Australia have run, or attended dozens of workshops on a range of building modalities so that we could learn the ins and outs of what works, how to adapt, fix and apply our knowledge to different climates and clients.

2)  Online courses

Since COVID, there has been a much wider range of offerings online that can cater to learning natural building skills online, and with detailed courses coming online from anywhere, we can learn from experienced facilitators in other countries and see how we can apply their experiences to our own.

Courses such as those run by Verena Maeder from the Earthbuilding School from New Zealand have been providing ongoing tutelage aimed at any audience. Since 2002 together with her partner Scott, they run an adobe brick manufacture and have to date carried out 200+ building projects in New Zealand and abroad. For the past 15 years, Verena has been sharing her knowledge of natural building with hundreds of people through workshops and community projects and has moved her teaching online so that she could continue to work and teach through difficult times.

Likewise there are other courses run online such as that run out of Quail Springs permaculture from the United States.  Their Online Natural Building course covers the basics of natural building, while also sharing the larger issues with the built environment, the changes that need to happen, and how to make those changes. Through a combination of pre-recorded lectures that you can watch at your own pace, as well as live sessions, you will be guided through the basics of analyzing site soil, mixing and building with cob, and building a small project.

Likewise, our friends at Build Outside the Box from New Mexico have devised an online course that can be approached by anyone, and is going to be taking on more applicants later in 2023 for their second session.  Bringing together a truly global array of natural building experts, each talking to their area of specialty, the build outside the box masterclass is showing there are ways to get access to vital information that can work wherever you are, online.

3)  In-person training

At this point, there are no official training facilities in Australia that provide you with accredited training in natural building skills such as strawbale building, green carpentry or plastering.  These skills need to be learnt at a registered TAFE or apprenticeship facility, and then applied in more applied settings and working with non-traditional materials.

Our friends at the Green Building Institute offer on-line apprenticeship trade courses that have a focus on sustainability, and are working to include more natural applications for their skills programs that can be applied to different construction sites and projects. You can apply for a Certificate III in Carpentry, painting, plastering or building and begin your training there and seek out natural builders who may also be registered in their professional and can take on an apprentice.

In the United Kingdom, there are far more opportunities for aspiring natural builders to learn from a growing industry that is recognising the opportunities for re-vitalising traditional knowledge and skills, such as thatching, lime plastering, and unfired mud brick making.  Organisations such as Historic England are the public body that looks after Englands historic environments and offers ongoing trainee apprenticeships for those looking to work in heritage areas and learn skills sch as traditional plasters, casting, and identifying and testing the use of traditional products such as clay and lime.

In Australia there are some stonemason apprenticeships that work with natural materials, namely slate, bluestone and limestone as those are the products that were primarily used in heritage buildings.  In terms of the plastering, there are some private businesses such as The Traditional Stonemasonry Company that work with lime plaster, but they recognise that it remains a niche industry and is often not attractive to young apprentices who are often lured into the more lucrative conventional building trade.

So what can we do to change this?

This will be the focus of the next blog