Profiles: The People and Skills Behind Our Green Buildings

Dancing Rabbit is a thriving alternative construction site these days, with at least 11 buildings under construction, expansion, renovation, or active planning. This will bring the total numbers of buildings built here to more than 25. Some of those who've built homes become construction generalists during the building process, and then cease to focus on building and find or return to other forms of work once construction is finished. But innovation and growth comes through a certain dedication to a task-- an urge to turn it over in one’s mind at odd moments, imagine and intuit possible improvements, test one’s thoughts, and evolve a better tactic or solution to a given task through repeated efforts. The specialists among us improve our efficiency, lessen our frustration, and help the village grow ever faster. Below I profile four members, representative of the skills so many have brought to this task over the past ten years and more.

The way we do things at Dancing Rabbit often emphasizes cycles: we compost human waste so that nutrients can return to the soil they come from; we recycle everything we can that doesn’t get reused instead; and in construction, our covenant on lumber used in construction dictates that building here usually begins with deconstructing buildings elsewhere to recover the timbers. While many a Rabbit has wielded a pry bar, in the past year Papa Bear has shown an appetite for demolition work that takes the task to another level.

Bear details his demolition practice elsewhere in this issue, but a few observations remain for me to make. Economic and demographic shifts over time have depopulated the land here; among the unoccupied houses and barns in various states of decay, there are also some whose fortitude clearly owes something to the care and materials put into them when built. Bear’s work and DR’s lumber covenant honor these, finding new and lasting uses for wood that has already given a lifetime of use, and in doing so avoid further contribution to unsustainable forest practices and disposable culture in general.

With the flurry of construction underway this year, ten out of thirty adults signed up for Bear’s first deconstruction workshop this Spring. Bear has also shown himself quite willing to share his acquisitions and labor with others. I believe ongoing construction at DR may eventually support a continuous cooperative deconstruction team to meet the need for construction materials, and Bear will doubtless be an essential member, if only to support his appetite for construction… see his sketches elsewhere in this issue.

The mixing and use of plaster and cob is another central skill to green building. At seven years here and counting, Tamar has either participated in or been a principal in the construction of at least eight buildings at DR. Each of those projects contributed to her knowledge base, and from working with her myself I can testify that her focus on a project rarely stops at the end of the work day. She’ll follow any source for new ideas and information.

When there is a need for cob or plaster, Tamar carefully evaluates the application, tests and evaluates the base materials (the quality of clay varies widely on our land), and then gets started. My own experience has shown that every single batch is different, and it is here that Tamar steps up to the task. Variables include wetness, stickiness, the effect of weather conditions, the intended application, and evaluation of each previous batch’s performance, and she constantly adjusts for each. I’ve come across a dozen or more discrete applications for earthen material, and often watched Tamar craft a finely-tuned solution for each one. She swears by fresh manure in her plasters, and the supple, durable results speak for themselves. My own earthen endeavors owe a great deal to hers.

Visitors to DR sometimes find it surprising that we have ample electricity and a variety of standard appliances in use in our homes. While our power is all off-grid and we work to minimize our reliance on some of these things, every currently occupied building here, save one, is wired for electricity.

Wiring was not a skill I or many of my peers learned growing up; personal familiarity with its practice and principles was limited to how to plug things in and how not to get electrocuted in the process. Similarly, my plumbing acumen was limited to using faucets and toilets.

Sara began enlightening me when we moved into an unfinished cabin on the coast of Maine together. She quickly plumbed and wired the place for our year in residence there, teaching me the basics of wiring and sweating copper along the way. Since arriving at DR, Sara has designed and installed wiring and plumbing in our house and Ironweed kitchen. She largely masterminded Ironweed’s solar power system. She fluidly adapts standard practices to unconventional construction: the cob kitchen required planning and hanging the completed wiring in mid air for the cob to envelop. And though her skills are valuable, her ability to reliably transmit skills to others, as she did for me, is perhaps more so—the staple of a stable culture.

Finally we come to Thomas, who, in addition to pioneering postmodern compostable construction, has in recent years acquired an impressive and increasingly thorough assortment of hand tools for wood working. More importantly, he has continually developed the skills of use and maintenance these tools require, particularly sharpening and honing, returning these museum pieces to their intended work. From slicks to augers, gouges to shaves, Thomas typically has a variety to finely suit any application. He builds his own shaving horses, once ubiquitous on rural homesteads but now practically unknown; the ever-growing pile of shavings beneath them attest to their constant use.

What these tools produce in Thomas’s hands very much reflects the character of he who wields them. Thomas’s favorite materials are those closest at hand, whether found or acquired on our land or a neighbor’s; and they are rarely worked more than is necessary to achieve the desired result. His spoontulas and bowls appear as though pulled in finished form from a tree. The outhouse he has been collaborating on with Nathan has the look of native architecture in subsistence cultures the world over, elegant but unpolished. It is as though the osage posts and oak pole rafters grew together that way. It is a pleasure to watch him work, finding planes in the most unruly timbers just long enough for them to mate with other unlikely surfaces hewn with exacting subtlety.

Like so many other skills and knowledge bases we’ve abandoned to specialists in recent generations, construction of shelter is one we lose at our peril, or at least our detriment. I am grateful to dwell amongst these and other natural builders at DR, in a culture that values their contributions and the individual spark of creativity they enable in others.

March Hare Spring 2008 Issue 56

The Year of Mud		Dreams and Waking
Deconstruction 101		Profiles
Jan’s Autobiography

Come see our past issues for lots of Dancing Rabbit information.