First, let's consider that humans have maybe been building for 50,000 years, roughly. From the Neolithic period to the beginning of agriculture, the building is what I call biomorphic; people used natural materials because that's all there was. Things weren't processed. So you find all these wonderful forms. If you're in a tropical wetlands, they built up off the water and they used grasses. If they were in mud country in Dogon country in Africa, they built wonderful mud houses.

  Then with the introduction of agriculture you start to have true architecture along with hierarchy, the beginning of science because they need cycles to predict crops, and the development of cosmology. The architecture becomes metamorphic as the sacred geometry and the cosmology of the particular culture get built into the buildings. These are the sacred cities that were built in all the great agricultural empires, whether they're in Central America, South America, or the Indus Valley.

   And then, as we move more into the modern era and the industrial revolution we get what I'd call mechamorphic. We start to assemble buildings out of manufactured components. The Crystal Palace is a great example as is the Eiffel tower.

   The era that we're moving into now, I would call ecomorphic. Ecomorphic means that your whole building system imitates and learns from how ecology works. If we're really talking natural building, we're talking about ecomorphic building, in which we start talking about the metabolism in the building, the embodied energy and the materials that flow in that it takes to make the building and keep it operating.

   You've got water coming in, you have wastewater going out. You have energy coming in, you have carbon dioxide going out, and so on. We start to analyze and we start to design using ecology and ecological systems as the analogs. We need to look at flows. We need to look at cycles. What's the footprint of the building? Where's this juice coming from? Where's the water coming from?

   It's not just materials. There are the site and context, whether it's urban or rural. There's how the form responds to that. There's what the structure is. Then it's what the systems are, the mechanical systems. What's the skin, the shell, and finally the stuff. By the way, as Frank Duffy, the English architect points out, all these systems, these five "S's" - site, structure, systems, skin, and stuff - they all exist on different life cycles. They all wear out at different rates. Sites wear out very slowly, although they change culturally and socially. Stuff wears out the fastest. If we're looking at buildings as ecologies, we need to be thinking about all these things.

   But how many of you have ever had to deal with building codes, planning codes, health codes? Pliny Fisk and I have both spent our careers as outlaw builders, because if you have an idea and you want to try something new, you generally legally can't do it. There is a very cumbersome procedure where you have to go through the ICBO, the International Conference of Building Officials, and spend anywhere from a half million to a million dollars doing testing. The whole process by which you get testing and innovation in the building industry is so outmoded and so hopeless that most folks in this natural building world aren't able to do that because they can't afford to.

   Luckily in our firm, we work a lot with sprayed earth and rammed earth and replacing the cement with materials out of the waste stream. Pliny turned me on to fly ash some years back. We started with that. Now we use rice-hull ash. We do very extensive testing on our projects. Where concrete maxes out at about thirty days, this material keeps increasing in strength. And the engineers keep saying, "We've got to keep testing this, something's wrong with our data."

   But to really make advances in natural design, we need a green builder program. I'm talking to the large suppliers to see if they can get enough fly ash and start to change our codes. Yet more regulation. I hate it, but why do we allow the use of old-growth lumber? The code doesn't say anything about that. Why don't we require a certain amount of additives we know work better than cement? Why don't we require that?

   I used to be the chief code-enforcement official in the State of California, and I went from being an outlaw builder to that job, so I know what cognitive dissonance is all about. But twenty years later, we're no further along in this game. So far we have had very little impact on how the building industry works. And it's hard to get the "experts " to see the light. Maybe the next generation will do better. In a K through 12 school, we were asked to come in and develop a whole sustainability curriculum for a 700-acre campus, a complete watershed. With the high school kids, we decided to do typical environmental mapping that would be required by planners, mapping, soils, topography, geology, vegetation, hydrology and all the rest of it.

   We did this with the high school students over the course of the year. We put all the maps in the library. Then the following year the school decided that it was going to expand. I happened to know their consultant. He said, "You know, we just spent $70,000 to hire these consultants to do this environmental mapping." I said, "We did it last year. It's in the library." He said, "Yeah, they told us about that, but we figured they were high-school students." We compared the results, and the high-school students' work was better than the professionals'.