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Earthbag building is a new member of the family of green building techniques. We built our house in Colorado that way when it was a little-known method, and now it’s very satisfying to see the method spreading all over the world. Sometimes people say that earthbag construction is where strawbale building was a couple of decades ago.

So how do people learn to do this unusual method?

The book Earthbag Building: The Tools, Tricks and Techniques (Natural Building Series) is probably one of the main ways. It covers many aspects of earthbag home building, in lots of detail. The method described differs from our approach in several ways. As my husband Kelly says in his review of the book, he finds the degree of precision excessive. Also, we filled our bags with insulating material, where they only advocate using soils. Here’s a bit more from Kelly’s review:

In the end the reader is given a wealth of information, gleaned from the authors’ hard experience, in a manner that is quite readable and clearly illustrated. I can recommend Earthbag Building for anyone thinking about building this way, as long as the perspective is taken that what they present is only one of many ways that earthbags might be utilized for construction.

You can read all of Kelly Hart’s review of Earthbag Building by clicking this link.

Other resources for learning about the method include Kelly’s website www.earthbagbuilding.com and the DVD we produced:

Building with Bags: How We Made Our Experimental Earthbag / Papercrete House

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