FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK I had written this page on the first day of Spring, but due to the need for eleventh hour adjustments in the magazine it is no longer. One thing has not changed however and that is there will be an earth building conference over the weekend of October 31st this year. Everything is in place – venue, food, speakers, homes to visit etc
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bviously, everyone’s focus has been spinning round the compass this year, and the uncertainty generated has caused many to doubt whether it is worth booking travel tickets etc. Well, bearing some other post-election debacle we are on course so please book as early as you can. I hope the fact we seem to have gone all digital with our booking doesn’t discommode the senior generations too much. In theory it makes it all much easier to handle. As with banking today everything is being run for the convenience of the operator … not the customers. I just wonder how much longer cash will be accepted. If the cover of this issue looks familiar – it is. I have ‘cheated’ by printing our last, digital issue and adding new material. Loosely, we had decided to print the last issue if we could (it ran into stage four “lockdown” regulations – which also nearly clobbered the olive harvest), and I’m pleased to see there has been a precedent set. A magnificent copy of The Owner Builder (TOB) reached me yesterday and the editor has done the same thing there, and given the Australian Strawbale organisation (Ausbale) genuine value for their input, by printing that section in what had previously been a digital edition. In keeping with Lynda Brighton’s high standards, it is a super issue. In conversation with Lynda recently she pointed out that TOB is unavailable on the news-stands here in NZ because the monopoly distributors ‘pulled’ her title along with a swathe of other minority (sic) journals. We could help - if we all ask our friendly, local paper shop to stock it, they may be obliged to obtain it. I certainly shall. Straw does seem to be becoming a popular material. TOB devoted much of this recent issue to the medium through Ausbale. Fraser and Faith Gould spent a week in Hawkes Bay last summer learning how to build their forever home, and we publish their excellent account and photographs of the workshop within. I was extremely interested to note the thermal properties of the Hiberna home we all visited last October in Otago. Jessica Eyers has updated her article here which rather remarkably demonstrates how good the insulative properties of a strawbale home seem to be … see page 48 so I don’t spoil the story! Toby Ricketts has an update on his hemp home construction in the north – all on his own during the period when builders could not join him. I think whether we like it or not, hemp is 2
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with us as a building material. However, there is controversy as to just how it is used and how much embodied energy is involved depending on what it is mixed with. I hope we will have more writers able to explore this issue in the future, and add value to the knowledge EBANZ holds. In this issue we are printing the history of the Earth Building Standards – not just for the record but to demonstrate just how much effort has gone into producing these ‘bureaucratic friendly tenets’ which allow home-builders to present plans to their local council and have them approved. A big thank you to Tatiana Zimina for providing such a fine collection of photographs to illustrate this history with, quite apart from the noble authors – Graeme North, Min Hall and Hugh Morris. We’d hoped to demonstrate the progress of the standards with homes that had benefited directly from them, but it was too complicated and time-consuming. Instead, Tatiana has illustrated this section with homes that are familiar to many of us, but above all show the beauty and passion that so many homebuilders imbue their houses with once their vision has been unleashed. I mentioned the olive harvest. Briefly, the Olive Presses had been instructed to close in March, smack into the start of the harvest, for Covid reasons. Incensed by this outrage I wrote to various Government bodies pointing out the implications = no domestic olive oil in 2020! Luckily, my letter was picked up by one of the senior people at MBIE who set in motion the ability of the presses to reopen by taking on-site, individual precautions. The best part however was that I made some new friends, and an article of mine about olives will be the result in a future issue of Organic NZ. Silver linings and all that – and we had a pretty good crop too! I don’t know what implications - sinister or benign - this early Spring will have upon the performance of Summer, but I noted our Paulownia tree was 75% in flower three weeks early. I look forward to seeing you all at Kawai Purapura again in October. My thanks as always to all contributors to this, and our previous digital issue. Crispin Caldicott EARTHBUILDING MAGAZINE - www.earthbuilding.org.nz
