Return to the Earth: Building with cob featuring Betty Seaman.

I'm Betty Seaman and I like to joke that I am an accidental natural Builder living in an unintentional Community we discovered through a friend that there was this piece of property for sale kind of an unsavory situation for most folks it was undeveloped we took a look at it and just fell in love with it we had to begin with the bare necessities living in a tent we would walk to the nearest spring and fill 5 gallon buckets with water and bring it back and use that for drinking and washing and cooking and it slowly unfolded from that point no one had heard of cob yet it was a very unknown term we researched and researched and I finally found a little obscure article in the LA Times about a couple from Oregon who had come to teach a workshop in Los Angeles when I read that I was like this is it after that Workshop I came home and immediately began building with my family testing the soil on the wall so I would just stick it on the chicken wire I put chicken wire and um just tried different recipes and adding sand and so you can see when you add a little more sand it tends to crack less I was really excited to utilize the materials that we had I felt very empowered and because none of us knew how to build or what to build with we just found scrap Lumber around town and just started experimenting we were teaching workshops and people were paying to come and learn and help us build our houses and probably 70% of the time the students would then go out and create their own shelter in 5 years we had housed our entire families children were quite Young when we moved here the youngest was six and the oldest was 12 now they're all adults so we have a couple of natural Builders and we have a chef artist who has her own Apothecary and grows herbs on the land my mom makes all the jams and jellies and pies and cakes and cookies so we call her house the bakery actually had a bear break into at one time which is hilarious my husband teaches iido we built an iido studio for him which now houses an international Gathering a couple of times a year practitioners come from Japan and Canada and all around the United States to practice Aikido on this beautiful mountain top Cobb and Adobe construction are very similar the materials are almost the same but with Adobe bricks you're baking bricks and then you're building with the bricks and with Cobb you're just building a single monolithic structure the materials are soil with Clay content straw and usually some sand added and of course water to create a heavy mud material that gets built with your hands and a monolithic form this is the stem wall that holds the cob Material off the ground to keep it from any water related situation that could happen and then there's a really nice drainage situation underneath these Stones the walls are about 2 ft thick and then we just put a finish plaster on them and that helps shed water and give it a lot more weather resistancy 95% of everything we've built here is either from the immediate land surrounding this area or recycled reclaimed materials that were just pulled out of a waste stream somewhere these windows are purpose sliding glass doors that were headed to the landfill that we took the frames off of and inserted in our south facing wall of this particular structure to get all of the winter solar gain we could to warm the space and have an epic view so in 2005 in BC not before Christ but British Colombia um they did an earthquake test on a shake table so they started at 7 .4 which is pretty high damage was just some cracking again it's because it was curval linear and the walls are thick and then when they pushed it as far as it possibly could there was extreme damage this is a 9 RoR scale and it still would not have collapsed on anyone it was a completely failed building but no one would have been killed in that event we weathered a fire it started the day after the 4th of July it wasn't the first time because we we do live in a fire-prone area however this one was definitely a different beast and was coming directly for us we were prepared we took our important papers our bodies and our pets were off the land and I really felt like these buildings would perform as I had hoped and that there might be some damage but it wouldn't be irreversible most importantly if we needed to rebuild pretty much we can just use the same materials that were here rewet them but soil can't burn sand can't burn that's 90% of these structures are an unburnable material and I was feeling very confident about returning to a place that was going to be depleted was 117° for 3 weeks and terribly Ashy and Smoky things suffered for sure but the houses did remain it was a good feeling to come home to that just to prove to myself and my family and anyone else that wanted to watch we took a giant blowtorch to the house the heat doesn't even transfer into the wall it just barely blackens the the exterior surface even when there was a nice plaster on it it didn't seem to do much and it's a pretty hot flame when I think about the fires not just in Los Angeles but that will be happening in California probably forever it's important to think about where are these resources coming from that we will be rebuilding with what kind of environment will that provide for us when we are living in those places the materials that we might be rebuilding with in the cities will continue to contain toxins and and of themselves and have a really broad footprint these houses that we live in we could literally take the roof off and in a few Winters when we get rain they would simply return to the [Music] Earth by signing the petition linked below you add your name to a growing voice urging public officials to embrace a future of non-toxic safe and affordable construction methods together we can expedite the process by learning sharing and educating others the more we can think about the beginning middle and end of our homes the healthier we will all be and the healthier our planet will be [Music]