Day 56: The birth, death, and rebirth of the eco-architect in me

I remember in fourth grade, my entire class created a new community — four or five small huts, each with three or four people, coming together to form the larger village — and all of us built elaborate tree forts out of sticks, leaves, and bark. A system of exchange for different materials emerged, complete with currency and non-currency-based ways of transacting.

Entire narratives were created that described the history of both the smaller communities and the whole as well. We were so engrossed in our community that when it would rain, we would beg our teacher to let us go outside so we could sit under the roofs that we had built.

I learned basic principles of natural building — how to ensure, first and foremost, that the walls or the roof don’t fall in, along with how to weave twigs and leaves together to create walls and roofing. I learned how to juggle multiple identities and memberships that called for different skill sets. I learned how to commit to and care for a home. And perhaps, most importantly, I learned how to collectively imagine and build towards an alternative reality.

But none of this required any teacher; it required no intervention. For example, thankfully our teacher did allow us to go out in the rain — it gave us insights into how and where our construction was faulty, which sparked new roofing ideas, like adding large pieces of bark to the leaves and twigs to provide better coverage. And more importantly, it deepened our sense of ownership and meaning in this physical and metaphorical place that we had created.

Fast forward 15 years and I’m again trying to pursue natural building in a community setting to invent a new world. But I’ve become handicapped — intellectually and imaginatively. The thought scares me — how can I design or build a space? I’m not an architect. I have no skills. I have no training. I’ve become the source of my own creative imprisonment. Can’s and cannot’s have become completely subject to those who mint papers saying that I “can.” Otherwise, I can’t.

I can hear my dad and his engineer friends reading this now — “you can’t build a building! What about the safety! For that, you need a civil engineer! Preferably from IIT!” (Last part added for emphasis, though it is implied.)

But then I look outside; a village surrounded with hundreds of barefoot architects who have never been to school. Just about anyone here, except, in many cases, for those who have been to school for several years, have built their own eco-homes. Renewable housing structures built from mud and bamboo that contribute essentially nothing to our carbon footprint, while the rest of the housing complex is responsible for roughly 40–50% of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Now people in concrete jungles are starting to realize — our collective obsession with cement will kill us all. Yet, the influence of the concrete jungle has already reached the village, as the very first aspiration of the household is a “pakka” house built from fire-burnt bricks and concrete. Ugly, hot, dark, poorly constructed houses, which have begun dotting the green landscape like stress-induced sores from scabies.

Why are the pakka houses here so wretched and the kacha (non-cement) houses so tasteful? Because the mud-bamboo structure is an expression of thousands of years of knowledge, combined like the perfect family chutney, whereas the concrete building is something for which people here have very little experience. In comparison to the eco-construction, the concrete houses here are like a child posing as an adult, wearing large shirts that droop down to the knees and clown shoes that are so big that the child has to skate, not walk, in them.

Yes, I get it. There are practical advantages to a structurally strong home, and concrete requires less labor than the mud constructions here. But there are techniques that can be used with bamboo and mud that can be used to build structurally stronger houses that require less maintenance. There are even ways to make bricks out of earthen materials that are stronger than the bricks people use for their houses here.

Why is it that these techniques didn’t filter down, while cement did? Why is it that the Bihar government will give you 80,000 rupees to improve your home with brick and cement, but that there is no such facility for people who build improved eco-structures that may be even stronger than the brick-cement monstrosities?

Because there’s no advocate for bamboo and mud. It’s the material of the poor. The education system celebrates Birla, not Boban chacha, the local bamboo expert. Boban has a voice that reaches within a 3 km radius; Birla has one that extends across a 3,000 km radius. Birla executives makes the policies, while Boban has no say with the local government; even to meet his local Block Development Officer for five minutes, he has to wait hours and hours for an outcome that he knows will be of no substance — forget about meeting people of any actual influence.

Children, engaged in rich systems of learning, like what I momentarily created with my friends when I was a kid, that allow them to learn many of the skills for sustainability that people in the outside world are dying to learn. But which they will never have a chance to share, and which they want to distance themselves from, all so that they can join the validated pool of carbon polluters. The irony.

I can locate this irony in my own current struggles with learning natural building. We live in a society, where we make few actual decisions for ourselves; the goal posts are already decided, and we simply have to reach them. And the goal posts are not up for debate. Educationally. Socially. Materially.

And in the performance we do for others, we slowly but surely become incapable of doing anything on our own. We have to read quotes by others to believe simple truths that we know and have experienced thousands of times. We wait for companies to tell us what to consume. And we need degrees to believe we are capable of doing anything ourselves.

We know that machines will replace us all in even the most of mundane work in the years to come, so even the skills required to survive in our dog-eat-dog world are shifting — or circling back, I should say, to where they were all along. Practical experience, imbued with intellectual and spiritual meaning, which is embedded within self-reliant communities and networks.

So I’m left imagining — what if I had simply been left to continually imagine and create? To decide for myself what I would explore? To do apprenticeships with those who have years of knowledge, simply to learn, but not as a puppet show for others? Perhaps I’d be an eco-architect today. Or have created my own community currency. Or pursued any other of the ten million questions and interests that I have.

What I surely wouldn’t have become, however, is a person filled with fear, scared to try new things, lacking confidence in my ability to try, fail, and learn. I would’ve continued experimenting much more than I’m able to now and learned many more skills. I would’ve realized that all things are interconnected and all skills are relevant to social change — not just the intellectual theories.

I’ve had this realization now, so I’m working towards it, but my imagination and capacity for experimentation has been grinded down, year after year, by this system of specialization and box-checking. Chalo, dekhte hain ki kya hota hai.