Building Ecotopia: Becoming an ‘Expert’

by Chuck Hall

So far in our series on building Ecotopia, we’ve covered the basics on food, clothing and shelter in an Ecotopian society. Before we continue, I think we should pause for a moment and reflect on what it means to be a citizen of an industrialized Western nation in the 21st century.
As technology has become more readily available over the centuries since the Industrial Revolution, the day-to-day tasks of living have been broken down into specialized areas. Each of these areas requires a group of experts. For example, primitive humans built their own homes out of materials readily available in the natural environment, but as the technology for homebuilding became increasingly complex, it became more difficult for an individual family to build their own home. This meant that experts called ‘masons’ and ‘carpenters’ and ‘plumbers’ arose to meet the need.
This can also be seen in the way we now feed ourselves. There was a time when the human race consisted primarily of hunter/gatherers. Each family found their own food directly in the environment that surrounded them. With the rise of agriculture, food became a commodity that farmers could trade to other artists and crafters for goods. Thus the farmer became the ‘food expert,’ as did the husbandman who kept livestock for the same purpose. Technology has greatly improved our quality of life, but somewhere along the way the ‘experts’ took over. While we have reaped the benefits of our ingenuity, we have also sacrificed the confidence that comes with knowing exactly how to survive in nature on our own.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not suggesting that the human race should abandon our cities and towns to go live in caves. What I’m suggesting is that in this over-reliance on ‘experts’ for our day-to-day living needs, we’ve sacrificed some of our freedom. This lost freedom most often translates into dollars and cents. Consider the example of building your own home. An average starter home in the U.S. costs around $100,000 to $150,000. A large part of this cost is due to the fact that machines run by ‘experts’ produce the building materials. Other teams of ‘experts’ assemble all of these goods into the final product. Along the way, each of these ‘experts’ takes a cut of the cost of the final home.
On the other hand, if you are able to provide most of the labor for a home yourself, you eliminate the need for all of these ‘experts’ who have to be paid for their expertise. While building your own home out of natural materials may be a labor-intensive process, sometimes taking anywhere from one to five years to complete, the tradeoff here is that you don’t have to pay all the ‘experts’ in the construction industry. Not only that, but when your home is finished, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you completed the entire thing yourself, without the help of any ‘experts.’
How inexpensive is it to build with natural materials like cob? Ianto Evans, a renowned cob builder, wanted to find out. His team succeeded in building a home for under $500! For an account of this project, visit: The $500 House.
One of the ideas behind Ecotopia is returning control of our lifestyles back to the people. By learning that we can do it ourselves by building our own homes, producing our own energy, and growing our own food, we take our lives out of the hands of ‘experts’ and put them back where they belong…safe in our own hands.