Until the Industrial Revolution, the advent of cheap transportation, and the professionalization of building and architecture, the same was true throughout Europe and America. Pioneer families in the United States built their own homes out of local materials, as the First Peoples here and everywhere always have. Let's look at some of natural building's many advantages over conventional modern building practices. It's no secret that the global ecosystem is ill. The housing industry is a major contributor to the problem.
Every material used in a typical modern building is the product of energy-intensive processing.
The mills which saw our lumber, the factories which make plywood and chipboard, the foundries which make steel, the plants which turn natural minerals into cement by subjecting them to enormous heat, all consume vast quantities of power, supplied either by the combustion of coal and oil, the damming of rivers, or the splitting of atoms. These manufacturing processes also release toxic effluent into the water and hazardous chemicals into the air. And even after our building materials are made, modern construction depends on an endless stream of polluting trucks to deliver them to us, usually from hundreds of miles away. In contrast, straw and other materials favored by natural builders are biological by-products which would otherwise create a disposal problem. Enough straw was wasted each year in California alone to build tens of thousands of family homes.