2024 Crestone Energy Fair

A community at the frontier of sustainable living.

Reflections from a visit to the 2024 Crestone Energy Fair, in Colorado in the US, where presenters discussed innovative and regenerative ideas for the future.

By Alex Hippenhammer
With Photographs by Alex except where specified.

The Demo Shed

I’m standing in front of the South wall of an unfinished shed, the first structure that greeted me at the 2024 Crestone Energy Fair in the San Luis Valley of Colorado.

This “Demo Shed” was conceived of by Shawn King, a natural home builder and Crestone local. The shed’s purpose is to educate participants at the fair on natural home building materials. Visible within the support columns of the wall are four of these materials: strawbale, cob, hempcrete, and aircrete.

Throughout the weekend, an assortment of natural home building experts walked participants through the steps to building with these materials, adding new sections to the shed.

Among these experts is Suzanne Rogue, a self-professed hemp enthusiast who led the hempcrete construction workshop. Hempcrete is a mixture of hemp and lime, and once mixed, has the consistency of oatmeal before setting.

Tying her long, gray hair back into a bun, Rogue began packing the hempcrete into a wall casing.

“You should only need to do three passes, and you aren’t muscling the hempcrete into submission,” Rogue explained.

She likened the process to the divine feminine, adding, “An 8 year-old can do this, no problem.”

While Rogue’s team used a concrete mixer for this demonstration, making hempcrete requires only the most rudimentary tools: a tarp and a shovel. Though it is not load-bearing, after a few days to set, hempcrete becomes solid enough to bear the weight of a full-grown man.

With her spiritually-infused charm, Rogue led workshops at the fair on bottle-brick making, hempcrete, and clay plasters.

She listed various health and environmental benefits of hempcrete, “It moves with the earth, so it’s earthquake proof.”

She added, “You don’t use drywall, latex paints, or caulk, so you’re not breathing in any of those nasty chemicals. And it creates a protective barrier on the outside that helps reduce pollutants coming into the building.”

Once petrified, hempcrete is fire resistant, a property much-needed in buildings throughout the western U.S. With a natural protective layer, such as clay plaster, hempcrete also helps to regulate the humidity inside of a home, making it an ideal building material for bathrooms.

In addition to their health benefits, natural building materials add aesthetic value to homes. During a workshop on bottle-brick making, Rogue showed participants how to repurpose glass bottles as “bricks” and cement them within a natural building material, like hempcrete.

Bottles ornament the walls of many homes in Crestone. The glass allows light to pass through the wall and into the home, and different bottle colors can be used to create a mosaic of color. The process is surprisingly simple: take two glass bottles with an equal circumference, cut the tapered ends with a table saw, then duct tape the cut ends together. You now have a bottle-brick.

This process allows natural builders to repurpose used bottles for ornamenting a home, much like the use of stained glass to ornament cathedrals.

The Demo Shed is a synecdoche of the many sustainably-built houses in Crestone and its neighboring community, Baca Grande. It reveals how such houses were constructed using simple, organic materials that can be sustainably sourced. The health and environmental benefits of natural building materials have drawn the attention of builder-homeowners throughout the area, and are well-suited for the harsh, arid climate of a high-elevation Colorado town.

A Quick History of Crestone

Builders in Crestone are afforded their creative freedom thanks to building codes designed to protect the natural environment rather than impose restrictions on builders. Nearly 100 years after being founded as a mining town, Crestone was rebirthed into a spiritual hub in the 1970’s, when the Canadian financier Maurice Strong and his wife Hanne began giving land grants to religious communities within the Baca Grande.

Since that time, two dozen spiritual centers have been erected in Crestone. These sites represent a variety of Eastern and Western religions, as well as the New Age movement. The unifying theme among all of them, however, is a structural deference to nature.

The natural-built aesthetic of Crestone’s houses and spiritual centers are as unique as its residents. These creatives have taken to heart the advice of Almustafa, the holy man from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet who advises the townsfolk of Orphalese: “Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls.”

In Crestone you will find Geodesic Domes, Earthships, converted train cars, shipping containers, and the Crestone Hobbitat, a one-of-a-kind pumice-crete home without any straight lines or edges that looks like it grew straight from a Salvador Dali painting.

Natural home building came into the mainstream consciousness largely thanks to Michael Reynolds, who designed the first Earthship in Taos, New Mexico in the 1970’s. Earthships, which are off-grid, sustainable housing structures, incorporate design principles that can enable autonomous living under the right conditions. Passive solar, for example, uses thermal mass heating, air movement, and ventilation to naturally heat and cool the home throughout the year. The goal is to close the loop on all human needs within a single housing unit or local community.

One theme throughout the fair that presenters stressed was the experience of a natural home over any materialistic dogma.

A panel of natural home building experts was asked about their preferred medium. Eric Ficinus, from the Off-Grid-Guru Channel, was one such expert. Ficinus’ moniker is befitting, with a black beard and long hair down past his shoulders. Ficinus explained that natural building is not about any particular medium or process, but about the result.

“I’ve experimented with all sorts of materials, and they all have different benefits,” Ficinus recounted with increasing fervor. “People have come up to me during a home tour and said, ‘We really like this element of the house. Can you build us a house with just that?’ But that’s completely missing the point: a natural home is a living system- no two are alike. They have personality. you simply have to step foot inside a shelter like this to truly feel the difference.”

Systemic Solutions

The ideology of the residents of Crestone attracts spiritual speakers and sustainability-minded individuals from around the country.

Lloyd Kahn, an author of 16 books on natural building design, said about Crestone, “There’s nowhere else in the world where this much is happening with natural building materials.”

While the methodology of natural builders inhabits a niche subset within the world of sustainable building, many insist their methods can be applied beyond geographical anomalies like Crestone.

A frequent talking point among presenters at the fair was the importance of natural building materials not just for their direct health and environmental benefits, but also for the materials they displace. One panel expert who spoke eruditely on such matters was Tim White, a natural building veteran and president of Texas Healthy Homes.

White, sporting a straw hat and long, white beard, described aspects of the modern housing industry that create systemic environmental issues: “What we’re finding is that all the paints and the caulks are systemic mold growing machines. The moisture condensates, and then we got a medium – food for the mold to grow. It’s eating the modern petrochemical based materials that are full of toxins and then the mold itself becomes toxic. This is the wicked cycle that we have.”

The toxic substance that White is describing here is known as black mold. It is most common in areas with poor ventilation and high humidity, such as bathrooms, kitchens, or even behind drywall.

“The simplest equation is the correct equation,” White explained during his talk on clay plasters. “In natural building systems, we want to go back to the historic building materials that have a track record of thousands of years: wood, clay, lime, adobe, and hemp.”

These materials, White explained, can be found locally, do not create waste, and are great at sequestering carbon. Clay-plaster, when used in place of latex-based paints, regulates the temperature and humidity of a home within an ideal range for human living.

White’s advice to conventional builders who want to get into natural building: just put clay plaster over the top of your drywall. “None of us has ever had a problem with mold in our drywall, as long as it doesn’t have a layer of latex-based paint.”

All of the natural home experts emphasized the importance of attending workshops to get as much hands-on experience as possible. “Get rid of the products with VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) inside of them. When you’re ready to go all on, give me a call. We’re here to help.”

About the Author

Alex Hippenhammer is a Colorado-based environmental writer and graduate student of Sustainable Natural Resources Management. He spends his free time rock climbing, dancing, playing ultimate frisbee, and recovering from those same activities. You can find more of his writing on his Substack.