In April, I went to gather urbanite for the kitchen foundation (which has finally been started as of last week!). Urbanite is, of course, reclaimed concrete from old roads and sidewalks.

I’ve collected and used urbanite for my home, but this time, walking in a giant yard brimming with the stuff, I got a decidedly post-industrial feeling about the whole thing. There was something sorta post-modern about the whole affair: scrambling over giant piles of rubble from dozens of demolition jobs, looking for the right size pieces of concrete to reuse in a completely different sort of building. I imagined that if I didn’t pick through this stuff, it would likely still be there the next year, and the next, and probably until well beyond my life or that of even our current capitalist, globalized society.

Concrete is, after all, pretty much completely non-biodegradable. And it is used absolutely everywhere: roads, walls, bridges, paths, houses, etc. The consumption of concrete is utterly massive: it’s the second most consumed material on earth, second only to water. That, I think, is absolutely horrifying. Concrete is here to stay. It’s not going to return to the earth anytime soon, like a fallen tree in the forest. That concrete block will look the same for hundreds (or thousands?) of years.

And then I realized why urbanite is  a great symbol for the natural building movement: to take old concrete from roads and big buildings, those things that symbolize the achievements of our sprawling, ecologically destructive society, and to reuse them in natural homes, homes built by human hands, using other natural and recycled materials, is a brilliant thing. Literally, we can create a foundation from the waste of our larger, wasteful society. Hah!