Sustainable Building Essentials Collection

Rob Avis, PEng, is co-owner and operator of Adaptive Habitat, a leading-edge property design firm for resilient homes, acreages, and farms, and Verge Permaculture, a globally recognized award-winning education business described by Geoff Lawton as “one of North America’s premier permaculture design and education companies.” Co-author of Essential Rainwater Harvesting, Rob has been professionally involved in project management, ecological design, and sustainable technologies since 2005. He lives in Alberta, Canada.

Michelle Avis, PEng, is co-owner and operator of Adaptive Habitat, a leading-edge property design firm for resilient homes, acreages, and farms, and Verge Permaculture, a globally recognized award-winning education business described by Geoff Lawton as “one of North America’s premier permaculture design and education companies.” Co-author of Essential Rainwater Harvesting, Michelle has over a decade of experience in project management, ecological design, and sustainable technologies. She lives in Alberta, Canada.

Ann Baird, BSc is co-creator, designer, and builder of the award winning Eco-Sense home, the first internationally recognized Living Building Challenge petal residential project. Ann works on regional climate action initiatives involving water, food, and energy resiliency in climate adaptation and risk management.

Gord Baird, BA, is co-creator, designer, and builder of the award winning Eco-Sense home, the first internationally recognized Living Building Challenge petal residential project. Gord is the Water Commissioner for the Victoria Capital Regional District’s regional Water Supply Commission and Juan de Fuca Water Distribution Commission, and was a technical editor for the BC Ministry of Health’s Manual of Composting Toilets and Greywater Standard Practices (2016).

Anthony Dente, PE, LEED AP, is a licensed engineer and principal at Verdant Structural Engineers, a firm that has designed over 200 structures using natural-building wall systems such as straw bale, adobe, rammed earth, earthbag, and cob. As vice president of the Cob Research Institute, he was the lead engineer for the Cob Construction Appendix of the 2021 International Residential Code, as well as the Hemp-Lime (Hempcrete) Appendix, both the first of their kind in the US. Dente has advised, designed, and collaborated on numerous university research programs testing the structural behavior of natural materials, and writes and lectures extensively about appropriate use of environmentally sensitive building materials. He is the CEO for Verdant Structural Products, and project lead for their prefabricated, carbon-storing, straw wall panels. Dente was recently awarded the Constellation Prize for Sustainable Engineering Practice. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area of California.

Lydia Doleman is a licensed contractor with two decades of experience as a natural and sustainable builder, cabinet maker, and trainer. She has taught carpentry and natural building at Solar Energy International in Colorado and was lead ecological builder for Portland’s City Repair project from 2002-09. Aiming to merge three converging passions in her life – art, ecology and social justice – Lydia has created beautiful, high-performance, low-impact buildings across Oregon and Washington, including Portland’s first permitted straw bale home, The Rebuilding Center’s cob entryway, and a 3,300-sq.f light straw clay brewery. She’s written articles for The Last Straw Journal and Permaculture Design and appeared on NBC News and HGTV’s Off Beat America on the topic of tiny homes, featuring a small-scale light straw clay timber frame home. Lydia lives in southern Oregon.

Leslie Doyle is the owner of Restoration Gardens Inc., a green roof design and installation firm that has designed and built dozens of green roofs for residential and commercial buildings from 80 square feet to 30,000 square feet. She is a certified LiveRoof Installer and an accredited Green Roof Professional by the Industry Association, Green Roofs for Healthy Cities. She shares her knowledge and passion for integrating nature in the built environment as a green roof instructor at the Endeavour Centre and formerly at Fleming College. Leslie lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Kelly Hart is a pioneering earthbag builder, author, and filmmaker. The building of his multi-dome earthbag Colorado residence is chronicled in the video Building with Bags: How We Made Our Experimental Earthbag/Papercrete House. Kelly also founded and hosts the widely visited natural and green building websites greenhomebuilding.com, devoted to all aspects of sustainable architecture and natural building, dreamgreenhomes.com, which features a wide range of ecological home plans for sale by various architects and designers, and earthbagbuilding.com which explores in depth the many possibilities for building with earthbags. Kelly’s other publications include Rolling Shelter: Vehicles We Have Called Home, Remodel Green: Make Your Home Serve Your Life, and Earthbag Architecture: Build Your Dream with Bags. Kelly lives in Silver City, New Mexico. 

Michael Henry has researched plasters and plastered his way across Ontario for the past decade, plastering for Camel’s Back Construction and Straworks. His attention to detail and mad-scientist plaster experiments have made him a noted expert in the field and a sought-after workshop leader on plasters at the Endeavour Centre. Michael is co-author of Ontario’s Old-Growth Forests, and he lives in Peterborough, Ontario, with his wife and two children.

Tim J. Krahn, P. Eng. is a registered professional engineer and partner in Building Alternatives Inc., a consulting engineering company specializing in non-conventional structural and building envelope engineering with an emphasis on natural materials and energy efficiency. He holds a masters degree in geotechnical engineering and a bachelors degree in civil engineering from the University of Manitoba, and is a founding member of the Natural Building Engineering Group, the current chair of the Ontario Natural Building Coalition, and is active on the Renewable Materials task force of the Embodied Carbon Network. He received the first building permit for a rammed-earth structure in the city of Ottawa, and has been the structural engineer on more than twenty rammed-earth projects in Canada, including the first net-zero municipal building in Ontario, the Oxford County Municipal Solid Waste Office and Education Centre. He currently resides in Ontario, Canada.