History
Ecological Building Network (EBNet) was founded in 1999 by Bruce King, a practicing structural engineer near San Francisco, California. King first became active in green building in the late 1980’s, but couldn’t find the information and engineer needs to work with innovative and natural building materials. The experience of working on the ground-breaking Real Goods Solar Living Center in Hopland, California, led him to establish a central resource and disseminator for information about building with natural and recycled materials. Since then, “natural building” – formerly dismissed as the frivolity of “hippies in the woods” – has emerged as climate-friendly building with its short, simple supply chains and minimally processed materials.
EBNet connects the people doing the research, experimentation, and innovation with people who are interested in putting that information to work, such as designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and building officials. For complete history, see timeline below.
Board of Directors
Bruce King, Founder and Director
A registered structural engineer for 45 years, King has worked on just about everything: high-rise structures in San Francisco, aircraft remodels in Miami, Tahitian resorts, Buddhist monasteries in the Colorado Rockies, and hundreds of houses of every style. He is the author of five books on sustainable building, and has given lectures all over the world to universities, professional groups, and government. Largely retired from designing buildings, he has turned his attention to BuildWell Media. He lives in San Rafael, California with his wife, Sarah Weller King.
Sarah Weller King – Co-founder, Secretary/Treasurer
Sarah Weller King has over 40 years of fund raising and marketing communications experience, operating her own free-lance consulting business with over 75 non-profit organizations in the local, regional, national, and international arenas. For EBNet, she is responsible for all managemant and administration, budget development and implementation, and reporting. She is one of the founding parents of Dedication to Special Education, an organization committed to raising money to support Special Education in Marin County, California. She served as co-chair for 20 years.
Anne Banta
Lola Ben-Alon
Andrew Himes
Peter Kloepfer
Kirsten Ritchie
Nick LituanioHistory of Ecological Building Network
1997 | Ecological Building Network (EBNet) is established by Bruce & Sarah King as a project of the Tides Foundation, and became an independent 501(c)3 non-profit in 2004 to develop and promote healthy, low-carbon building. |
1998 | Publication of Buildings of Earth and Straw, the first engineering design guide for straw bale and rammed earth buildings |
2001 | EBNet produces the first International Conference on Climate-Friendly Building Materials, what proved to be the predecessor of the BuildWell conferences |
2003 | EBNet secures $250,000 in funding from the State of California and private supporters to conduct testing of straw bale wall systems, already becoming popular on every continent; we conduct structural, seismic, fire, moisture, and acoustical tests around the USA. |
2005 | Publication of Making Better Concrete, a guide to using industrial waste materials to reduce the enormous carbon footprint of concrete |
2006 | Publication of Design of Straw Bale Buildings, a much more comprehensive engineering design guide for straw bale structures based on the preceding test program. |
2009 | Working with ASTM International, EBNet expands and improves the international Earthen Building Standard, ASTM E2392, that provides safe building guidance to the poorest billion or so people around the world living in the simplest of structures |
2010 | EBNet produces the first International BuildWell Conference on Climate-Friendly Building Materials at Cavallo Point near San Francisco |
2011 | EBNet in Haiti; after spending a week touring the country and evading cholera, our proposal for rebuilding after the 2010 earthquake is among a small number of finalists in the Clinton Foundation’s “Building Better Haiti” competition |
2013 | The second International BuildWell Conference in San Francisco
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2014 | Launch of the BuildWell Source, an online library of resources for natural and climate-friendly building technologies |
2016 | Publication of The New Carbon Architecture, proffering a vision of a global built environment that absorbs more carbon than it ever emits |
2019 | Bruce King instigates and writes the world’s first climate-friendly building code, the Marin County Low-Carbon Concrete Code. As hoped and intended, that initiative is being much replicated in California and around the world, and garnered for Bruce a Newsmaker of the Year award from Engineering News-Record |
2022 | Launch of ARPA-E‘s HESTIA grant program awarding $40M to carbon-storing building technologies, inspired (according to its Director) by The New Carbon Architecture. |
2023 | Launch of BuildWell Media –– video and other resources to spread climate-friendly design. |
2024 | Beginning work on Earthbound –– reimagining concrete and earthen construction. |
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