Who We Are
Josh Burg
Co-Founder
Growing up in an adobe brick home outside Albuquerque in the foothills of the ruggedly beautiful Sandia Mountains, it was here I first experienced the joy of building shelter. On weekends, holidays, and summer vacation, I would venture deep into the high desert hills with my two compadres Jacob and Evan to build “forts” inside the Juniper and Piñon clusters that dotted the seemingly endless Placitas landscape. It’s this deeply embedded childhood memory that probably drove my subconscious to find my first cob workshop in 2017. Having been a landscaper and dabbled in construction off and on through my teens and early 20s, the tactile experience of working with earthen materials was a natural fit. I was immediately hooked and continued working with cob under the mentorship of Claudine Desiree with CruzinCobGlobal and then spent several years focusing on carpentry and conventional building around Portland and Southwest Washington to balance my skillset. Having now taught or co-taught several very rewarding workshops with CCG, I’ve decided to form my own building team with my incredibly talented partner, Sara Crippen. We are currently experimenting with a hybrid method of cob construction using posts and pallets to speed up the wall assembly. It is our hope that this method, invented by Miguel “Sir Cobalot” Elliot, will prove to be a scalable method that could provide affordable, sustainable housing systems for many in need. We plan on incorporating pallet-cob, monolithic cob, and straw-bale elements in our future projects and workshops. I believe natural building and it’s related fields of permaculture and communal living hold the key to a brighter future for our overly individualized and atomized society.
Co-Founder
I come by natural building honestly. Growing up, my weekends and summers were spent tending to our family’s extensive gardens, working in construction and landscape installation with my parents, wandering the trails of our back timber, and selling Christmas trees from our farm during the Winter. I found joy connecting my body and mind to create functional, beautiful landscapes and homes. Even though I followed the typical midwestern track of ‘getting an education,’ after college I felt hungry for more. I had spent the last four years exercising and expanding my mind, but the somatic experience of being outside doing good work still tugged at me.
I decided to explore other ways of living and found myself living in two intentional communities, Jubilee Partners and The Possibility Alliance (the PA). Both communities felt radical to me. We were serving refugees, living off the land, cooking with fire, building a strawbale home, and teaching free workshops about permaculture and restorative justice. Those two apprenticeships were the most formative experiences of my life, besides growing up as a slightly feral girl in rural Iowa. I was brought onto the PA as a natural building apprentice and learned how to build non-load bearing strawbale with Mark Mazzioti of Red Earth Farms, a neighbor of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage . My work that Summer was to plaster the two- story, multi-family home we had infilled during Mark’s workshop; it was HUGE and I got a whole lotta practice plastering!
After the PA I focused on regenerative agriculture and eventually found myself in Mexico in the rural mountain town of Tlayacapan, Morelos. There I finished a small strawbale home, among other structures, and began to teach natural building workshops for women. Despite the difficulties that arose while being an owner-builder, I absolutely loved how I felt working, playing, and living in my strawbale home. The earthen walls breathed and played with the light shining through the deep windows, they kept me cool during the hot spells and warm in the winter winds; I felt safe and truly at home. Friends, family, and students would come visit my home and leave changed, realizing how palpably different living in an earthen structure felt. Observing their reactions to what I had created propelled me to want to educate others on how to do the same.
After moving back to the States in the Spring of 2023, I met Josh at a CruzinCobGlobal workshop in the North Carolina mountains where he and Paula of Mocabarro taught us how to build a cob cottage with a reciprocal, living roof. Our passion and enthusiasm for natural building aligned and kept pace with one another, and we eventually decided to co-found Clay Sand & Soul in order to manifest our dream of building healthy homes for all. It has been a journey, but I feel it has really only begun! To me, natural building is an extension of how I want to move through this world; with regard for all the human and non-human beings in my environment, with grace, with creativity, with wonder, and with love.