The first spark of the European Earthship Builders United idea was born on a Belgian/Dutch expedition of Earthship Belgium to Sweden. It was about a small group of people from two different countries helping out a total stranger in a third country on a voluntary base to build his home for his family.

This made a lasting impression on all expedition members and the future home owners and for many it was a good peak in their life.

The cooperation amongst total strangers from 3 different countries all without any money involved was really great to experience. It was like free open source development or free open document development. It was like free open source earthship development where people contribute their talents to make something work, without money involved. A new sort of economy where money becomes less important and sharing of talents and energy all the more important.

Discovering needs and solutions

It was clear that building your own self sustainable house in a low budget way with just some friends to help is a very long term enterprise. That these kind of project could use some outside help from people willing to travel there and do some voluntary work was clear as well. And that doing so could end up being one of the better times in ones life was experienced.

But arranging volunteers can be a quite time consuming business for people often already very busy with both working their jobs and building at the same time.

So the idea of a web based platform got born. A place where a project has the tools to write about their project progress, post some pictures or a video, have some discussions with builders elsewhere in Europe and have the means for people to sign up for volunteer work.

This place also needed to be a place were people willing to gain some experience in new ways of building can find those projects. Bring those two together and EEBU was born.

Birth of the EEBU Community

By the end of February 2011 the EEBU web site was launched. Besides a public part with information on EEBU, earthships in Europe and articles, there is also a closed EEBU community where project owners and volunteers can meet. In the community part were 3 building projects at kick off. Since then the community has been slowly growing and more members and projects joined.

Besides facilitating projects, there are quite some discussion topics related to building. Further more work is done on an instruction manual on how to build in a Do It Yourself way, at least as much as possible. This for keepin costs low and possible mortages out.

When finished these manuals will be freely available for downloading.

Who is EEBU meant for?

So for future earthship builders, those who want to experience building or for those just looking to enrich their knowledge EEBU is the right spot.

But be aware, it is a place where your activity an contribution of talents is some what expected...