Ditching concrete for earth to build a cleaner future

You do hear about some horrendous collapses of rammed-earth buildings due to earthquakes…

I'm looking at images of the flooding in California with visions of a rammed earth home simply dissolving. That and surviving earthquakes make me say no thanks. Our modern wood frame home with thick manufactured wood sheer walls on a steel reinforced concrete foundation withstood back to back M6.4 and M7.1 earthquakes a day apart with no damage. Works for me! If I was living in a rammed earth home I would probably not be alive.

No, let's not go backwards, instead, let's develop more low emission ways to make concrete.

Currently living in a house ravished by subterranean termintes, the issue? The wood was explosed to soil by a crack in the concrete. Rammed earth is soil...

A lot of the mooted 'green alternatives' don't work or won't scale. Obtaining enough raw material for everyone to do anything a different way, creates a whole new raft of problems. A fossil-free, plastic-free, concrete-free future reversion to the pre-industrial age is simply not going to happen. Humanity won't be living like hobbits. Activist futurologists are enthusiastic people with good intentions, but due diligence is advisable. There is often some aspect of their brave new world that we can run with, but in general, tweaking products to be greener is the best we can hope for. When scaled up, that does often make a real impact.

Make concrete with the ingredients the Romans used using nuclear energy to power the kilns to dry the cement. There's your green concrete and it will be durable.

Currently living in a house ravished by subterranean termintes, the issue? The wood was explosed to soil by a crack in the concrete. Rammed earth is soil...

With subterranean termites you can have a perfect concrete foundation and those miserable pests will still get at the wood in your home.