At the Center for Creative Ecology, Mud Building is Green Building

Mud has just about the lowest embodied energy footprint of any building material. It's cheap (or free), natural, a decent insulator, non-toxic, and in a place like Kibbutz Lotan ( located in the desert of Southern Israel)there's just about an infinite supply. According to Alex Cicelsky a resident of Lotan, the CCE is on its way to becoming a "national leader in the use of natural and renewable materials like earth plasters and strawbales."

Lotan is home to the Center for Creative Ecology, an environmental education center offering opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and hands-on experimentation. The CCE hosts classes and workshops on permaculture, alternative building methods, and organic gardening, the most notable of which is a 7-week "Green Apprenticeship" program. Students and other "eco-volunteers" live in an ecologically-minded neighborhood called the Bustan, sleep in "domes" built from mud and strawbale, recycle their wastewater, cook in a solar oven, use composing toilets, and tackle a wide range of ecological projects around Lotan. It is a unique opportunity for people to practice the ethics they preach, and teachin this case.

The CCE, in addition to educating students from all over the world in the ethos of permaculture, has also had a major impact on the rest of the kibbutz, which has made a commitment to environmental action in general, and the use of "environmentally appropriate technologies," in particular. They are also cultivating their image as an eco-tourism destination, leveraging their green publicity and providing an opportunity for more people to experience the CCE life-style first-hand.

Lotan is located in the Arava Valley, about an hour North of Eilat. While development of the Arava is currently being actively promoted by the Israeli and Jordanian governments (most notably in the case of the Red Sea - Dead Sea Project, a trans-governmental infrastructural plan to dig a canal from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea), the Arava is, for the time being, pretty empty, and desolate, and remote. In a way, this location necessitates the sustainable framework practiced on Lotan. The community is forced into a certain degree of self-reliance, resources are extremely limited, valuable, and not taken for granted.