Straw bales ancestor systems include Asian and European practices of building with tied bundles of straw stacked in mud mortar. But straw bale building really begins in the 1880s with the invention of the mechanical baler. Experimentation soon began in northwestern Nebraska, where people tried both baled grass and straw. Intended originally as secondary or temporary structures, these buildings were soon found to be more comfortable and economical than most conventional building forms. Cheap transportation and imported manufactured building products, however, soon destroyed the nascent straw bale industry (Steen et al., 1994). The straw bale revival began in the late seventies and early eighties, taking its place at the head of the natural building pantheon in the nineties. Innovators saw in it a super-benign form of building with great potential for self-help and owner-builder construction. Today we find straw bale buildings in almost every state and province in North America, and rapid growth all over the world. The largest concentration of straw bale structures is in Arizona, New Mexico and California; but they can be found in Canada, Mexico, Russia, Germany, Sweden, China, and Australia, to name only a few places. Straw is basically a waste product of grain production, and every year vast quantities are burned after harvest, generating substantial carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming. Making good use of waste straw not only avoids this destructive combustion, but it reduces the use of lumber and synthetic building products. And by creating super-insulated buildings, straw bale construction further reduces carbon emissions otherwise generated by heating and cooling. Researchers have discovered that each straw bale house built in China and Mongolia will over a 30-year period reduce