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It's been with no small amount of frustration that I've watched anyone and everyone involved in pushing energy efficiency in our homes to never once hear them mention the one asset we have easily at our disposal.

Adobe.

As in earthen building.

Here we sit in a state that took the simplest of building materials, mud, and transformed it into an art form, literally. Yet we can't find a way to elbow this material to the green table for discussion.

Something has gone horribly wrong with our relationship to adobe building. It's akin to turning our backs on a wise elder we've taken for granted and stopped listening to.

If we'd just turn back around, we may be surprised at what we'd learn.

I was thinking about this reading over the program for the Adobe Association of the Southwest's Fourth International Conference, May 18-20 in El Rito. The conference is driven by the Adobe Construction Building Program at Northern New Mexico Community College. Right under our noses - albeit a bit north - this program has become a global force in the cause.

The conference draws a dazzling array of attendance, with Asia, Africa, Europe and South American countries well represented.

These are architects, builders, conservationists, historians, geologists, environmentalists and scholars who will get after it in a thoughtful and wide-ranging way.

That the adobe industry has to even scream to be heard in this dawning of energy usage is ironic to the point of laughable. But it's no joking matter. And for me, it's personal.

I've lived in four houses in my 17 years here. The first three were adobe. For someone who grew up in New England, adobe was a revelation.

And eventually an obsession.

Some years back, I took the plunge and entered the industry, working first at making adobe bricks at New Mexico Earth, one of our hidden treasures in Albuquerque. That eventually led to working for a couple of adobe builders in the city, in particular Terry Taggert, one of my personal heroes, and John Calvin, owner of Casa Ronde¤a Vineyards in the North Valley.

If you've been in that amazing, Tuscan-inspired, double-thick-adobe-walled winery, then you know adobe.

So why aren't we seeing adobe at the heart of our building boom? Simple: It's expensive. Each brick weighs 30 to 35 pounds and finding someone willing to lift a few thousand of them into place would eat up your construction budget.

But Quentin Wilson, director of the college's Adobe Construction Program and organizer of the conference, says homeowners can get around that with a do-it-yourself effort.

Without it, adobe remains a boutique building material for the gentry - a sad twist of fate.

"Adobe is not the alternative, it's the mainstream building material worldwide," Wilson says. "Only in the U.S. is frame building considered mainstream."

My old boss, Richard Levine, owner of New Mexico Earth, has seen a lot of ups and downs in 30 years.

As to this notion of why adobe has fallen so far off the collective local consciousness, he says, "I've noticed that very same thing, also. There are so many people who could be involved, but there is no effective political organization beating the drum, so nothing happens."

Adobe can be a quiet practice. I recall many early dawn mornings, pulling a hoe through a huge mud pit, getting it ready for the adobero crew.

Adobe does not shout or boast. It just is.

Perhaps if we prick our ears up a little more, we may hear what it's trying to tell us.