One thing I’m good at is designing and building houses.  I believe I truly grasp the fundamentals and have learned to work with the elements of our environment to create living spaces which meet the needs and wishes of the people who use them.  I have worked at it passionately for a long time.  I also care about our environment from an ecological point of view, and have always tried to find ways of building which would minimize the degradation and consumption of our natural resources while at the same time enhancing the quality of life for as many people as possible.  So it was with open arms and an open mind that I greeted the ‘Green Building’ movement as it emerged over the past couple of decades to become the moral and ethical voice of a vast worldwide industry.  Conceptually, philosophically, it seemed to embody many of the goals which I have always felt were important to creating a sustainable way of living while still providing the security and comforts most people desire.  But I have become disillusioned.  As a recovering cynic, I need to understand this because most discussions about ‘building green’ push me to the brink of a total relapse quicker  than any other topic I can think of.

Maybe by looking closely  I can resolve some of my negative feelings and move beyond them.  There are several different aspects of the movement which seem to contribute to my unease and I want to spend a little time with each of them.  The first is my gut level reaction to watching how dissent or disagreement is tolerated within the movement.  The next is the general presentation of supporting scientific and empirical evidence when evaluating the performance of new methods and products.  Thirdly, I am disturbed that the issue of ‘consumption’ is not more honestly dealt with.  And finally, I want to explore the topic of money and why real cost isn’t used more readily to compare the value of  ‘green’ designs when in fact nearly everything under discussion can be boiled down to dollars and cents.  I should feel much better when this is done.

Cult mentality has long bothered me because there seems always to be a general suspension of dialog in favor of unquestioned devotion to one all-powerful and unassailable point-of-view which dictates every aspect of behavior and thought amongst the followers.  In other words, people are relieved of their ability (and responsibility) to think for themselves and act as autonomous beings using the senses and reasoning abilities most of us have.  At it’s most innocuous level, cult mentality merely wastes the potential contributions of lots of creative people.  At it’s worst, it leads to wholesale destruction of the individuals involved along with extensive collateral damage well beyond the confines of the group itself.  I bring this up because I am often bothered in much the same way when I encounter someone talking about the virtues of Green Building (notice the capitals!) .  I am basically expected to suspend any doubt I have and accept the ‘truth’ and ‘rightness’ of all things green, and to bow my head if that green is ‘Certified’.  As though no one ever thought or cared about these issues before.  Like cult followers, we must not question what we are told, let alone disagree with it.  At least in a cult, you know who it is you’re following …  whatever leadership there is in the green building movement basically comes from sales people who want nothing more than to generate business for themselves.  That’s okay, as long as you recognize it, but I’m not necessarily buying.

If the development of  ‘greener’  homes is to progress in a truly conservative direction, there needs to be honest scientific appraisal of these machines we are creating which examines gains and losses on an overall basis and an ongoing timeline.  There are a lot of hypotheses being offered these days as to how we can save energy and other resources thereby sustaining our planet, but testing them is by no means a simple task.  Houses can be incredibly complex structures put together in (how can I put this delicately?) somewhat random ways and they don’t lend themselves well to being tested. Energy audits based on computer modeling are now routine for new house designs and on many existing homes when they are upgraded in substantial ways, but these are only as good as the assumed model.   How do we know the model is accurate?   Scientifically speaking, it has to be tested, and testing is hard  …  and might not give you the results you were hoping for, which for the green movement is a distinct problem because the adherents are filled with hope.  A case in point which demonstrates the problem was the construction of a large, modern straw bale house with 20 inch thick walls calculated to have an insulating R-value of at least 60 (more on this number later).  To this day, nearly ten years after the house was completed, I believe everyone involved in the building will tell you the walls are wonderful and vastly superior to more conventionally built walls.  But I know the straw bales inside those walls are completely surrounded (except on the bottom) by large and continuously inter-connected air spaces which allow convective currents to move relatively freely from the exposed exterior plaster to the exposed interior plaster surfaces and back again.  There’s just no way those walls are providing the degree of insulation assumed in the model.  No tests were ever made to find out.  Even when testing is done it can be misleading, as can be seen in another example involving a different straw bale structure.  Concerned that moisture inside the walls needed to be monitored, glass viewing ports were installed in the plaster coating (no easy task!)  and periodic observations were made.  It wasn’t until the roof started sinking that it occurred to anyone the moisture might not be uniformly distributed where the ports were.  Science is not easy.  And one final caution about science … don’t be deceived by the numbers.  An R-value of 60 means 1/60 of the heat is being conducted through the walls and an R-value of 19 means 1/19 of the heat is being conducted through the walls (Resistance is the inverse of Conductance), meaning a perfectly built 20″ thick straw bale wall theoretically conducts only about 3 – 4% less energy than a conventionally built 6″ wall with fiberglass batt insulation.  This is to say that straw bail construction theoretically saves only 3 – 4% more energy (compared to having no insulation) than simple fiberglass batts and this only through the walls (where the fewest losses occur anyway) which is nowhere near the savings implied by comparing the respective R-values, 60 to 19.  Real world testing might find the difference to be even smaller.  The mathematical fact is that increasing the R-value to 10,000,000 would only conserve an additional 1% – 2%.

It’s interesting to me that the words ‘conserve’, ‘conservation’, ‘conservative’, ‘conservatism’, and ‘conservationism’ elicit such different responses about  worthiness and/or political correctness, and in sometimes opposing ways.  Throw in ‘neoconservatism’ and you really get people stirred up.  But what’s the deal?  Aren’t we just talking about keeping things as they are so that we don’t waste what we have?  About using less and getting more from it?  It’s a simple concept …  save what we have and get as much as possible from it when we do consume it.  The unfortunate (and probably inescapable) conflicts arise because so much of our economy is based on consumption, a great deal of which occurs in the home building industry.  You want a ‘green’ house? … make it smaller, simpler, colder in the winter, hotter in the summer, and build it out of the most basic, abundant,  non-degradable materials available.  Easy.  Bernard Maybeck perfected the art more than a hundred years ago.  And yet we continue to build houses several times the size and complexity of those built  in the past  and demand that these provide a level of comfort and security unimaginable  to most of our ancestors.  This is the 800 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to ‘going green’ and nobody wants to talk about it.  It’s bad for business.  Instead of conserving we are substituting one product for another, one material for another, one ‘certified’ system for another (every one of which is more ‘eco-friendly’ than the one before) and all the while we’re trying to talk the customer into buying more.  When I hear of houses being built as models of ecological engineering excellence which incorporate $50,000 HVAC systems and require 5 layers of synthetically created membranes of varying thicknesses to make them work it gives me pause.  Two hundred cubic yards of concrete is two hundred cubic yards of concrete even if it’s made with fly-ash cement and recycled aggregates.   I have less trouble accepting the behavior of people who indulge themselves by over-building and who do it in an efficient and conservative way than I have accepting the behavior of people indulging their creative urges by inventing monstrously complicated machines that basically don’t work very well, even if their intention was to save the planet.  I don’t really know what’s right and what’s wrong in the midst of all this, but I believe the best way to reduce the degradation caused by home building and home usage is to build smaller, build simpler, and provide fewer creature comforts.  Not exactly the slogan anyone wants to hear but it should not be ignored.

The idea of building smaller and simpler can be looked at not just in physical terms, but in monetary terms as well.  Money is a symbol.  It represents a quantity of value, and the hope among all of us who use it is that the symbolic value of the money we associate with some product or service will be equal to the real value of the thing itself.  Embodied in this is the basic notion of an equal trade between people … this pig for those two goats.  We have money so the pig and the two goats don’t have to be in the room at the same time, nor do they have to end up with the same two people.  Money systems have been the basis of quantifying value for thousands of years.  Billions of people have contributed to determining those values by trading for what they wanted or needed the most.  We all get to vote every day with our pocketbook.   So why is it that  the monetary cost of  ‘building green’ can’t be compared directly to the cost of  ‘not building green’ when examining which approach most depletes the environment.  Theoretically, the cost to produce something equals the value of everything sacrificed in it’s making, and in a competitive and unregulated marketplace this pretty much holds true.  But green building advocates routinely offer designs costing substantially more than their non-green equivalents (meaning they are willing to sacrifice more resources today), while simultaneously claiming that in the end we will somehow come out ahead.  In the case of the straw bale house mentioned earlier, my guess is that the use of straw bales as the insulating material necessitated changes in the structure costing more than $100,000 and the sacrifice of close to 1000 square feet of potential floor space.  Choosing the more expensive green design only makes sense if the non-green approach is ‘hiding’ some of it’s costs which will have to be paid sometime in the future, and these will out-weigh the savings today.  To some extent this may happen (as it may also happen for the ‘green’ solution), but the beauty of the marketplace is that not much gets hidden for very long.  Insurance settlements and lawsuit awards find their way into the cost structure relatively quickly and (hopefully) in a way that honestly and accurately rebalances the books.  I am far more comfortable with this model for comparison than I am letting sales-people arbitrarily assign value to unknown hidden future costs and expect me to pay them that amount right now with their assurance that doing so will prevent these future costs from ever occurring.  Again, I just can’t buy it.

I really am pro-green, if that means I want to conserve precious resources and sustain and enhance a healthy, diverse environment (using my definition of ‘precious’, ‘healthy’, and ‘diverse’ of course!).  I support the movement.  However, when it comes to building houses, it’s quite difficult to improve on thousands of years of human invention tested continuously and rigorously by the real environment.   Science and discovery have made incredible new materials and products available for use, but radical design changes usually result in failure and added expense (waste).  The urge to ‘solve the problem’ is commendable and of course nothing will improve if we don’t work at it, but there are so many factors affecting the outcome that’s it’s easy to lose sight of the path we should follow.  To stay on it, I believe we need to eliminate the cult-like attitude that presumes to know what’s best for everyone, we need to test our designs far more rigorously and completely in the real environment while honestly and clearly presenting the scientific results, we need to remember that simpler is usually the best approach when it comes to conservation, and we have to be willing to play on a level field without expecting subsidies and political goodwill to hide our short-comings.  No one said this was going to be easy.

Aaahh …. I really do feel better now!