Hippies, greenness, sustainability, thou and me

This article sparked my interest for a few reasons, including that the guy that climbs up on my roof to adjust my swamp cooler twice a year is building an off-grid house.

It starts out about architecture - Boddy is an urban design/architecture critic - but gets into the wisdom - or not - of the 100-mile food choice and the no-airplane rides choice, towards the end of the article.
There are photos with the article that I won't show here.

Here's the link -
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071207.revan-boddy-1207/REStory/RealEstate/home


BUILDING GREEN
Let's push sustainability from fad to mainstream
Maybe the hippies were right afterall
TREVOR BODDY
December 7, 2007 at 11:03 AM EST

Does anyone remember the straw bale house fad of 15 years ago? As architecture critic and design teacher, I got asked back then what I thought of those thick-walled residences stuffed with enough straw to winter a goat herd, then covered over with lathe and stucco. My answer seldom pleased the well-intentioned builders who quizzed me: "They waste floor space and wall depth, plus there are the extra building materials needed to wrap them," I would declare. "Moreover, straw bale houses waste straw, which has perfectly good use as bedding for cattle."

More interesting and apropos to our growing sustainability crisis are the quirky houses of New Mexico designer Mike Reynolds. From the late 1960s to the present, he has tried straw bales and virtually every other constructional variation on off-the-grid, solar powered, self-built, organic and downright nutty building ideas that ever zoomed out of the Whole Earth Catalogue.

But Mr. Reynolds' time has come. Dozens of his hippie houses are recognized today as the ultimate in recycling ?- for using garbage as insulation within their walls.

All of this is told in the documentary feature film Garbage Warrior, which played at this fall's Vancouver International Film Festival. And his house designs are shown in the timely exhibition 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas at Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture, which documents architectural responses to 1970s oil crisis.

Soon after the newly minted architect moved from Ohio to the sunny southwest, Mr. Reynolds tried embedding discarded car tires in walls; the rubber proved a more efficient insulator than straw. He soon found an even better insulation material: polycarbonate water bottles. Emptied of Evian, they are laid empty and capped, in rows like wine bottles, their ends sealed in wet concrete that forms walls.

For a warm but high-altitude climate like New Mexico's, these bottle walls provide all the insulation needed. The designer then experimented with bottles filled with water that would soak up solar heat during the day, then radiate it back out during cool desert nights.

When some of his increasingly well-heeled clients objected to the use of plastic in their walls, he substituted multi-coloured glass bottles lifted from landfills. The walls glow like stained glass windows, and their reuse saves the energy that would have been expended to melt them down for recycling.

The downside of Mr. Reynolds' self-described "garbage houses" is that no matter how innovative their use of recycled materials, and no matter how much they help save energy, his designs increasingly serve as the second homes of well-heeled boomers. They are one more expensive bauble for those who left the commune to enter law school or dabble in high tech.

A partial benediction for Mr. Reynolds' persistent pursuit of sustainable building is a phrase I once saw on a funky truck bumper ?- "The Hippies Were Right!"

And wrong, too, because this mixture of environmental good intentions, funky aesthetic preferences and embedded social-class obsessions also applies to many other green causes these days. While Mr. Reynolds' clients' taste for ex-urbanism undoes much of the good accomplished by his buildings, his houses nonetheless demonstrate how the built environment is the centrepiece of a sustainable world.

Studies show that 48 per cent of the energy consumed by Canadians is tied to building, heating and cooling our buildings, and getting to and from work. Decisions about architecture and the configuration of cities are much more important than other areas commonly earmarked for conservation. But these other conservation causes have a surface aesthetic that attracts us ?- conferring status or identity ?- or else they fulfill some quasi-religious need to suffer, or to be seen to suffer.

Consider the new questioning of the morality of air travel, for example. British environmental writer George Monbiot has foresworn the use of airplanes, a viable option for a London-based contributor to the Guardian, but less practical if one is based in Dubuque, or even Vancouver. Air travel, at most, consumes 2 per cent of our total energy budget. To cut this in half ?- producing a net savings of only 1 per cent ?- would require revolutionary changes to the way we do business and would decimate tourism as we now know it.

By comparison, a more aggressive program subsidizing increased insulation and replacement of leaky windows would yield a significantly larger benefit. Granted, this less sexy strategy would deny the opportunity of Mr. Monbiot and others to wear the hair shirts of self-righteousness. Decked out in their fuzzy apparel, we are now obliged to hear how they now need never leave Clerkenwell for work, and if they do, offsets can be purchased, our contemporary version of the indulgences sold by medieval churches to thieves and adulterers.

There is a similar streak of moralizing at the core of the more radical versions of the "100 Mile Diet," the practice of consuming food produced only in the vicinity of the eater. Does the denial of pleasure and variety really further green aims? Rigid applications of the 100 Mile Diet are more the demonstration of a Puritan ethos than a realistic wish to reduce the energy spent in transporting food.

Only a small fraction of us can afford rural off-grid redoubts, choose to never again set foot in a Boeing or Airbus, or limit our diet to a boring bag of local produce. But those who can should admit they may be doing it for reasons other than a green future.

Especially for fast-growing, young regions like Western Canada ?- where changes now in city-building can make a permanent difference ?- the best green policy is the shaping of denser, more integrated communities, places where sustainability is a light cloak, not a hair shirt.