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Deep
Green Building
 by
Carol Venolia
Carol directs the EcoDwelling program at
New
College, teaches in Living Environments
for GGSFS and is
author of 'Natural Remodeling
for the Not-So-Green House'
The
phenomenal spread of green-building programs in recent years
is a testimonial to the hard work of many pioneers. Their
success is bringing green building into the mainstream—a
phenomenon hardly imaginable twenty years ago. But with
popularity often comes oversimplification. As the green-building
wave swells, it’s time to take a deeper look at what
we’re really all about.
In common parlance, “green building” is understood
as encompassing energy-efficiency, the use of resource-efficient
building materials, sensitive site design, and good indoor
air quality. But, in truth, these are not the end goals;
they are the tools, the means to achieving our true goal:
restoring the vibrancy of life on earth.
Building materials and energy consumption are not the cause
of the pollution, resource-depletion, and global climate
change that threaten our biosphere. Without people to misuse
them, the coal, oil, forests, soil, rocks, water, and air
just hang out doing their natural-cycle things, which generally
involves supporting a rich web of life. Rather, the problem
is the way we think, which governs the way we behave. Materials
and energy-consuming toys are the tools we use to wreak
havoc or to restore the self-sustaining juiciness of life.
This is not just another guilt-trip designed to make us
feel bad about why our collective room is a mess. My intention
is to shine a spotlight on the true point of power, the
real fulcrum for lifting the planet: our worldview. The
worldview of most folks raised in Western/industrial civilization
is based on the subliminal message that humans are separate
from and superior to the rest of life, and that natural
resources are there to be used as we please. Submessages
tell us that reality can be divided into categories, and
that we can take actions without incurring reactions.
BUILDINGS ATE MY BRAIN
How does this relate to buildings? Buildings help shape
our worldview. When we spend most of our lives in climate-controlled
enclosures, with little contact with other life forms and
little participation in the important feedback loops of
natural processes, we can come to believe that we really
are separate from the rest of nature. Most people in this
country seem to think that nature is somewhere far from
cities and towns. All that tells us is that we’re
not designing our settlements very well. In fact, the laws
of nature work just the same indoors and out, in town and
in the countryside—as well as in our veins, our tissues,
and our biological rhythms. But our homes and workplaces
generally give us the message that heat, light, coolness,
and fresh air—to say nothing of livelihood and social
contact—come from flicking a switch or pressing a
button. Thus divorced from reality, we’re likely to
think nothing of the consequences (often seemingly distant)
of that switch-flicking.
In other words, a family can live in a house built of sustainably
forested wood on a flyash-concrete foundation, heated by
an efficient furnace, with good insulation, double-pane
windows, and bamboo floors, but if the house looks and feels
like most houses built in the last half-century, their worldview
will remain largely unchallenged. This leads to the very
real possibility of saying, “Hey, I insulated my house;
I paid my dues; now I can drive my SUV all over town without
guilt.”
What we need is to understand the big picture and how things
interact, not to take isolated “green” actions
without grasping their context. As visionary architect Paolo
Soleri once said, “There’s no point in walking
in the right direction on a ship that’s headed in
the wrong direction.”
 If
our homes don’t help us understand how the sun warms
the air and our bodies, and how that warmth is stored by
earth and water; if they don’t allow our complex internal
processes to be synchronized by the sun’s cycles;
if they don’t nurture plants and critters that do
their part of the web-of-life dance while providing us with
the rich natural texture of sights, smells, and sounds that
our Paleolithic bodies call home, then we’re just
adrift in space, not even knowing what we’re missing.
The real revolution happens when we re-embrace life, and
our buildings can help us do that. We can participate in
this revolution by massaging our existing homes into a more
gracious relationship with the world around them. Instead
of seeing our homes as objects that should meet checklists
of criteria in order to be green or healthy, we need to
look at them as dynamic modifiers of our environment—and
to measure their success by the vitality in and around them.
WHAT HAPPENED TO US?
Early humans learned to create dwellings that made the best
use of heat and light from the sun, cooling from shade and
breezes, and the tempering influence of earth, stone, and
water to provide human comfort. Such homes intrinsically
maintained the health-supporting links between their human
dwellers and the natural cycles and resources they depended
on.
We are best adapted to such sensorily rich surroundings.
Our senses evolved over millennia to recognize every change
around us as meaningful to our survival, nourishment, and
pleasure. Our eyes work best with variety in lighting level
and color. Our ears need to hear a rich texture of sound.
Our skin needs to feel air motion and changes in temperature.
We function and feel best when we receive gentle, varying,
meaningful sensory stimulation.
Instead, the modern world feeds us a weird combination of
monotony and overstimulation. In terms of sensory nourishment,
we are starving on junk food.
WHAT CAN WE DO NOW?
When remodeling our homes, the opportunities are tremendous.
We can help turn our unsustainable behavior around by holding
humans as the central touchstone when designing or remodeling
buildings—not humans as self-serving thrill-seekers,
but humans as the agents of world-healing change.
Most homes in this country today were not designed for optimal
interaction with their site, climate, and other resources.
But they can be tweaked and nudged into a respectful dance
with life. The process itself is healing.
As with anything related to real life, there are no blanket
solutions. The best strategies emerge when we pay attention
to the rich jambalaya of our inner yearnings, our bodily
wisdom, the way the sun kisses our place on earth, the flow
of the breezes and rain, the qualities of the earth beneath
our feet, and the pulsing of the web of life.
We can begin by asking ourselves some basic questions:
• What is the most nurturing place I’ve ever
been? What are its qualities?
Can
I have any of those qualities in my home?
• What’s the first thing I see when I wake up
in the morning, and how does it make me feel?
• How much of my daily activity is lit and warmed
by the sun? If the amount is low, how can I let more sunshine
in?
• How much of my day is spent outdoors? Do I have
places at home where I can eat, sleep, work, and relax outdoors?
Do I know how to alter outdoor spaces to make them comfortable
for people in various seasons?
• Is the space around my home abuzz with critters
doing their rounds of feeding, pollinating, soil-building?
• Do I see water outside my window?
The best way to get the inputs that our body-mind craves
is to increase our exposure to the constantly varying light
of the sun and moon, darkness of night, movement of air,
life of plants, sounds of birds. The most invigorating spaces
may well be the most energy- and material-efficient: heated
and lit by the sun, cooled by natural air motion, opened
to the outdoors in salubrious weather, or modified as little
as necessary in inclement weather to provide us with warmth,
dryness, and a bit of stillness while keeping us stimulated
by meaningful change. The best way to conserve energy is
to do it in a way that enhances human energy.
Our own bodies, emotions, and intuitions are our most powerful
touchstone. No checklist, no goals, no concepts will ever
be more useful than trusting our own perceptions. And little
could be farther from our training! But once we feel in
our bodies that we are nature, we can begin to look outward.
We see that our buildings separate us from our beloved world.
We long to transform our built surroundings from stiff barriers
into flexible mediators between our life and the rest of
nature.
Our initial actions can be as simple as moving the furniture
closer to the windows or planting a window box—or
as complex as reshaping our homes in response to sun, wind,
and water. In a way, it doesn’t matter if we do these
things as acts of sensual indulgence, planetary preservation,
or both; the results will be happier, healthier humans who
are viscerally aware of the interdependence of all life.
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