Sustainable WNC

I’ve been bad. I’m supposed to do my duty and blog more often…at least once a month for god’s sake…but I haven’t. I should be canned. In fact, I’d throw the first stone if it was possible to throw stones at yourself. I moved to this area 15 years ago to put my 2 cents worth into the “back to the land” movement. I imagined…well I won’t even tell you what I imagined because it’s just too silly at this point. Though I love living here and feel great about what I’m doing, the simple life has never materialized. I am frantically busy all the time and have yet to find a way out of the cycle. This blog for wonderful ol’ Sustainable WNC has become just one more post-it note on the fridge of my life.

Okay, I’m going to give it another shot. Let’s see if there’s anyone out there listening. I’d like to get some back and forth going, here. I’m trying to compile a list of all of the “alternative”, “natural”, “extreme green” or whatever you want to call them houses that have been built in our neighborhood. House means inhabited. I’m particularly interested in CODE APPROVED buildings, but also want to hear about everything else. I’m definitely interested in the straw bale contingent, though I know a number of those already. Any habitable cordwood buildings around? What about earthen materials (cob, adobe, slip-straw, etc.)? Anybody actually living in an earthen building in the area? Etc. I’ll keep it confidential if desired.

“It’s Not Green Being Easy”. That was one of the headlines from the daily paper at Burning Man this year. A west coast friend of mine convinced me that I had to go because the theme was environmental consciousness (”Green Man”). If you’ve never been, well…there’s really no way to describe it. My pardner Tim perhaps summed it up best by saying “it’s like being on another planet in a movie on hallucinogens”.

The site is a desert in Nevada surrounded by black mountains. A lake for millions of years until about 11,000 years ago, it’s a Spagetti Western set on steroids during a severe drought. Incredible heat and vicious wind storms during the day give way to beautiful cool nights under a bright moon. Save for a single coffee bar and ice dealership, there is no money exchanged, so if you want it you either have to bring it with you or ask someone to give it to you: a gifting economy. BM is a “leave no trace” event, so if you bring it in or produce it there you have to take it out. (The only exception is that portable toilets are supplied.) Even greywater has to be either evaporated or carted out. Into this environment and defined social structure come 50,000 people to build a city for a week, go insane, then tear it all down until next year.

What could possibly be green about such a scenario? Well, once the clear absurdity of the concept wore off, there was much to learn. Just spending a week without seeing any plants is a lesson that you can only experience, not read about or imagine. One day a bird flew through our camp, the only non-human life-form I saw, and my heart leapt. All the dystopian sci-fi imagery of a bleak future of wall to wall humans endlessly shuffling through their own trash can’t match the ominous, portentous power of that simple moment. Yet, in this movie, the human masses weren’t sallow-eyed, mopey droids but vibrant, happy, helpful, friendly, wildly partying imps. What planet are you on where it makes sense to walk up to any stranger and ask, “Can I have…?” and expect the immediate answer to be, “Of course!”?

At Burning Man this year, I experienced both the grim environmental future of my nightmares and a glimpse of the human society that might be able to stop it. For me, that made the experience deep, dark, beautiful green.

Interesting in getting some hands-on natural building experience. Experienced cordwood builder and author Richard Flatau is coming to the area for a two day workshop in early September. What’s it all about?

A large component of the environmental and financial price tag of any building is the energy expended and pollution created to manufacture and transport materials. If you go down to your local Home Depot and buy a 2×4, chances are it’s coming from the West Coast or Canada. Some commercial lumber even comes from Europe or even further! That’s crazy since we live in a forest around these parts.

One interesting alternative is cordwood construction. The technique utilizes un-milled, air-dried logs cut to length and sometimes split to build strong, insulated walls. The cordwood technique allows us to use a local resource with minimal processing. If you can cut and split firewood, you’ve got a cordwood production facility.

At the same time, access to cordwood doesn’t make you a builder just like access to vocal chords doesn’t make you a singer. There is nothing easy about building a house. What’s a fledgling owner-builder to do? A building workshop is a great place to start because it will not only teach you practical skills, but more importantly give you context and perspective into the complicated process that is building a solid, long-lasting abode. It may be the first step toward building your own place, or it may be the experience that convinces you to keep your day job and hire professionals. Either way, the outcome is more than worth the price of admission.

Here’s the info you need to sign up for the workshop: cordwood. As an added bonus (or warning depending on your perspective), I’m playing a bit part in the proceedings. Participants will be subjected to one of my tirades during a visit the cottage we built for our book “Building Green”. No one will be allowed to leave the theater during the harrowing composting toilet rant.

Okay, this is very late notice, but I’m busy (insert all of those modern human excuses here). I’m teaching a little seminar this week at the AB Tech Madison County Campus. It’s part of the WNC Green Building Council’s “Green Building 101″ series. I’ll be talking about my take on “natural building”. At the end of the class, we’ll do a site visit to tour the cottage that we built for our book “Building Green”. For more info, go here To wet your whistle on my natural building diatribe, you can read my column this month in the New Life Journal

Even though it’s a tad on the whitebread side, I continue to be AMAZED at the incredible human population that we have around here. Sometimes I think that we in WNC can accomplish anything we set our minds to.

Case in point: Tom Rioux, founder of Earthpaint and resident of West Asheville. This is a guy who after almost dying from the toxic effects of being a professional painter rebounded with the simple mission to make better paint. The results are amazing and he’s making them right here. I won’t go into details, it’s Sunday for god’s sake. Just go to his website EARTHPAINT (soon to be slickified) and drink in the knowledge.

Not only has he done amazing things with the toxicity issue, he’s also focused on embodied energy of materials and other “green” priorities. All of his ingredients (except for one in one product), come from within a days drive of Asheville. Most are four hours or less away. The point is that none of us have an excuse any more to compromise on paints or wood finishes. Locally produced eco-paints in tiny little Asheville. Give me a break! I give it six thumbs up.

Earthpaint products will soon be available locally at Jennings Builders Supply at a new store in Asheville (I hope I got that right) and perhaps other local venues. Right now they are available directly from Tom. Again, see the website.

Roger. Over and out.

What’s the big hub-bub about bamboo? It seems like just sticking some bamboo in a product these days qualifies it for a “green” brownie point. Honestly, I don’t get it. As a replacement for hardwood flooring, the argument for bamboo is that it grows faster than wood and therefore is more rapidly renewable. Bamboo grows quickly, yes, but wood is denser, so I wonder what the real comparison in biomass yield is between the same amount of land planted in bamboo and wood. Still, this line of thought is missing the point for us locally. We live in a hardwood forest and, at least potentially, can harvest wood locally for use in flooring. True hardwood flooring is solid wood, no additives or glues. Once installed, it can be sanded and finished many times which gives it an incredibly long life span. What could be more natural, baby? On the other hand, as far as I understand all bamboo for commercial flooring, wall board, and other similar products is factory farmed in China. My guess is that they aren’t winning any sustainability awards for bamboo production. What’s more, bamboo flooring and sheet products are usually laminated, so you have to check the glues and other additives to make sure they aren’t nasty. Finally, the finished bamboo product has to be shipped half-way across the world to get to us.

Now, we actually do have some bamboo growing around these parts. In the “natural building” world, locally harvested bamboo is often used for trellises, to replace steel reinforcement, to make fences, etc. These applications make sense to me because they utilize a local resource directly with minimal processing. However, some people freak about even these examples because the bamboo species used aren’t native to our area. Bamboo is very hardy and invasive, meaning it can take over and dominate. Examples of bamboo on the rampage are all around us. If you want to see a good example, go to downtown Tryon. Of course, by far the most damaging invasive species in our area is white Europeans, so the arguments here get pretty complicated, pretty quickly. If you have bamboo on your land that is driving you crazy, let me know. If its of sufficient dimension for building projects, I’m sure I can find it a good home.

The point here is that nothing is “green” in a vacuum. Not bamboo, not wood, not straw. It all depends on context: where it comes from, how it’s processed, and how it’s used.

You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting something “green”. It’s getting downright surreal. For example , have you heard about “green warfare“? I shit you not. This green-washing (or green-bombing) phenomenon is one reason we decided to call our little business Think Green Building. The main ingredient is careful, conscious, skeptical thought.

We have our share of green-washing in WNC, but we also have a real and powerful movement of businesses, groups, and just plain people that are honestly and diligently looking for sensible, regional solutions. In the realm of “green building”, we have a vibrant scene. A central hub of this effort emanates from a West Asheville office smaller than the hot tub in a McMansion. It’s the WNC Green Building Council, my vote for the best thing to happen to local environmentally conscious construction. If you’re interested in green building (either as a do-it-yourselfer, client, professional, student, trained seal, or whatever), do yourself a favor and join the WNCGBC. It’s $15 for students, $35 for individuals, $50 for families, $150 (and up) for businesses for an annual membership. In other words, there ain’t no excuse not to join.

Want to open up a can of global warming wup ass? Step it Up is an organization dedicated to helping all of us get together to do just that. Their big push is to get a bunch of people out and about on April 14th, the “National Day of Climate Change”. All you have to do is go to their website , click on “Join An Action”, and enter your zipcode to see what’s movin’ and shakin’ in your hood.

So…this is the blogosphere I’ve been hearing so much about. Don’t I need an avitar or something? As usual, I find myself asking the question, “What the hell am I doing?” I’m already hemorraghing work, and now I’ve agreed to start blogging?!

The answer is simple. I love MAIN. I’ve been a member since the beginning. I guess that’s more than 10 years now. I still remember sitting in the dilapidated Madison County log cabin we were renting at the time and staring at the screen as we tried to download the MAIN homepage…though we weren’t sure what a homepage was. It took about 30 minutes for the cheezy map of North Carolina to finally show up. Today, I still live in Madison County, but I’m wizzing along with a wireless connection from MAIN. Without MAIN, I couldn’t run my business from home, let alone jam out to funky tunes and stream Democracy Now! while doing it.

Okay, back to the blog. Have y’all heard about the global warming reduction initiative called the “2030 Challenge”? It’s the brain child of architect Edward Mazria. (You may know him as the author of “The Passive Solar Energy Book”. Written in the 70’s and now out of print, it’s still the best book on the subject that I’ve seen.)

The idea is to sidestep the whole political tarpit and just solve this problem ourselves. Since buildings are a huge part of the problem (our buildings use half the energy we make and emit half of the global warming gases we produce), then its up to building designers and professionals to design and build better buildings. We can do that without Kyoto and without even asking George Bush’s opinion.

Sound obvious? Of course it is, but that’s the beauty of the initiative. Professionals need to start getting a backbone and refusing to create designs that aren’t part of the solution. We don’t have to be jerks about it, but we need to start shaping the framework of what’s possible for our clients. People don’t want free reign on surgery. They expect the doctor to tell them what’s going to be the best approach. Why should it be different in the building world?

Mazria’s contribution is to create a framework to quantify these efforts. His group has created the 2030 Challenge, a set of design and performance targets conceived to limit global warming to 1degCelcius above present levels. Though imminently acheivable, these measures far outstrip anything presently being proposed in the form of regulation by our government. To read more about the specifics and adopt the Challenge for your organization, click here

A variation on this theme created by the same group is the 2010 Imperative, an initative to get design schools and departments involved. The first step asks them to add the following simple statement to all design studio problems:

“the design must engage the environment in a way that dramatically reduces or eliminates the need for fossil fuel.”

In other words, forget the “sustainability” departments, and “environmental design” seminars. Sustainabiliity and the environment need to be a part of ALL design. Again, an obvious point that no one should have a problem with, but will revolutionize design education if adopted. For more on the 2010 Imperative, click here