When Building Green Ain’t so Green (or accessible)
I just got done reading a great article by Don Fitz at ZNet.comwith a sort of checklist of “It ain’t green if…” observations about green building. I’m not convinced that I agree with every item one-hundred percent, but I do agree with the wide premise of the article, that as with everything that comes with the promise of being green, organic, natural, and eco-friendly, it is important to scratch the surface and see what is really going on.
Fitz has done a good job of stepping back from all the commercial eco-ballyhoo and seeing just what is not being said, when someone is claiming to sell, build or have bought a green building.Take a look at this item and see what I mean. I am particularly pleased that he addressed the sprawl issue.
3. It ain’t green to encourage urban sprawl.
Builders love to advertise that a home can be designed green for any income range in any location. Really? This thinking reflects a profound disconnect between designing homes and planning urban areas. How can a home possibly be green if its location requires long distance commuting for work, school, shopping and recreation?
To its credit, LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards give credit if a new home is built on an existing lot, which encourages use of vacant urban space. This is a positive band aide, as band aides go. But aren’t we long past recognizing the huge environmental destructiveness of replacing farms and parks with pavement? Wouldn’t a government seriously concerned with global warming figure out a way to halt it?
And number eight was an excellent point.
8. It ain’t green to protect the environment with one hand while destroying it with the other.
Virtually everyone involved in green building promotes it as the new growth industry. Huh? There will be huge single-family houses built on expansive lots with energy efficient devices which are constructed and transported using fossil fuels. And there will be more each year to help fuel the gross domestic product (GDP) and serve as an extravagant growth mode l for the rest of the world. If this is how you protect the environment, how would you destroy it?
When you tour a green home, see if there is a sign next to the washing machine connection which says “Since clothes dryers are the greatest energy hogs and clothes lines work just as well, there is no space for a dryer.” You might look a long time for that sign. Green homes tend to encourage the owner to use as many electricity-based appliances as possible. Though individual gadgets in green homes are more energy efficient, they are part of an overall dynamic which increases the use of electricity each year.
However…
Fitz doesn’t touch much on what I consider to be a very important topic, if not the most important issue. The inaccessibility of green housing to low-income buyers and renters. As has been the case for many years, the only people who can pursue an earth-friendly lifestyle most aggressively are those who can buy it. Yet people who need greater access to greener housing have often been the ones who tend to vote greener, volunteer in environmental causes more often, and suffer from corporate and governmental ecological abuse most. I’m referring mostly to low-income neighborhoods and communities of people of color (African American, Native American, Asian American, Mexican American, etc.)
Habitat for Humanity is addressing this problem more and more. And there are scattered cities (Seattle and San Fransisco come to mind) who are beginning to work green standards into city affordable-housing projects. But on the whole, it is scattered. The people whose kids are still getting lead poisoning, who still live in the shadow of lead smelters, commercial hazardous waste facilities, and uncontrolled hazardous waste sites and others, have a long way to go before they are able to live green, much less build green.
So what does it take to get green housing in everyone’s neighborhood?
There are more than a few places to go, luckily, to find out more about green building (there has got to be a better way to say “green building.” Some journalist somewhere needs to come up with something that rolls off my tongue a little better than that. Green building just doesn’t rap it up very well. I vote for Zero-Footprint Construction.) Here is a short list of places to go find out more.
-
Building Green (article at NHI.org)
Green Communities Online
Global Green
Greenhousing.net (a site with a new one for me: an eco-broker)
Green Affordable Housing Association
ZNet |Ecology | When Building Green Ain’t so Green
Tags: eco-friendly, green building, affordable, justice, leed, znet, ecology, Habitat for Humanity
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!
Nice post Bryan. People don’t want to be “down on everything” but in our system, soooo much comes unglued when you think critically about it. So it makes you seem bitter and “hate everything.” This dynamic comes into play when greenwashing is criticised. I have had a few run-ins with the “Wal-Mart Environmentalist” type crowd (I don’t know if you have any of those out there in KY). They were very enthusiastic and energetic and they were working on stuff, but I’m sorry theres just no way in hell that Wal-Mart is an “Earth Friendly” operation.
The idea that you can create your own little green paradise is so USA. Green individualism. No way. You can’t seperate the “environment” from society at large: how we work to stay alive by serving corporate mega-beasts, how we have to drive to and from there because of the way our cities are developed and structured, how social/political disempowerment causes some of us to live in hazardous environmental conditions, how most of us live paycheck to paycheck (not really saving up for them solar thingies)… on and on.
At the end of your suburban cul-de-sac 25 miles out of town where there are 2 or 3 cars for every McMansion you’re going to build the perfect eco-friendly ranch? OK!
Yes, I certainly agree. As soon as you start thinking critically about the way we do things now, the foundations begin to quake. Sometimes they hold strong, other times not. Sometimes that’s good, but sometimes not. And not just the foundations that these systems are built on, but the foundations in our heads that allow us to understand and accept them begin to shake, too. As soon as we begin to realize just how absurdly far we’ve traveled away from sustainable practices in every area of living, it’s a little disheartening.
So I certainly agree about the Wal-Mart environmentalism issue. It is the same as the building/construction issue. It simply can’t be (that they’re green, or really even greener) because of the mass amounts of energy it takes just to pull it all off. You and I know well that it’s absurd to think that Wal-Mart, for all of it’s power, or the construction industry, for all we may need it, could ever really become earth-friendly. Not when you know enough about how they tick and what they need to spend in energy to survive. It’s almost a hopeless joke. Like most commercial industries, they depend on the ability to waste as much as necessary, and trample over as many individuals as necessary, to get the job done. The housing industry is not only no exception, and it may be the rule. They are both very much sister monsters.
The best way I can see to not feed those monsters, no matter how “green” they ever claim to get, is to avoid them like a plague, like E. coli. They are at their very core unsustainable, greedy, toxic and illegitimate as tools in the fight for equality among people, a cleaner planet, and reason.
[...] The Olympian newsletter in Washington wrote an article this week about what it means to have a green home. About.com has just published an article about the best materials for green homes. Finally, here’s a link to an article about when building isn’t so green. [...]
Leave your response!
Meta
Archives
Random and Of Interest
Most Commented