The only perfect building, environmentally speaking, is no building.

Clarke Snell, author of The Good House Book: A Common-Sense Guide to Alternative Building, seems to agree. Anything we build, Snell writes, has some degree of unavoidable, negative ecological impact, and so:

“For me, alternative building isn’t about fads, right way versus wrong way, how things ought to be, or how you wish they were. It’s about how things are. How you are, how your land is, and how the two can come together.”

Snell believes our current way of building is broken: “The paradox of human life is that it must be both separated from and connected to nature. Modern buildings are all islands. they’re conceived as separate from the outside, as islands.”

I think he’s right. Most homes in America are usable only because we build them this way.

Snell explains this spaceship with life support idea:

“We’ve taken buildings out of their environment and boiled them down into modular packages that can be dropped anywhere. This is a hostile-environment, or spaceship, approach: a box with attached life support systems. You can install this box almost any place–Florida, Minnesota, or the Moon–because it has nothing to do with a specific environment.”

Think about it. Without this spaceship approach, skyscrapers, modern commercial structures and most homes could not exist. They would be stale tombs, inhospitable to human life. When you go into them you are, in effect, entering a spaceship. Most or all of your air, energy and water (and often, light) is supplied from ducts, power lines and pipes connected to remote sources. As Snell says:

“We install sewage systems that combine drinking water with human waste, pesticides, and anything else anyone dumps down a drain, then treat it all with chlorine–a poison itself–and pump the “fresh” water back into our homes. We face our houses away from the sun, then burn polluting fossil fuels to produce heat and light. We seal our houses to keep costly conditioned air in, then fill them with materials that give off dangerous gases. We extract resources from one local environment, digging a huge hole for a quarry or cutting vast tracts of timber, then use energy to transport the materials to another local environment, which we disrupt by bulldozing to make way for the materials.”

If I had to sum up the book in a paragraph, I believe Snell’s saying “Look. There is no perfect house, environmentally speaking–what works well and is appropriate here may be disastrous over there. Place (with its inherent limits) is *everything*. To build well we must take responsibility for our own housing and then build in a way that connects us, our shelter and the land so they work together, as harmoniously as possible, to sustain life and minimize harm.”

It’s a wonderful book, one of the very best I’ve seen on tackling sustainable building. It’s suitable for anybody–I mean anybody–covering everything from what a house is to how its connected to (and separate it from) its place. I read it cover to cover, but it functions well as a textbook or reference guide–you can dive in at any point. Generously illustrated, thoughtfully organized and written in a clear, direct and engaging way, it’s a perfect way to better understand the questions, concepts and processes of alternative/green/sustainable building.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died yesterday. Solzhenitsyn became lost to popular memory some time ago, I think. But he was once quite famous, specifically for writing about his experiences as a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag. He was a dissident, eloquent and empathetic in his writing, winning the Nobel Prize in 1970. He escaped the USSR in the 70’s but returned to Russia a decade or so ago after the Soviet Union’s collapse.

As a kid in the 70’s, I remember seeing his picture and how ancient he looked–a long, dignified face with a bushy, wiry beard and weary-sad eyes. I still remember thinking he looked tired and beat up. I didn’t know a thing about his life in a prison camp.

His most famous work, the Gulag Archipelago, chronicles in great detail his prison camp experience. One paragraph from that book has stuck with me. I remembered it when the current Iraq war began to unravel and Bush looked more and more a caricature of leadership when he labeled various countries “The Axis of Evil” and raged earnestly about “evildoers” and the “crusade” in the Middle East. Here it is:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: “Know thyself.”
Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t.
From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.
And correspondingly, from evil to good.

It’s a deeply uncomfortable thing for us humans to admit. That line between good and evil running down the middle of every one of us. The stupid and the shameful coexisting with the empathetic and the generous, us moving back and forth across the “line” dividing the two as we make our way through life.

But it’s what we do. We struggle to be acknowledged good. We seek to make that line sharper rather than softer. We repeatedly forget the difference between our beliefs and those of other people (or societies) and so, as Solzhenitsyn also said, “we confidently judge the whole world according to our own home values.”

I believe we can extend that simile to the environment. Treating the natural world as a “resource” (as in “natural resources”), we judge it as having only that value which we can extract from it. We draw a line between it and us and commence paving over our own heart, so to speak, when we act as consumers of nature rather than being in a relationship with it.

And so, I think, until we acknowledge that line between us and nature runs down the middle of every heart, we will continue to live beyond our limits–and beyond our means. We are nature, and nature is us.