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.

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.

China added more coal-burning power plants in 2007 than Britain has built in its history, said Gerard McCloskey, a coal market specialist with Cambridge Energy Research Associates in London.

America’s no slouch, though. Already, the US gets almost half its power from coal, with a rise expected in the next few decades. We’re simultaneously leveling mountains and digging canyons to extract the stuff. Strange, given what the same author points out:

Coal-fired power generation and manufacturing is the leading source of carbon dioxide and methane emissions, which scientists agree are the leading contributors to the “greenhouse effect” and global warming.

But what’s got me worried is this: as oil sources dry up and energy demand outstrips supply more every year, we’re increasingly turning to one of the worst possible alternatives–coal–and rationalizing it.

“Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”

The UK’s Daily Telegraph reports what happened next:

“He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.”

Yes, folks, that’s the President of the United States, fist in the air and a leering grin while making a joke about one of the most destructive problems in human history. It’s beyond embarrassing for Americans. As Bush (and Cheney) wind down their last few months in office in belligerent, obnoxious, screw-you-Americans style, it’s ever clearer how they really feel about the whole “leading the country” thing.

And the G8 summit? Criticized by nearly everyone as an utter failure on addressing the problem.

And gentrification isn’t always about blight: The Rue de Rosiers, a centuries-old Jewish neighborhood in Paris (and by centuries-old, I mean since the Middle Ages), is undergoing the slow, inexorable crush of gentrification.

Here’s an example of how gentrification, driven by the profit motive and executed with tools like tourism and hyper-consumerism, trashes a centuries-old ethnic neighborhood in a matter of a few years:

The district has been losing a vital chunk of its Jewish character to high-end designer labels in a slow transformation that residents say is reaching a turning point. Local officials estimate that as many as 20 Jewish shops in the compact quarter have given way to clothing stores in the past four years.

And now all that is left, as Cheryl Shanks described in the Nine Quandaries of Tourism, is mostly artificial authenticity:

“What remains is a sort of optical illusion,” said Jean Laloum, a historian at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, and contributor to a city-sponsored history of the surrounding neighborhood.

“Tourists come to visit a sort of ghetto with an identity … which they read about in the guidebooks, but which today, in reality is gone.”

Why? It was a thriving neighborhood. People who live there identify strongly with it, wanted it to remain vibrant and real. Not to be static, necessarily, but to remain a cohesive, connected neighborhood, as it had for centuries.

But the “inevitable” forces of “progress” won’t be denied; even this neighborhood, which even survived the Nazi occupation and it’s accompanying deportations, has mostly fallen prey to gentrification.

Moshe Engelberg, who ran a Jewish restaurant in the district, gives us a clue at how the wheels turn:

After the city required Engelberg to make costly upgrades to the restaurant, he consulted a rabbi for advice, and concluded that renovating — a concept he didn’t believe in anyway — wasn’t worth the trouble.

“It’s not the feeling of the ghetto anymore, it’s the feeling of something modern, without a soul,” said Engelberg.

And so it goes, then–first the removal of the authentic:

“They destroyed the oldest Jewish quarter in France in a matter of five years,” said Michel Kalifa, a kosher butcher and president of an association fighting to hold onto the area’s Jewishness.

…Then the installation of the facade:

The mayor also said she hoped to install a Holocaust memorial library in the former Jo Goldenberg diner.

Of course not everyone loves the place. Many love gentrification or aren’t too nostalgic or attached to the identity of the district:

“It’s normal that we transform all this,” he said. “We can’t always stay in the Middle Ages.”

Leaning forward, he winked, and nodded toward the luxury clothing shops now entirely covering the western half of the street. “You know, the boutiques that are here, they’re Jews who run them,” he [Buchwald] said.

It’s tempting to look at gentrification as some kind of manifestation of inevitable change. Local urban planners even speak of growth as “inevitable”, something to be accomodated or managed, not questioned. But I propose a different way of looking at it–instead of nurturing and protecting the delicate webs of communities, we instead treat them like a gigantic Lego set, consisting of interchangeable parts that can be (literally) lifted and dropped into place. This has a host of outcomes–forced diversity breeds resentment, racial tensions arise from economic bulldozing; hyper-consumers flatten whole ecosystems then fly across the globe to those that are not yet destroyed. There are too many things like this to list.

But community, so much more fragile than a Lego set, rarely survives. And so I think we’ve become schizophrenic, craving that which destroys us but unable to choose differently in a way that requires wisdom, multi-generational patience and a deep regard for the limits of places and the fragility of all connections. Our current way of life, in fact, cannot exist without stepping far beyond such limits.

Now, why you might ask, would the White House secretly work to block efforts to make the environment healthier for humans? Or other Bush-appointed agency directors? Or Cheney? Or corporations that donated to the Bush campaign?

I have no idea. Surely our own government wouldn’t try to compromise the health of millions in favor of corporations, would they?

Several sources now say that investment speculators are helping to fuel the global food crisis.

Meanwhile:

The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world’s richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (£275m) to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn.

But that’s the free market, yes? Some think the market’s a little too free:

The Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that 37 developing countries are in urgent need of food. And food riots are breaking out across the globe from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso, from China to Cameroon, and from Uzbekistan to the United Arab Emirates.

Benedict Southworth, director of the World Development Movement, called the escalating earnings and profits “immoral” late last week. He said that the benefits of the food price increases were being kept by the big companies, and were not finding their way down to farmers in the developing world.

Of course, we’ve heard something similar in other markets:

Shell and BP between them recorded profits of £14bn in the first three months of the year - or £3m an hour - on the back of rising oil prices. Shell promptly attracted even greater condemnation by announcing that it was pulling out of plans to build the world’s biggest wind farm off the Kent [England] coast.

I think it’s the rage of a dying beast. That is, multinational corporations, the entities that really call the shots in situations like this, since we gave over power to them. But don’t worry, dear reader, there’s good news ahead:

World leaders are to meet next month at a special summit on the food crisis, and it will be high on the agenda of the G8 summit of the world’s richest countries in Hokkaido, Japan, in July.

Will the “world’s richest countries” move to agressively modify the system so that corporations don’t do quite so much damage? Snowball. Hot place. Chance of survival?

1: Bio(fuel) Hazard
Why biofuels are one of the worst ideas ever. Here are the Top 5 Reasons.

2: Modern(ist) Love
Why McDonald’s, air-dropped condo boxes and skyscrapers exist.

3: Zero is My Hero
Britain tries to build zero-emission homes. Why can’t we do it even better?

4: A Fairy Tale
The elephant in the room? Population growth.

5: Transit, Time and Condoms
One (large) example of how density and public transit eventually fail.

Results of a three-year study at the University of Kansas are clear: genetically modified (GM) crops actually produce less food than regular crops, not more, despite the claims of GM proponent corporations like Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Earlier studies confirm the result, and similar results are being reported in non-food crops like cotton.

Remember: The chief reason for GM crops, pushed hard by corprations like Monsanto, was to increase yield by protecting crops: to make them invulnerable to heavy duty pesticides (and certain pests) and other crop-damaging problems. And, as a result, address Third World hunger and make crops more profitable in the First World.

As you might have guessed, human and ecological health are beside the point in a GM food discussion.

Yet GM crops are likely a part of your diet–most are grown in the USA and the worldwide percentage of acreage devoted to GM crops is rapidly growing.

Writing over a year ago, I called this “acting in ignorance.” For me, it’s more than just being wary of technology or science; it’s being skeptical of the very idea that we can understand the potentially catastrophic consequences of our actions well enough to just go ahead and do something like genetically modify crops. It is, in the end, a remarkable act of faith thinly disguised as “science” to reassure us. Remarkable faith in specialists, in others, in governments.

If the issue seems complex, keep this in mind: most of the money and effort devoted to promoting GM crops comes from large, monolithic, transnational corporations like Monsanto. Other than reduced yield, the side effects of GM crops are just beginning to be discovered. Who knows what other consequences are already affecting humans and the global ecology, perhaps irreversibly?

For example, bees.

Time to plant a garden.

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Pollan asks a critical question: does it matter if he changes his life to address climate change by going “green”, given the humble scale of one person’s effort and the existence of “evil twins” in places like China who offset improvements with increased consumption and worsening pollution?:

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will.

So, as Pollan asks: why bother?

Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

I like this. Risking ridicule, Pollan proposes that what we’re facing involves near anachronisms in a postmodern pop culture wasteland of forced irony, kitsch and techno-fetishism: character and virtue.

Virtue?

That’s right. Pollan suggests this climate change crisis of character might be addressed by adopting a sense of virtue, ethical principles for how each and every one of us does right by the planet’s ecosystem. Even in the face of doubt, derision and hopelessness about one’s ability to make a difference.

And when Pollan turns to personal vs. “other” change, he gets to the deeper question: why are so few of us willing to act, instead depending on politics and technology to solve the problem for us? Or more bluntly, hoping that governments and technology will solve it? Pollan says:

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

And buried there at the end is what many believe to be a critical piece of the puzzle: specialization. We give over power and depend chiefly–often utterly–on “specialists” to solve the problems: politicians, lawmakers, scientists, inventors, corporations.

The result? An odd practice of helplessness that Pollan quickly points out was described aptly by Wendell Berry 30 years ago:

He [Berry] argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives — the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the “split between what we think and what we do.”

Today, we might call that cognitive dissonance. But more about Berry:

For Berry, the “why bother” question came down to a moral imperative: “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”

For Berry, the deep problem standing behind all the other problems of industrial civilization is “specialization,” which he regards as the “disease of the modern character.” … Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another — our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.

Economists call this a “division of labor”, and Pollan reminds us that that division has led to modern civilization with all its benefits–the computer he uses to compose his essay, for example. Then why is specialization so bad? Pollan nails it:

…This same division of labor obscures the lines of connection — and responsibility — linking our everyday acts to their real-world consequences, making it easy for me to overlook the coal-fired power plant that is lighting my screen, or the mountaintop in Kentucky that had to be destroyed to provide the coal to that plant, or the streams running crimson with heavy metals as a result.

I talk about this part often on Ecohuman–the abstraction of our daily lives (and selves) away from the consequences of our choices, away from our ecology, from other people, from our local, physical community.

So, then, how did we end up living this abstract, dependent, deeply disconnected modern life of convenience? Two words–cheap energy:

Cheap fossil fuel allows us to pay distant others to process our food for us, to entertain us and to (try to) solve our problems, with the result that there is very little we know how to accomplish for ourselves. Think for a moment of all the things you suddenly need to do for yourself when the power goes out — up to and including entertaining yourself. Think, too, about how a power failure causes your neighbors — your community — to suddenly loom so much larger in your life.

Cheap energy allowed us to leapfrog community [italics mine] by making it possible to sell our specialty over great distances as well as summon into our lives the specialties of countless distant others.

Wendell Berry called this “cheap-energy mind”:

The “cheap-energy mind”…is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant.

Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for.

But in a way, I believe Pollan says it even better:

Specialists ourselves, we can no longer imagine anyone but an expert, or anything but a new technology or law, solving our problems. Al Gore asks us to change the light bulbs because he probably can’t imagine us doing anything much more challenging, like, say, growing some portion of our own food. We can’t imagine it, either, which is probably why we prefer to cross our fingers and talk about the promise of ethanol and nuclear power — new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.

Then what do we do? All become “generalists”? No, that’s not quite what Pollan’s saying, I don’t think. Rather, he’s saying take a step towards personal responsibility, towards developing a different character, virtuous behavior that increases self-reliance and strengthens the connection between us and the climate changing consequences of our choices. Pollan’s pragmatic advice on how to start changing our “cheap-energy mind”? Plant a garden:

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon.

Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support.

…Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction.

As I pause to look out the window at our rain barrels and our six large garden beds full of seed and our hopes for a good harvest, I feel Pollan is right. Our garden literally binds us closer to our place, our neighborhood, the weather…and to consequences. I feel we have found, as Pollan writes, “ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.”