Eco-Building II
Waking up to the larger system implications of eco-building
IN CONTEXT #44, Summer 1996
© May 1996 by Tom Bender, © 1996 by Context
Institute
I've worked the last twenty-five years on developing parts of what is
now called "Eco-design", under the belief that healthier buildings,
lower energy use, and less ecological impact was important. This was only
to discover recently that all this time I was still looking at things in
isolation rather in their ecological interconnectedness!
What I didn't see was that every dollar a person saves on energy use in
a building is somehow spent on something else - vacations, a new car, an
education, or just paying the bills. As those same dollars ripple around
the economy, they end up using up similar amounts of energy and resources
as before. Shifts from energy-intensive to less energy intensive expenditures
do reduce energy use, but by only the net difference. Some alternatives,
such as vacations, can be more energy-intensive. And second-tier
expenditures narrow the gap further. The only apparent out seems to be earning
less or investing in renewable resources. And after working to cut in half
the use of wood in a building (and equivalently the ecological impact of
logging) we find that in one generation of growth we're cutting twice
as many trees to build twice as many, twice as large houses.
All these connections lead back to our base cultural values of greed, growth,
and violence. Until we let loose of our insane belief that geometric expansion
of our numbers and our appetites can continue in a finite world, any
"eco-building" is only a band-aid. True "eco-building"
involves whether we build as well as how, and the values from
which we work. It is, however, possible to let go of the values of
greed, growth, and violence. And doing so, we discover many unexpected benefits.
(See my 1996 "Shedding A Skin That No
Longer Fits" for more detail on the whys and the hows of letting
go, and the wonderful but unfamiliar benefits of a sustainable society.)
We discover first that stabilizing growth has immense monetary, resource,
and personal advantages. It totally avoids our current expenditure
of 33% to 40% of our time and resources spent on creating the infrastructure
to accommodate more people and things. A detailed study of these
costs would be valuable. We can estimate at this time at least a doubling
to tripling of all of society's capital expenditures, plus a 50% increase
in consumptive expenditures, for population doubling alone, without
counting expansion in consumption. A population doubling means duplicating
our entire stock of houses, water systems, power plants, cities, roads -
as well as prematurely demolishing existing ones. It also means spending
more on feeding and educating those additional people to adulthood.
Growth has been claimed as necessary "to help the poor" - as if
growth over the last twenty years hasn't dramatically worsened the
condition of the poor and heightened the concentration of our wealth among
the rich. (See, for example, Keith Bradsher's "Gulf widens between
wealthy and poor", New York Times News Service, April 20, 1995.)
The median US household income for wage-earners is currently $31,000, with
more than 13% of households under the monetary poverty level of $15,000.
A fully equitable distribution of personal income would amount to $59,000
per household.
An equitable society could totally eliminate poverty and support EVERYONE
at the current median income level of $31,000 per household. To do
so would, surprisingly, need 47% less work, [see also "Wasted
Time, Wasted Wealth"] and equivalently fewer resources than our
current society uses to maintain poverty and inequality!
To achieve growth, we have also developed the habit of paying for personal
expenditures, corporate expansion, and governmental infrastructure consistently
through debt purchasing. That debt purchasing has resulted in an across-the-board
20% surcharge on our cost of living, without any substantive benefit.
For example, interest paid on national debt in 1994 equaled 20.3% of federal
outlays (with no capital repayment). Consumer credit outstanding in 1994
equaled $985 billion - 19.9% of disposable personal income and 17% of national
income - roughly equally between auto, home, and revolving credit. Finance,
and related fields constituted 22% of national income. (For more detail
on the illusory benefits of these financial shell-games, see my 1993 "Borrowing
Trouble", 1990 "Endgames",
and "Hidden Costs of Housing".)
Together, stabilizing growth and dealing directly with the inequality in
our society can <U>permanently</U> release us from almost 75%
of our present energy, material, financial and human costs of living, without
lowering our material living standard, and without need for any "technical
fixes". (For further discussion of how to achieve these benefits,
see my 1996 "Some Questions We Haven't Asked".)
Said another way, GREED AND GROWTH ALONE CURRENTLY QUADRUPLE
OUR COST OF LIVING!
Our belief in an endless cornucopia of resources and wealth has also caused
us to ignore care and efficiency in all of our institutional structures,
production processes, and living patterns. The result is that they have
developed almost inconceivable waste - which now represents an equally great
opportunity for improved effectiveness and efficiency. (For some of the
other non-technical, big-jump opportunities, see "Some
Questions We Haven't Asked".)
Well-documented research over the last twenty years has shown and is beginning
to produce <U>factor of ten</U> savings (90% reduction) in energy
and resources needed in almost every sector of society:
- This means two hundred mile-per-gallon cars, safer than today's, and
totally recyclable. They're due on the road in four to five years. (Best
resources are the many progress reports of the Rocky
Mountain Institute.)
- Even greater magnitudes are possible in public transportation systems.
(For a small piece, see my "Rentalls: A Key
to Successful Transportation Systems". )
- It means homes that require only sunlight and rainfall to operate.
(See, for example, work of the Center for
Maximum Potential Building Systems and the Rocky Mountain Institute.)
Prototypes are already in operation in almost all of our climate zones.
- Water?.....today's toilets and showers already have reduced water
use 75% from fixtures of only a few years ago - and more improvements are
on the way. (Note in particular John Todd's
work with biological water purification .)
- Forestry practices are available now - requiring no new technology
- that maintain all forests in old growth condition, while doubling
timber production, increasing the economic benefits from timber production
nine-fold, and increasing total forest value many times more. (See my 1994
"Improving the Economic Value of Coastal Public
Forest Lands". )
- How about a higher education system with resources available - free
to all, worldwide - via satellite TV? (See my 1993 "Vitality
and Affordability of Higher Education".)
- Housing that costs only one-tenth of today's, through improved durability,
energy efficiency and financing patterns? (See my "Hidden Costs
of Housing", RAIN, Utne Reader, Sun Times, Alternative Press Annual,
1984.)
- Industrial products with virtually zero ecological impact and magnitude
lower production costs? (See Amory Lovins, NATURAL CAPITALISM, 1996.)
All these and more are immanent or already being implemented today. "Eco-building"
(or "eco-adapting", as we need much less new building under such
conditions) is clearly an important element of improving the effectiveness
and efficiency of our systems - once we deal first with the basic
causes of instability in our society.
When we put just these four opportunities together, they add up to ways
to reduce our resource consumption, ecological impact, and use of our time
by up to 97%, which is significantly more than appears needed to
achieve sustainablilty ... and the real rewards of a sustainable
society do not fall in these familiar material dimensions of life. (See,
for example, "Shedding A Skin..."
above, my 1993 "Building Real Wealth",
and "Transforming Tourism", Earth
Ethics, Summer 1993. For values, see my "Sharing Smaller Pies",
New Age Journal, Nov. 1975; The Futurist, 1976; RESETTLING AMERICA, Gary
Coates, ed. 1981, and Utne Reader, Fall 1987.)
It is unlikely that we would ever follow such possibilities out to these
extremes - if for no other reason that we decide we want to work
more, or we want to do better for ourselves and all life, and ask
for higher levels of performance in all we do. But even if we decide to
only achieve two-thirds of each of these savings, that still adds up to
an 82% reduction from our present patterns - almost exactly what is projected
by preliminary Friends of the Earth studies on European and U.S. economies
to be needed to operate on a sustainable basis. (See also Bill Rees' excellent
"Ecological Footprints and Appropriated Carrying Capacity..."
in INVESTING IN NATURAL CAPITAL, Island
Press 1994, or "Revising Carrying Capacity..." in Population
and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, Jan 1996.)
We've also looked at these issues very briefly and in isolation. In reality
they are interactive. Some give resource savings but not financial or employment
ones. Others, as in any ecological system, have multiple and interactive
effects and savings. (See Amory Lovins, "The Super-Efficient Passive
Building Frontier", ASHRAE Journal, June 1995 for an outstanding
example of the interactive and cumulative benefits of energy efficiency
in minimizing building operating costs.) Hours worked would drop significantly,
but unlikely to the equivalent 12 minutes a day, as these alternatives are
often more employment intensive. What is important is that the savings
possible are far more than enough to totally transform a once frightening
prospect of change into an opportunity for significant betterment of our
lives!
One of the curious twists of ecological interconnectedness here is that
proceeding with implementing these efficiency improvements (such as eco-building)
without first dealing with growth and our other base values can turn out
scarily counterproductive. It would result with us twenty-five years down
the road having twice the population, fewer resources, and having already
used up the opportunities for releasing resources out of our operating patterns
to finance a transition to sustainability.
There is an urgency to this issue. (See, for example, L.F. Ivanhoe's
"Future World Oil Supplies; there is a finite limit", World
Oil, Oct., 1995 on global oil and population trends, and Richard Duncan's
1995 "The Energy Depletion Arch..." on U.S. and global
oil depletion.) Ivanhoe also interestingly touches on the falsification
beginning to occur in government statistical studies as our denial of resource
depletion becomes more acute. The likelihood of major reduction in our material
quality of life would then be immense.
Does that mean we should stop trying to improve the ecological fitness of
our building? That would seem crazy. What I think it means is that we hold
such building up as an example of just one of the benefits
of stabilizing growth, and explain the others. That we add to the technical
aspect of eco-building the human, psychological, and spiritual dimensions
that give us connectedness with the rest of creation, places with souls,
gardens to nurture our spirits, and cities of passion. (For more detail,
see my 1994 "The Spiritual Heart of Sustainable
Communities".) And along side, to put as much or greater effort
into helping us all become aware of and achieve all the benefits
of stabilizing growth and becoming a sustainable society. (See my discussion
of the human, psychological, community, and spiritual dimensions of sustainable
design and building in my 1993 THE HEART OF PLACE, and 1995 "Sewage
is Art: A Study of the Healing of Place with "Chi".)
© May 1996 by Tom Bender, © 1996
by Context Institute
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URL: http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC44/EcoBuild.htm
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