My View: Greening the housing stock

By STEPHEN STUART

Building Energy 09, the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association’s 34th educational conference and trade show, focused on sustainable building practices and the challenges in preserving and enhancing existing housing stock and in building new, highly efficient, healthy homes.

Keynote speaker Marc Rosenbaum tied the challenge to a fundamental shift in our values. Predicated on unsustainable continuous growth, our wealth has come from extracting and depleting our resources. The necessary paradigm shift highlights that real wealth does not come from goods that we amass but rather from what is passed on to future generations.

Rosenbaum introduced the influence of Joanna Macy, Buddhist environmentalist, in referencing the great turning we face. In this turning, we will move from an industrial society to a life-sustaining culture. This shift will takes courage and we need not be afraid to take risks and feel insecure.

We cannot solve the problems facing us by relying on the same practices, technologies and knowledge that got us here. We have to be willing to give up what we thought to be our foundation of beliefs and values. If we question what we know and become willing to follow some simple guidelines, we can make it through this great turning.

We must be willing to share the honest results of our work. If we crash, what can we learn? We must trust ourselves to know intuitively how to contact that deep reservoir of knowledge within, rather than trusting the historic experts. We must stop struggling with our doubt. We must focus on community rather than singularity, and we must speak our truth.

When I think about how to apply these lessons to sustainable building, I know that I must question what have been “tried and true” building practices. Because we have built our homes in the same manner for the last 200 years does not mean it is the way to build them now. We must be resource conscious, embracing the mantra “less is more,” and boldly proclaim and embrace a better, smarter way to build healthy, robust, comfortable homes that give back as much as they take. Yet, even if every new home built from this time on is a net-zero energy home, it is still not enough to shift the balance.

The real burden lies in intelligent, honest, authentic weatherization and deep energy retrofits of our existing housing stock. We have the technology (building analyst tools that measure building air flow and energy losses), and we have the tools (cellulose insulation, low u-value windows with fiberglass sash and frames) to air-seal the shell of our homes and provide extra r-value to our exterior walls and roofs. We have heating and cooling technology that just sips electricity to provide a warm, clean indoor environment, and we have the renewable energy resources (solar and wind) to provide our power.

We must emphasize training a highly skilled, effective workforce that will embrace this work, do it joyfully and therefore do it correctly. We need to help the existing homebuilder shed the “I’ve done it this way for 30 years” mentality and bravely embrace the challenge of change. We need to encourage building design professionals to build beyond code relative to the shell and insulating components, and to know that advanced framing science conserves energy and materials. We need to teach the prospective homeowners to change the focus of their “first dollar” expenditure so that the question is not “how much will this cost?” but “how can this technology help me save financial and natural resources?”

Working together, we can succeed in meeting these challenges.

[Stephen Stuart is a resident of the Town of Tusten who is working with Sullivan County BOCES on homeowner and construction trade workshops on sustainable building practices.]