Design and Waste

At Focus the Nation, I stopped by the alternative fuel vehicle show and found it to be a lot more interesting than I expected. It consisted of the predictable Prius and electric scooters, but I was pleasantly surprised to see home built electric and bio-diesel converted cars. The people who built them were closer to Walden’s mindset than most people who would go out and buy a Prius. They were doing things for themselves and doing them better. One man I spoke with had converted an old VW truck to run on biodiesel. With the motor swap from another old VW and other small improvements, he had a truck that got over 80 miles to the gallon while only spending $1600 on the whole project. Sure the technical expertise required for this is far beyond what most of us could do, and I’m sure he spent countless hours in his garage, but it isn’t that different from Thoreau building his own house in the woods. I’m sure neither of them knew exactly what they were doing when they started, but they were both willing to put in the effort and I’m pretty sure they felt the long hours were worth it in the end.

I was also lucky enough to sit in on a presentation about how aspects of Architecture can help reverse global warming. One of the speakers, Sandy Stannard, discussed how much of the total energy is used in our buildings. It was something I had never exactly thought about before, but almost as much energy is used just heating and lighting our homes as goes into transportation and industry. By designing our buildings better, we can cut back on energy usage. She was involved with the solar decathlon team which was part of a national competition to design the energy efficient home of the future. It brought together a lot of ideas that could be used in our homes right now like solar panels and insulation. It also relied on its initial design to be more efficient. The whole house was designed to catch and utilize heat and light from the sun but was also well ventilated so you would not have to worry about air conditioning.

While most of this stuff seems like it should be common sense, environmentally smart building practices are not used nearly as much as they could be. Especially in new suburban areas, the square footage of homes continues to increase and every home has both central air conditioning and heating. Before modern conveniences made it possible for us to be this wasteful, people built homes with things like warmth in mind. Some Native Americans built homes with walls that absorbed heat during the day and kept the home warm when the temperatures fell at night. Thoreau was very deliberate in building his home. In his introduction to Walden, Bill McKibben writes that “Building a house involves remembering that it’s designed to fulfill a function.” I think it is something that is too often forgotten today where people have several either empty or non-essential rooms in their house.

Thoreau’s house measured only 10 by 15 feet and was no more than something that kept him and his bed separate from the elements. He didn’t even find it necessary to build a chimney at first and did all his cooking outside while the weather permitted. He built it to stay as warm as possible, keeping it small and only giving it two windows. For someone that did not seem to have much construction experience, he built a home that was comfortable and much easier on the environment than ours today. We have to remember though, that Thoreau did not build his home this way with the intention of having a smaller carbon footprint, only out of simplicity.

McKibben refers to Thoreau as, “a good, if unconscious, environmentalist.” I thought it was interesting that McKibben also uses that sentence to describe most of the world’s poor. For most of human history, we have been just another animal on the earth’s surface. Sure, we altered it in slight ways for our comfort, but nothing near in the way we have since the industrial revolution. It was only with modern machinery that we have distracted ourselves enough to forget that we have to take care of the land we live on. Ancient cultures knew the importance of treating the land with respect, if only just so it would continue to support their offspring. Thoreau had respect for the land, and wasn’t wasteful out of respect. He wasn’t doing it to qualify for a tax break, he wasn’t wasteful because, in his mind, why would he be?

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