What Is Green Building?

Let’s face it: “green building” is a nebulous term. Broadly, it refers to an attempt to consciously create buildings with an eye to how they interact with our planet’s ecosystem. But this means different things to different people. For some, it means focusing on creating a healthy indoor environment inside buildings. For others, it makes sense to focus on improving the mass-produced materials that predominate in modern construction. For still others, it’s about eschewing mass-produced components and centralized systems altogether in favor of site-harvested resources, including building materials, electricity, water, and food.

Our approach to “green building” centers on the concept of “sustainability”: the simple notion that the way of life we choose must not lead to circumstances that prevent that way of life from continuing. In order to create a building to serve that end, we believe, five basic traits need to be considered:

1) Low Construction Impact

Building, almost by definition, is initially a destructive act. Land usually has to be at least minimally cleared and reshaped, holes need to be dug, and material resources refashioned to serve the building. A “green” building minimizes its impact on the building site and the environment at large through careful, conscious design and by utilizing replenishable materials that create a minimum of ecological destruction through their use.

2) Resource-Efficient

The impact of a building’s construction is only part of the story. Once a building is built, people move in and use it. This human use requires environmental resources for such things as heating, cooling, water, and electricity. A “green” building provides these human needs efficiently, conserving resources.

3) Long-Lasting

Natural resources in the form of building materials, tools, and fuels, as well as human energy and ingenuity, come together to create a building. The longer that building lasts, the longer the time before the environment is asked to give up those resources again to replace the building. Therefore, the longer a building lasts, the “greener” it is.

4) Nontoxic

To sustain healthy lives, we need to sustain a healthy indoor and outdoor environment. A “green” building, then, needs to provide a healthy indoor environment while doing nothing to harm the outdoor environment.

5) Beautiful

One of the biggest sources of our environmental woes is the constant and polluting movement of humans about the planet. To create a sustainable lifestyle, we need to stay put more of the time and derive more of our social, physical, and spiritual sustenance from our own backyards. For example, it takes a long time to build healthy soil to grow good food; to build a network of friends and compatriots that will be the basis for community; to nurture the trees and other plants that will be part of a house’s cooling strategy. These things simply won’t happen if you aren’t sufficiently seduced by your home to stay there for the many years it will take to turn it into a real place that nurtures both its inhabitants and the environment. A “green” house, then, needs to be beautiful, a place that is as hard to leave as a lover and as unthinkable to neglect as your own child.

What Now?

Grappling with these issues in their full depth is complex. It often requires compromise, and always demands a combination of idealism and realism. For instance, imagine two neighbors building houses of exactly the same size. One person is determined to build using only site-harvested “natural materials” that require little energy to produce and that create almost no pollution in the process. The other is using some site-harvested materials in combination with some mass-produced materials that are more energy-intensive in order to create a building that will use less energy through its lifetime to provide warmth and other to its inhabitants.

Which builder is “greener”? To even try to answer that question you’d need to know the embodied energy of (the energy required to produce, transport, and use) all the materials involved, the relative energy efficiency of the two buildings, how long each will last, how much maintenance each will require, and many other factors, both technical and personal to the owners involved.

In the end, “building green” is a deeply personal process in which you make judgments as to how a building will best merge with your own personal mode of survival, be it computer programming or subsistence farming, to create the most beneficial impact on your environment, both local and global. An ideally “green” building, then, must be a very specific thing, matching your idiosyncratic personal needs with the fabric of your exact local environment.

© Clarke Snell, 2005