I am but an egg in the realm of green building (that's a Robert Heinlein reference, for those who don't recognize it; I was named after his Martian, Valentine Michael Smith), and yet I get to sit in the office's most pleasant room here in the old Estey Organ building--the drafting room, airy and bright with large double-hung windows and a delightful clerestory, where in days of old plans for over-ornamented Victorian parlor instruments were drawn. May I be worthy.

Before coming to Building Green, I studied anthropology, grew vegetables, and wrote and edited for small-town weekly newspapers.

A recent Environmental Building News story, "The Folly of Building Integrated Wind," (May 2009) revealed that attaching spinning things that are supposed to generate electricity to buildings is not a very good idea. In critiquing building-integrated spinning things, however, it is important not to paint with too broad a brush.

The Tibetan tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism gave rise to a building-integrated spinning thing that is energy efficient, relatively low in cost, and non-polluting: the prayer wheel.

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I recently went through the scoring tool on the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) green building website www.nahbgreen.org. The tool lets you get a good idea how your project would rate according to the National Green Building Standard (EBN, March 2009), and to plan adjustments in the design and construction process to do better. Using information about my own house was a way to simultaneously get acquainted with the standard and satisfy my taste for self-administered tests. (What's your IQ? What type of personality do you have? If you were a quattrocento fresco painter, which one would you be? Facebook users will know just what I'm talking about.)

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Greenbuild 2008 included the first ever Green Homebuilder's Day, a conference within the much larger overall conference. Homebuilder's Day welcomed old hands and newcomers to the field of green building, and the sessions were full. BuildingGreen organized the event, which coincided with the announcement of our soon-to-be-available, residentially oriented Green Building Advisor.

That this day of educational sessions took place at all is a good sign for the future of houses in America and for softening their environmental impact. But in a general session on that topic, three speakers--Kevin O'Connor, host of "This Old House"; Tedd Benson of Bensonwood Woodworking Company; and Steve Kieran of architecture firm Kieran Timberlake--all expressed the view that American homebuilding is fundamentally flawed, and that the current mortgage meltdown is only one symptom among many.

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A wind turbine ad on the New York Times homepage! Sure, Web ads are relatively cheap, but it still looks like a sign that alternative energy is hitting the big time.

And the day after this ad ran, the Times ran a page 1 story (in print as well as on the Web) about wind power, exploring concerns that while some say wind could provide as much as 20% of the U.S. electricity supply, the existing grid isn't up to the task of transmitting power from the often remote places that have the best wind resources to the populous regions that need it.

How to retool for a more sustainable energy future is a discussion that eventually has to shift from the specialized realm of energy experts and environmentalists into more popular venues. Here's an indication that that's happening.

BuildingGreen recently cleared out about 75 shelf-feet of periodicals -- Architecture and PanelWorld and Ecological Restoration and Mold and Moisture Management and lots more. The recycling area outside the office was getting overcrowded with them and we still had more to remove. Then I remembered that our neighbor, Steve Benson, at J.S Benson Woodworking & Design, had told me he could use paper in his briquetter.

I gave Steve a call, and he happily accepted our old magazines. The next day he brought over a brown, nice-smelling cylinder about two-inches long and an inch across, made partly out of our magazines. He also sent the photos above, showing magazines in his heavy-duty shredder, then all chewed up along with wood scraps in the hopper of his briquet-maker, then the finished briquets.

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A friend of mine near Barcelona wrote me that truckers in Spain are on strike and are blocking roads. They demand the government set a 35% haulage tariff, which would be in proportion to the increase in fuel costs in the past year. Anticipating the stores will soon be empty, my friend made a trip into town, by train, to get a 50-pound bag of rice and some butane cylinders to run his family's kitchen stove. News reports say perishables are expected to run out within a week. Of course, if people make a run on the stores, perishables and non-perishables alike could be scarce faster.

Is this how famine starts?

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French climber Alain Robert, who has taken to climbing skyscrapers instead of cliffs -- so far he has made more than 70 urban ascents -- scaled the New York Times building June 5. Before being arrested, Robert unfurled a banner reading, "Global warming kills more people than 9/11 each week."

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Greasy Socks and Certifications

Recently I was doing research for a brief item about green education for "real estate professionals," that is, real estate agents, appraisers, house inspectors, and loan officers. I read about a new course being offered, covering global climate issues, green building, indoor and outdoor air quality, and, last but surely not least, using all this green material in marketing. Those who complete this course are allowed to add CGREP -- for Certified Green Real Estate Professional -- to their collection of post cognomenal letters. It sounded good until I discovered how much time was allotted to instructing prospective CGREPs in all this: three hours. Three hours? I would spend about that long finding out about the course and writing my 200-word brief.

I began to perceive the stink of greenwashing.

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