A Bigger Picture

I’ve worked the last 25 years on developing parts of what is now called “Eco-design,” under the belief that healthier buildings, lower energy use, and less ecological impact were 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. (The only apparent out seems to earning less or investing in renewable resources.) And after working to cut in half the use of wood in a building (and the associated ecological impact of logging), we find that in one generation of growth we’re cutting

twice as many trees to build twice as many houses, each twice as large.

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.

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 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 deemed necessary “to help the poor”—as if growth over the last 20 years hasn’t dramatically

worsened the condition of the poor and heightened the concentration of our wealth among the rich. The median U.S. 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, 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 through debt purchasing.

That debt purchasing has resulted in an across-the-board 20% surcharge on our cost of living, without any substantive benefit.

Together, stabilizing growth and dealing directly with the inequality in our society can

permanently 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.”

Said another way,

greed and growth alone quadruple our cost of living!

Our believe in an endless cornucopia of resources and wealth has 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.

Well-documented research over the last 20 years has shown and is beginning to produce factor-of-ten savings (90% reduction) in energy and resources needed in almost every sector of society. This means 200 mile-per-gallon cars, safer than today’s, and totally recyclable. They’re due on the road in four to five years. It means homes that require only sunlight and rainfall to operate. Prototypes are already in operation in almost all of our climate zones. You’ve probably been involved in some of them. 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. 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 ninefold, and increasing total forest value many times more.

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 sustainability. (And the

real rewards of a sustainable society do not fall in these familiar material dimensions of life.)

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 to be needed to operate on a sustainable basis.

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. 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 in the end be frighteningly counterproductive. Twenty-five years down the road it would result in us 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. 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. And alongside, 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.

Tom Bender

Eco-Building II

Nehalem, OR

Editor’s note: The letter we received contains numerous footnotes with citations for the facts listed. We omitted these citations due to space limitations. A complete version is posted on our website or is available by writing to Mr. Bender at: 38755 Reed Road, Nehalem, Oregon 97131.