What Does It Mean Being Green?

"Ginormous" House

First of all, I must de-confess. After making a rather dramatic confession of gross over-use of water in my last blog, it turns out the problem was not a moral failure after all, but rather a leak in the pipe carrying water from the street to our house. The leak has been fixed. But if you already extended forgiveness to me, I hope you don't mind that I'll count it towards future eco-sins.

Now on to other people's sins–at least it's a sin in my book–ginormous houses. (I've wanted to use the word "ginormous" since I found out it made it into the Oxford English Dictionary.) I recently had an e-mail conversation with someone writing a story about green homes for a national magazine. We discussed "green home," which I defined as an energy-efficient home with good indoor air quality that is comfortable, durable, water conserving, made of sustainable materials, and affordable to build and maintain. I now add to that list the quality of "passive survivability," meaning that the home is still livable during a blackout without the use of a generator or other outside power source. Notice that the word "ginormous," or even "big," are not on the list.

With some of the newer green home rating systems, I think that a big house should be penalized (say, for example, the home would lose points for being bigger than 2,500 square feet, with more square feet added depending on the number of occupants). A big, efficient home generally still uses more energy than an average home, and the "embodied energy" in the home– the energy that goes into creating the materials, such as wood, steel, and concrete– can be ginormous in a large home. I was disappointed to read in a recent issue of Environmental Design and Construction that a 5,500 square foot home in Virginia was certified by Energy Star, EarthCraft Homes, and LEED for Homes, three very respectable organizations and rating systems.

Some green building advocates tell me that a large efficient home is better than a large inefficient one. Also, to be fair, many new green technologies that eventually become mainstream start out in big, high-end homes, because wealthy people have the wherewithal to experiment with new technologies. It's like NASA giving us Tang and medical advances. I don't know, maybe I'm just jealous.

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

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