Clark County ***CALL TO ACTION*** Let’s Build!
Published by Tauscher on Tagged UncategorizedIn response to the Oct. 28 Columbian green building article, I would like to offer to Clark County citizens a call to action to support sustainable home building.
I agree with Steve Madsen. This isn’t just an Al Gore response to building homes. McGraw-Hill reported October 22, 2007, that the residential green building is currently a $2 billion industry. That figure, the study found, will increase to $20 billion in the next five years.
Simply put, a green home out performs a current code-built home, but what about a home that produces as much energy as it consumes, treats waste water onsite, is built with next to zero waste, and harvests all the water you need? It’s here, it’s called the Living Building Challenge, and local architects and green builders are developing it.
As a Call to Action, Project Green Build (PGB) will offer public investment opportunities to work in community collaboration to build a home to address the Living Building Challenge in Clark County.
Those interested in partnering on this project should contact Project Green Build for more details.
November 14th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Nice to see this blog up. Im new in SW washington as a builder, but old as a resident. Regionally Ive worked on over a dozen strawbale homes, including the one in Amboy. Ive designed and build several cob and lichtenstraub structures as well, and designed a few rainwater to grey water systems. I just had a great chat last night with a city parks and rec advisor who was intrigued with the idea of composting toilets - I spent some time on the composting toilets installed in a state college LEED gold Building, and she wanted to know how they worked- and Ive designed some green roof and stormwater features. Two of my projects have been featured in the Portland Green Homes tours.
None of this is new or even complicated technology. The tendency we have as a culture to be attracted to ‘new flashy and bright’ things may be ending, or we might be learning to spiffy up the old sod home, but in either case almost all of this ‘technology’ is a reiteration of what our great great grandparents knew: build things well, with deliberation and observation of their impact and effects on the local environment. its an ethic that were returning to, not out of fashion or incentive (the incentives to do things horribly wrong are still much larger than doing things well and ecologically balanced) but because we know that in the long run it simply makes more sense.