Interesting Articles About Green Building

Save the Icing for Last
by Alex Wilson
BuildingGreen.com, May 1, 2009

Before considering high-profile features, such as wind turbines and photovoltaic arrays, we should focus on the basics of green building.

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Provided with permission of BuildingGreen.com, from the editors of Environmental Building News.

Imagine two builders in your community. One knows the building code as a set of minimum standards and builds only to those minimums, producing the worst building he legally can. The other always is pushing the envelope at the opposite end of the spectrum, trying to build the most energy- and resource-efficient, least toxic, most environmentally and socially responsible building possible. Which builder, do you think, holds the record for the fastest and easiest time getting a set of plans through the building department, and which holds the record for the longest and most brutal experience? Nobody intends to give a pass to the worst builder and to beat the crap out of the best one, but that’s what our system does.

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Reprinted with permission from Fine Homebuilding magazine.

My wife and I decided not to have children. We just couldn’t make the numbers work. From prenatal care through college tuition, we were looking at half a million dollars. Minimum. And it would be 25 years before that investment would even begin to show a return, let alone pay us back. Kids made no sense.

I’m joking, of course. Looking just at the monetary cost of having kids not only ignores other costs – a parent’s time, for instance – but more important, it fails to account for the tremendous emotional rewards paid out over a lifetime. No one in their right mind would decide whether to have children based solely on the financial equation. The issue is more complicated.
So is green building.

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Kevin Ireton is the editor of Fine Homebuilding. Reprinted with permission.