I Talk Green

10,000 Years of Building / History is our Future  

From The Build Well Forum (www.ecobuildnetwork.org)

A place for the leading edge innovators and thinkers to talk, bounce ideas around, share interesting news, and simply be together.

Excerpt by Bruce King from "Tradition and Sustainability" © 2010 The Prince's Foundation / Compendium Publishing

“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty . . .

but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

–R. Buckminster Fuller

Bucky Fuller worked in the same spirit as indigenous builders throughout human history. Use what is at hand, rely on your own and your community’s intelligence, adapt to your culture and climate, notice what works, and learn from your mistakes; the beauty will naturally follow. In the past century we have turned that on its head: We use anything we want, brought from anywhere on earth, we hire “experts” to design and build for us, we ignore our own culture and climate, and we often fail to learn from our many mistakes. For beauty in our buildings and communities, we rely on the strangely exalted tastes of the latest fashionable architects and trends, and on the myopic worldview of government planners and regulators. What happened?

We of the Industrial Revolution are made of oil. We grow our food with oil, we make clothing with oil, we move ourselves and our things around the landscape with oil, and we certainly build and heat our shelter with oil. We eat, wear, drive and live in oil; we are steeped in the mythology and ethics of oil ­–– the word “oil” being used here generically to connote the family of fossil hydrocarbons (petroleum, natural gas, and coal) that we began mining and using in earnest 250 years ago. The reader is probably wearing clothing containing some petro-materials, recently ate food grown with natural gas fertilizers, will today use a gas-powered vehicle, and will sleep tonight in a climate controlled with fossil-fuel energy. Perhaps you read these words by electric light, about half of which comes from a coal-fired power plant. All of this might be fine but for a few problems only recently coming to light: the many and huge toxic hazards to people and the environment that are oil and its by-products, the abrupt and unpredictable changes to global climate caused by the recent increase of carbon and other substances in the air, and, last but certainly not least, the fact that supply is limited. We’ve already used up half the oil we ever had. We were and still are like an adolescent child, with sudden access to the Internet and semiautomatic weapons, having power beyond our dreams but almost no wisdom or experience to guide our hands.

The way we build is very much a part of the global problem. We are hypnotized by the myth of the superiority of modern architecture, with the disastrous consequence of not seeing the many flaws in our work. We use gas and oil instead of good design, sun and wind to keep our spaces comfortable. We use toxic materials in the usually mistaken belief that they will give us nicer, dryer, softer, prettier surfaces.  What we have is a lot of cheap energy that makes up for the many flaws in our modern architecture. When that energy is no longer cheap, the buildings will no longer work very well, if at all.  How shall we break the spell?

A general consensus among those thinking about a sustainable future is that everything will become more localized.  Energy, food, water, textiles and building materials will generally come from a shorter distance because it won’t be worth the financial and ecological cost to toss them across the globe as we so routinely do today.

Dreadful as the notion may be to contemplate, we’re going to have to ease away from oil and machines, and use more of our hearts, minds and each other to build well.  Something wonderful is just now unfolding on Earth.

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