All right, let’s review our progress. There was this big bang. Matter flying around. E=MC2. Galaxies, stars, planets coalesced. In our hood: primordial soup. The miracle of life. Ontogeny sort of recapitulates phylogeny. Amoebas, walking fish, and then, finally, our peeps the protohumans hit the scene. Until about 1.5 million years ago, we were homo habilis, i.e. “handy man,” because we had tools. Makes sense. Then, for about a million years, we were homo erectus, or “standing human.” I’ll buy that. Save for a few anomalies like homo heidelbergensis (Heidelberg man…no really, look it up), for the past 250,000 years we’ve supposedly been homo sapiens, or “wise human.” Now, based on our present situation (global warming, constant war, Britney Spears), I think it’s pretty clear that the naming committee was a bit optimistic on that one. Though we may pull together and reach the sapiens level, we clearly need a new name for the past 250,000 years of humanity. My proposal is homo controlfreakus.

As far as I can tell, the core of much of human activity seems to be control. Industrial agriculture is our attempt to control plants. War is our attempt to control each other. A city is all about control: a unilateral and hostile takeover of an indigenous ecosystem by a single species (you guessed it, homo controlfreakus). And then it gets weird. Have you heard they are inserting a spider gene into a goat to get spider silk in milk?! Then there’s my personal favorite: the human-rabbit embryo. No, that’s not a Halloween costume. It’s science.

Though technologically advanced, the controlfreakus approach is comically simplistic. It sees the world as an eighth grader’s chemistry set waiting for experiments, and the results are often sadly predictable. Kudzu is a great visual aide for this point. You know, that carpet masquerading as a plant you see draped over acres of former forest and farmland around our region. This vine was intentionally taken from its native ecosystem in Japan and introduced into this country as a forage crop. The U.S. government used to plant it and encouraged farmers to do likewise. Unfortunately, our climate turned out to be too much of a good thing for Kudzu, and it dominates wherever it takes hold. Now, that same government recommends pesticides to deal with this “invasive species” that reportedly costs us $500 million annually in lost cropland and attempted control measures. I would argue that our present struggles with melting ice caps and the invasion of Iraq are cut from the same cloth. Homo controlfreakus sees the world as hostile, disjointed and flawed. Consequently, he (or less often she) barrels ahead with shortsighted goals of short-term gains and no concept of the overall context.

That “context” is the almost infinitely complex, exquisitely fine-tuned feedback loop that is this planet. In order to prevent more kudzus, Chernobyls and drowning polar bears, we just need to heed the old saying, “If a planet ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Okay, that’s cute, but what does it really mean? Well, since this month New Life Journal’s focus is on warmth and rejuvenation, let’s take the problem of heating a building as an example. On Planet Earth, fluctuations in temperature are almost solely the result of the relative exposure to sunlight. What’s more, the Sun’s path through the sky changes throughout the year in an annually repeated pattern so that we can know exactly where it will be in the sky relative to our planned building at any given minute of any given day. Obviously, then, our starting point in considering a heating strategy will be to determine how the Sun will interact with our building. This concept is called passive solar design and is: (A) the default design process for any new building or (B) a fringe concept that comes in and out of style but never seems to catch hold?

The inexplicable answer is (B.) The really weird thing about this is that almost all of the energy we use to run our modern technological society already has a solar origin. Photosynthesis turns sunlight into plant tissue. That tissue in turn is metabolized to create animal tissue. When compressed and naturally “processed” for millions of years, these materials become coal and oil, which we then burn to move cars, heat houses, create electricity, drop bombs, etc. More direct uses of solar energy are burning wood and other plant tissues. The Sun is also the engine behind air movement and the hydrologic cycle, so it’s the source for wind and hydro-powered electricity generation. Of course, the Sun is also the source of power for photovoltaics, the direct generation of electricity from sunlight.

Yet, if you analyze our use of these various forms of solar power, it seems like the less direct the access, the more we depend on it. We go to bizarre lengths to harvest ancient sunlight in the form of oil, gas and coal when the direct source of that power is the most available natural resource around. Why? After a lifelong study of homo controlfreakus, my theory is simple: direct use of the Sun is basically a humble undertaking. You can’t tell the Sun where to be and when to shine, so you have to accept limitations and work to maximize positive effects of existing realities. Your goal is to cooperate, cajole and enhance. On the other hand, even though coal, oil, and gas are very hard to access, they represent concentrated sunlight that can be taken out of context, thus removing limitations…at least in the short term. You can have waterfalls in the desert of Phoenix, snow skiing in the heat of Dubai, and build houses and cities on a grid disregarding the path of the Sun. On the surface at least, you are in control.

Unfortunately, this childish outlook won’t work in the long run. For one thing, like any harmful addiction, this will eventually kill us. Our solar control addiction is creating climate-changing pollution and is fueling wars as we speak. Even if the planet and our society could hold out, our supply won’t. These materials take millions of years to produce, so we can’t make more of them. It’s really pretty simple. Right now, it’s the Sun and millions of species of life on one side working together and one lonely little species on the other trying to stand up for its right to party. Come on, my fellow controlfreakians, let’s move up the bench toward homo sapiens status. A good start is a transition from trying to control the Sun to basking in it.

Clarke Snell is the author of two books on alternatives to conventional construction, The Good House Book and Building Green, and is a regular columnist for New Life Journal as well as a member of the NLJ Green Home Experts Board. He administers Think Green Building, LLC (www.thinkgreenbuilding.com), a consulting and design network that offers land assessments and design consultations on green renovations and new construction.

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