I guess I’m basically a Taoist because I see everything in terms of balance. Take “green building,” for example. It’s simultaneously incredibly complicated and amazingly simple. The challenge is striking a constant balance between the two. Here’s something complicated: how do you create indoor air with sixty percent relative humidity when the outdoor air is at ninety percent without producing air pollution in the process? And here’s the simple side: why are you inside wearing a wool suit on a humid summer day instead of floating down the river in an inner tube drinking a beer?

In my experience, the best solution in the context of our modern lives is almost always somewhere in the middle. No, we can’t call in sick because it’s hot outside, but we can return to a consciousness that adjusts lifestyle in response to seasons. Even something as simple as wearing shorts to work in the summer relieves a lot of demand on the building in which you’re working. It allows low-tech, minimal -impact cooling strategies, like operable windows, ceiling fans and shade trees, back into the design vernacular.

Once you start thinking like this, it’s like waking up from the Matrix. Yes, it’s good to recycle bottles, but wouldn’t it be better to find liquids that haven’t been mass-produced, packaged and shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to allow our bodies twelve ounces of moisture? Sure, compact fluorescent bulbs are a vast improvement over incandescents, but how about turning them all off sometimes and sitting outside, communing with the fireflies? Without a doubt, hybrid cars are cool, but here’s a question I hope some kid asks me when I’m ninety, “Yo gramps, did people really drive big hunks of pollution-spewing metal to work instead of living close enough to walk?”

The Taoist part for me is that life never seems to allow the choice of black or white. Somehow, we humans can’t ever just do the simple thing. For example, a number of years ago when I moved to the country, I thought on some level that I was giving up the need for money by returning to the land. The reality ended up being that only with the advent of the Internet and high-speed rural access (thank you Mountain Area Information Network!) could I begin to do much of my work at home and avoid driving all over the universe. After a lot of experimentation, including plenty of kicking and screaming, the personal approach I’ve developed is to embrace the complexity of the modern while always looking for the simplest way.

What does this have to do with “green building?” Everything, of course. The basic goal of a green home is to unite people and place to the benefit of both. In other words, we want to live without doing harm. However you slice it, though, much of what we do to create and live in a house is detrimental in some way to the environment on which we depend. Mechanized transportation of materials and people, no matter how efficient, creates pollution and environmental degradation. Electricity, whether generated by the sun or burning coal, creates pollution and environmental degradation. Heating a building, unless accomplished solely with direct sunlight, creates pollution…okay, you get the idea.

All of this is compounded, perhaps even created, by the fact that the modern world has lost its connection to climate. Most of us are generations removed from living in the climate in which our genetic make up was generated. The result is that while desert Bedouins can live in intense heat without needing mechanical cooling and Inuit peoples can live in intense cold without mechanical heating, us “modern” folks often have to go to bizarre lengths to create environments that we find comfortable.

What’s the solution? For me, it’s to accept complexity while looking for simplicity. In the context of housing design, that means starting with the simplest, lowest-impact approach with built-in flexibility. Let’s go back to the example of humidity. In our climate (Western North Carolina, Upstate South Carolina and North Georgia), humidity is really a difficult design challenge. It not only impacts human perceived comfort, but it’s also a big factor in potential mold growth. As a result, people who are sensitive to mold or are used to cooler or more arid climates assume that they need complete mechanical climate control to live here. This approach virtually guarantees the highest energy input and largest environmental impact.

My design approach is to create a cooling strategy that can be implemented in phases. The first phase is to design a building that does the utmost to control humidity without any mechanical (read: polluting) input. This is accomplished by using materials that can take on and give off water vapor in response to humidity changes, therefore helping to create stable indoor air quality. This strategy, combined with ample natural light, natural ventilation, and integrated shade can create a comfort level that only needs to be augmented by a ceiling fan or two for many people.

However, if after living in the house for a cooling season it turns out that the simplest design isn’t sufficient for your comfort, then you implement phase two, which might entail installing a single room air conditioner in the bedroom. This unit is already sized and the retrofit (not in a window for goodness sake!) planned as part of the initial design. This cooling augmentation makes sense as the next step because we sleep a third of our lives and can very efficiently cool a bedroom, so we are getting a lot of cooling use value for a small expenditure of energy.

If phase two still doesn’t cut it, then you move to phase three, which is basically what you would have started with in a marginally conscientious design: the highest efficiency whole-house cooling system. Again, this eventuality is planned for as part of the initial design. This same paradigm can be used to approach a variety of design challenges.

What have we accomplished? First, by playing with the complexity/simplicity dynamic, we’ve given ourselves the mandate to try the simplest, lowest impact solutions we can imagine to create comfortable living spaces for modern lifestyles. We provide the courage to try these solutions by allowing ourselves the flexibility to move up from simplicity to the solution that fulfills our personally defined basic needs. The end result is that we are grappling with the real question of green building and, I would posit, even human survival: what do we really need and how much damage are we willing to do to get it? In my humble opinion, it’s the answer to this question, not technology or the lack of it, that will determine our fate.

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. Clarke administers Think Green Building, LLC (http://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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