It ended badly.

We had to hire workers willing to charge lower salaries which resulted [...]]]>

Eco Brooklyn just came out of a renovation of a four story brownstone where the budget was very tight. We took the job full of idealism believing we could make green building affordable to somebody with a small budget.

It ended badly.

We had to hire workers willing to charge lower salaries which resulted in mistakes we had to redo.

Combine that with the inevitable surprises that arise in 100 year old buildings and the end result was we lost money. Had we worked quickly perhaps the client could have appreciated the good deal they got, but the project dragged on and in the end nobody was happy.

It has made me re-evaluate the wisdom of accepting jobs with tight budgets. I have come to the hard realization that despite my intense desire to make good building affordable to middle class budgets, good building is expensive and no amount of salvaging can change that.

The problem of offering affordable services is also compounded by tight profit margins that require taking on more jobs. This results in logistical mistakes and further loss of quality.

In true green fashion I realized that our business model was not sustainable. The bottom line is that we need to charge more to reflect the true cost of building green.

Our fear is that green building remains an option for the elite rather than the middle class worker.

But despite our raise in prices I don’t think green building is only for the rich.

I think there is something much deeper at stake here.

Unfortunately current building – green or not – is like everything else in the world – highly subsidized by suffering.
The only reason you can get a 2×4 for $1.50 is because they laid waste a mountain side. $1.50 is not the true cost of that wood. The hidden cost is a barren mountain which costs in other ways – loss of ecosystem, destruction of waters through silt run off, destruction of local culture…how much does that 2×4 really cost?

Each time we buy a subsidized 2×4 we are buying on our global credit card. And it maxed out a long time ago. We are already paying the price ten fold through global suffering.

So the solution is to start putting the real cost back into things.

Middle class people have come to expect a full gut renovation of their home. Just like they expect a supermarket full of a thousand cheap food products. Both are part of a consumer society that is not sustainable and is causing great problems.

More and more those problems are breaking through our artificial protective walls. For a long time we managed to keep it far from us – in remote vilages on the other side of the world where children work in sweat shops and companies pillage local resources for us.

But with global climates wreaking havoc from such human made disequilibrium and with global political and cultural sharing it is impossible to stay isolated any longer.

In terms of building, the harsh reality is that we need to drastically reduce it. Period. Instead of a renovation every 20 years it needs to be a renovation every 100. Going forward when you build you build for yourself, your children and your grandchildren because they won’t get the chance to renovate. You Build It Forward.

With this new attitude building becomes a very valuable process instead of the “I don’t like my kitchen, lets tear it out,” process it is now. The reason old buildings last is that they were built to last. Kitchens would stay the same for hundreds of years. They were built right in the first place and they served their purpose despite whatever their paint color was.

We build now like spoiled children without any appreciation for the great sacrifices that go into it. We build largely with borrowed or inherited money and without any understanding that the building materials are immensely valuable due to the blood and destruction needed to get them.

Like sanitized beef patties in a supermarket the building materials sit in neat little piles in Home Depot. But like the horrendous animal cruelty in the beef industry, those building materials were equally wrenched from the earth without consideration or intelligence.

Lets bring the humility back to building, the respect and gratitude, the awareness that we are causing great destruction by renovating our kitchen and that nothing comes without sacrifice.

Some Native American Indians when killing a deer would appologize to it and thank it for its life sacrifice so the Indian could eat and survive.

We must renovate, we must build. But we also must do it with more awareness of the cost. Only then will we build when absolutely necessary and we will build to last with gratitude for those who sacrificed – easpecially our Mother Earth.

And in that gratitude we are filled with the need to give something back so we build for our future generations of humans and ecology. We Build It Forward, a cycle of life where we take with awareness and give with gratitude.

Believe me, that kithen – whether the one you build for your grandchildren or the one your grandfather built for you – will have so much more meaning.

August forum: Working with contractors (AIA credit)August’s forum will discuss working with contractors in both residential and [...]]]>

Green Home NYC is featuring Gennaro Brooks-Church as a guest speaker. He will be speaking on two key concepts he coined: Build It Forward and the Zero Brownstone. More info below on the event next week.

August forum: Working with contractors (AIA credit)August’s forum will discuss working with contractors in both residential and commercial projects. Along with teams of architects, designers, and specifiers, the future of green construction is in the contractors’ hands. Please join GreenHomeNYC on August 18th to hear how these innovative people are greening our skyline, one building at a time.

When: Wednesday – August 18, 2010. 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Where: Trespa, 62 Greene Street, Manhattan
Please RSVP . Space is limited.

We are providing AIA credit for this forum ($15), click here if you are interested.

Our speakers are:
Gennaro Brooks-Church, NY Licensed Real Estate Broker, Certified EcoBroker®, National Sustainable Advisor Program, LEED AP and Passive House Consultant Trainee, directs Eco Brooklyn. He coined two important building concepts: Build It Forward and the Zero Brownstone. Build It Forward is where all building must be made to last at least one hundred years, be a desirable gift to future generations and not drain existing resources. The Zero Brownstone is when a brownstone is renovated using no new materials, creating no waste and the end result is a home that uses no energy.

From the Zen perspective it is an acknowledgment of the “isness” of being, meaning that with enlightenment you see life as it is, free of expectation or judgment. You and life are simply “being” perfectly and [...]]]>

There is this great Zen saying: “Before Enlightenment, fetch water, chop wood. After Enlightenment, fetch water, chop wood.”

From the Zen perspective it is an acknowledgment of the “isness” of being, meaning that with enlightenment you see life as it is, free of expectation or judgment. You and life are simply “being” perfectly and the mundane daily tasks like chopping wood become part of the perfect rotation of the cosmos.

Trying to describe the one handed clap in words of course comes across as clunky but my point is that a person’s inner being might totally transform yet their outer actions appear the same.

And that is a lot of what green building is about.

Take the awareness of conservation, for example. Let’s say two builders in Brooklyn are each renovating a Brownstone. They both use salvaged old beams from a dumpster and cover them up with drywall so the inspector does not see them.

One of those builders is dishonest and cheap, cutting corners by using “junk” wood and hiding it behind drywall before anyone catches him. He does it to put extra money in his pocket and doesn’t care about his client or anything else. Pretty simple. Most of us have come across this kind of builder.

The other builder is an honest green builder and yet it appears does the exact same thing. Why? This is an example of similar external actions but different internal motivation.

The green builder salvaged the beams to lessen the impact on the landfill and so new trees would not be cut. He knows that old wood if picked correctly is much stronger. He also knows the Department of Buildings does not allow this kind of wood because in his opinion it is behind the times as well as trying to deal with dishonest builders.

So the green builder hides the wood from the inspector in order to have less of an environmental impact and a stronger house.

Outwardly there is no difference between a corrupt builder trying to save money by using old beams and a green builder trying to save the environment and build better.

This goes on so much in green building and is why green building can be misleading. For example it is hard sometimes explaining how one house built green is radically different from another that wasn’t. On the surface they might not seem so different.

After all every smart business tries to reduce waste and re-use materials because it saves money. Who doesn’t want to reduce the impact on the land fills: less dumpsters sent to the dump means less money spent. All businesses want to have happy employees and if that means using less chemicals on the job then so be it. You can pretty much explain the logic of all green building practices from current building perspectives.

But that is the huge difference: the green building perspective is vastly different. The angle is different. Instead of looking from the view of profit for that individual business you are looking from the viewpoint of “profit” for the whole planet, the whole community, the whole ecosystem, the whole house……it is a vastly more holistic view.

Even though the external actions may sometimes align and seem similar, they are not because of the “reason” behind the actions.

So why are you building green? Is it because you are a contractor and that is where the money is? Is it because you own a home and have allergies? Is it because you want your local river to be cleaner? We all have reasons for building green. All these reasons might make the exact same house. But the reason behind that house is so important.

The holistic reason is the most powerful because it looks at all the reasons and creates a holistic synergy of them all: not only does the contractor make money but you get rid of your allergies AND the river becomes cleaner.

That is true green building.

It takes more time, more honesty, more knowledge and more maturity. It is not the easiest in the short term but it is the only path to a healthy world.

Built It Forward or Don’t Build At All.

The Report by the Brundtland Commission, titled “Our Common Future”, was published by Oxford University Press in 1987 and laid the definition for sustainable [...]]]>

Ever wondered who coined the definition of sustainable building? Many people had a good idea what it was but it really became official with the publication of the Brundtland Report.

The Report by the Brundtland Commission, titled “Our Common Future”, was published by Oxford University Press in 1987 and laid the definition for sustainable development and the change of politics needed for achieving that.

The sustainable movement uses this definition as the common reference. One sentence in the Brundtland Report is most commonly cited:

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

And thus most green builders define green building as building that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

If your current motto is, “Use what you need without any consideration for the future.” then the Brundtland definition is a great improvement. It is saying, “Build what you gotta build but make sure it doesn’t screw people in the future.”

But truth be told it is a transitional solution. It is a little like saying, “I try to keep the house clean.” It is a weak statement at best. It is based on the concept of doing LESS damage. But if you have ever seen a graph with a line that become less and less you know you can never reach zero.

You can half the damage you do. Then you can half it again. And again and again. But you will never be able to completely reduce the damage to zero because your basis is flawed. You are trying to do LESS damage. Until you remove the concept of damage from the equation you are fighting a loosing battle.

The next step in our building evolution is to Built It Forward. This is where you aren’t trying to lessen the damage but actively increasing the benefit of future generations. It is not about being less bad. Bad is not part of the equation. It is about being more good.

You are essentially going beyond just “putting money in the bank for your own savings without depleting other peoples’ savings” (which is the current definition of sustainability).

When you Build It Forward you actively plan on putting money in your own account AND IN OTHER PEOPLES’ ACCOUNTS. You become the Robin Hood of building.

In a land lacking abundance this may seem impossible. But with smart design, pro-active planning, future thinking and skill it can be done.

Truth be told nature does it all the time. Look at the cherry tree. It gives off many more blossoms than it needs for its own survival. It creates an abundance of food and housing for the ecosystem around it without any personal sacrifice.

We can build that way too. We can build houses that deplete the landfills, produce clean water, energy and nutrients, and provide an abundance of food and housing for the ecosystem around it without any sacrifice.

Build It Forward or don’t build at all.

So what does this mean if you are a green builder in Brooklyn? When doing a green renovation on a Brooklyn brownstone you want to embody the concept of Building It Forward:

Salvage materials – dumpsters and other jobs

Gray water system

Solar PV and Thermal

Rain Water Collection

Green Roof

Build so that it can be disassembled and reused

Compost

Edible Garden

Solar Heating

Efficient Boiler

Design for Cooling and Heating

The list goes on but it is possible. We are doing a lot of it on the Brooklyn Green Show House. If all brownstones were built this way we would save money and live in a thriving natural habitat.

The quote that caught my attention the most was: “We can either create assets for [...]]]>

Here is a great collection of words organized in a powerful way. If you are doing something green then you need to realize you are part of the largest single movement the world has ever seen. This is BIG.

The quote that caught my attention the most was:
“We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future.”

I see the whole world in terms of Build It Forward and so this struck a chord.

Bottom line ladies and gents, you either Build It Forward or don’t build at all because any other way is taking milk from your child.

The Unforgettable Commencement Address to the Class of 2009, University of Portland, May 3rd, 2009 By Paul Hawken:

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful”. Boy, no pressure there. But let’s begin with the startling part. Hey, Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation – but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.

Basically, the earth needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades. This planet came with a set of operating instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, and don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken.

Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food – but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: YOU ARE BRILLIANT, AND THE EARTH IS HIRING. The earth couldn’t afford to send any recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint.

And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.

The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. ” There could be no better description.

Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refuge camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums. You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more.

This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself.

The founders of this movement were largely unknown – Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood – and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty.

But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. . And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, and non-governmental organizations, of companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history. The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart.

What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. Think about this: we are the only species on this planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than to renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.

We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable.

We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe – exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven. ” So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end.

Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature.

What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.

This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation.

You are graduating to the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence.

Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss.

The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hopefulness only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful.

This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

Paul Hawken is a renowned entrepreneur, visionary environmental activist, and author of many books, most recently Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. He was presented with an honorary doctorate of humane letters by University president Father Bill Beauchamp, C. S.C., in May, when he delivered this superb speech.

When you build it forward you are giving more to the world than what you are [...]]]>

When I coined the concept of Built It Forward I knew what it meant but that didn’t mean I knew how to accurately describe it to others. Today I was describing it and came across a good way:

When you build it forward you are giving more to the world than what you are taking from it.

This would mean that it creates more resources than depletes resources from the world. It creates more community. It facilitates more nature. It gives a better living space for people.

A normal builder might be able to do one or two of these things. For example they might be able to build a great home but at the expense of what resources? The builder almost always depletes more in terms of materials, nature etc than what they give back with the building.

A green builder can build it forward and add to the world on all levels. This is not a small feat but it can be done. The holistic vision of a green builder can see the house from many levels and make sure that the building is giving back on all of them.

The green builder manages resources so that “old” and “wasted” materials are reused. This does two things: it means no new resources are used AND it means the world is a cleaner place since less goes to the landfill. This is a classic example of building it forward.

Another key point of Built It Forward is that the building is built with the future tenants in mind, no mater how many hundreds of years that is in the future. This means a green builder is investing more (on many levels) than what a normal builder would deem necessary.

The green builder can justify this because they understand that this investment will benefit them too. A normal builder does not have that kind of vision.

The perspective of time makes all the difference with how we live our lives. I had an interview with the execs at Lightolier lighting company here in Manhattan [...]]]>

I’ve thought up a concept called Building Forwards where you create equity for people in the future. It comes down to using time as a bank.

The perspective of time makes all the difference with how we live our lives. I had an interview with the execs at Lightolier lighting company here in Manhattan this morning and they were telling me how the government put out mandates over 15 years ago that they wanted LED to become a dominant player in lighting. Only now is that becoming a reality. For some LED is a new phenomenon. For others it is a 20 year project. It is all about perspective.

And here is an astounding perspective on time: every single highway in the entire world is less than a hundred years old. That is a astronomically small drop in the bucket of time but it has changed the world tremendously. That is a great example of Building Backwards because it is going to take future generations a lot of time and money to undo that (yes they need to be undone).

I’m renovating the Green Show House in Brooklyn that was built a hundred years ago and I’m building it so it won’t need another renovation for another hundred years.

For me as a green builder and contractor it is IMPERATIVE that I build not for this generation but for the generations at least a hundred years from now. It is called Build it Forward (I just invented that phrase!). If we all did this the cost of EVERYTHING would be greatly reduced over time. Not necessarily our living time because we are paying dearly for the stupidity of our past.

But the concept of Building Forward is in my eyes the only way we can achieve that utopia of forever bathing by the pool that the past 50 years of technological improvements promised but never delivered on. We were barking up the wrong tree. The trick isn’t to make things more efficient. The trick is to make things more durable (at least that is one of the tricks). Each time we build something that will outlive us we are creating a nest egg for our children.

The past fifty years of course had a lot of great things. One of them was the amazing efficiency we achieved in almost everything. But there is one issue with this. Making things more efficient has proven to speed things up. Nothing more.

A more efficient razor means you can shave quicker. Period. It has increasingly shown that it doesn’t change much in your life beyond that. If anything it is simply puts pressure on the rest of your life to speed up, until you are running frantically trying to keep up.

For example we now know that adding another freeway lane to a congested freeway does not solve the problem. In a couple years that lane will be congested as well. What does work is SLOWING IT DOWN! by adding other paradigms like public transport and bike lanes.

So yes we have to deal with the present problems and tackle them but I’m not concerned weather I see the results of the big improvements. I’m just focused on making those dayly deposits into the bank of time so that my children and their children can live off it’s interest. The irony is that with this attitude I get great joy in the small results. Time is funny that way.

Here is another way of saying it: