The Green Builder Magazine is slick. The magazine certainly isn’t green with it’s glossy pages and radiant colors. Whoever is behind it appears to have good funding. Or they are really proffessional. Their staff is large and their sponsors are too – Dupont, Home Depot, Whirlpool.
Mainstream of Green Magazine
The magazine has good content and reviews. It is very product driven – house as product. Buy this and it will be greener. It hasn’t gotten away from the belief that buying might actually be a problem in itself, regardless of how green the product.
But because of it’s “apparent” (I am only guessing) backers that is to be expected.
The mag is not cheap by mag standards – $39.90 when I got it. It gives you a good insight into the best of mainstream green building products – stuff coming from the big players.
Their web site oddly enough is pretty crap. It look good but has all sorts of broken links.
Green Building Course & Certification
They are also behind the Green Builder College certification program where you take online courses to be a certified green builder. There are a couple levels of 40 hours each costing about $700 each.
Again, there is money behind this and I would be concerned that the backers could cause a conflict of interest. Is the Dupont vapor barrier REALLY the best green choice or is it because a Dupont consultant helped build the course?
Either way if you understand that the course is mostly an education in how to build brand new homes (not green) in more green ways then you probably can get value out of the mag and class without continuing to destroy the world because you think you are now a green builder and doing things the right way…if that makes sens, I didn’t write it very well.
How to rid of completely?
Bottom line, the mag and the course are trying to make the existing ways of building more green so that the existing companies can continue to make money. Nobody disagrees the existing ways need to be more green. And if they are doing it then great.
My one criticism is that a lot of the existing ways should be gotten rid of completely and not simply greened. But I don’t expect the existing companies to understand that. They are part of the old. The trick is to not fight against them but to make the new so big and powerful that the old dissolves into the background naturally.