Beyond green building: expand eco-choice outside the walls of your home: Beth Trigg explores the politics and practice of living green so we can ask ourselved, 'how does my home--space and place--fare on the green continuum?'.

Close your eyes and imagine the green home of your dreams. You're breathing clean air, protected from the elements by sustainable materials and doing your part to save the planet ... or are you? What happens when you take a wider view of all that surrounds your green home? What does your community look like? Are there mature forests and clear streams? Plenty of active farmland? Are the air and water clean, and is the soil healthy?

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The increasing popularity of green building points to a growing awareness of our connection to the systems of life on the planet and our power to support and heal these systems. But getting serious about getting green means looking beyond green materials and home design. After all, a landscape of lovely, nontoxic, green-built homes surrounded by strip malls, polluted waterways and clear-cut forests is no good for the health of individuals or health of the planet.

Sustainable Development: A Contradiction in Terms?

As the movement to reduce our ecological footprint has picked up speed, some environmentalists are asking the question: can growth, development and building more homes--however "green" they may be--really be ecologically responsible?

Let's look at our area. The nonprofit advocacy group Environment North Carolina recently published a report on the loss of open space, farmland and forests to urban growth and development, documenting significant loss of natural areas in NC and projecting an additional two million acres lost in our state over the next twenty years if current trends continue. In Georgia, the hungry behemoth Atlanta, one of the fastest growing human settlements in the history of the planet, is gobbling up farmland and previously rural areas and encroaching into the mountains of north Georgia and even into North Carolina.

To help prevent these losses, before looking for property, starting construction, or choosing a location for a home, consider the impact of development on the long-term future of our region. Are your choices and our communities' choices about land use sustainable for the long-term health of ecosystems? How do your choices about where and how to build support or threaten this vision? What land should be set aside and protected from development, and what can you do from a personal and political standpoint to ensure that this land is preserved? Do your budget and intentions support buying mad preserving land with low-impact new construction on site?

Home Is Where the Sustainability Is

Many people who think of themselves as environmentalists imagine a dream home deep in the woods, high on a mountain, far away from civilization. While it is possible to live sustainably in a remote forest hideaway, if creating your home requires building a road, clearing forest, or disturbing pristine or recovering ecosystems, the damage probably outweighs any benefit. But, living sustainably in the city or suburbs is certainly possible, and may even be easier on both your bank account and the planet.

In creating a green home, it is important to ask yourself where you can live most sustainably, balancing your own vision and the realities of your community. You can construct an ecologically sound home or retrofit an existing one in an urban, rural, suburban or "ruburban" (rural areas around cities) setting. Each choice will have a different ecological impact and will involve different approaches to sustainable living.

Some choose to live close to already developed areas and existing infrastructure (roads, water lines, etc.) as a way to reduce their ecological footprints. In cities like Asheville, urban homesteaders are helping create green cities, contributing to a renaissance of urban gardens, urban permaculture, green building and green infrastructure.

Others choose to buy undeveloped rural or suburban land and preserve more than they disturb in the building process in order to help protect and restore forest, habitats and farmland. Keeping rural farmland in food production, for instance, helps support local food systems and reduces the whole community's ecological impact.

Choices about where to build are just as important on the political level as they are on the personal level. Some policymakers argue that urban "infill" development helps prevent sprawl. But local governments are not stopping sprawl simply by promoting infill. Only comprehensive land use planning (see our new department Smart Growth on page 34 and in future issues for information on land use and development) can preserve open space, forests, farms, and ecologically sensitive areas and concentrate development in less sensitive or already developed corridors.

The ecological costs of transportation are also important considerations at the individual and community levels. Is the commute from your rural hideaway polluting the air? Will you have to construct a road to your mountaintop dream home, producing runoff and polluting waterways? Can your urban community create public transit and greenways for bike and foot traffic sufficient to significantly reduce auto traffic?

In our region, both city dwellers and ruralites are building energy-independent homes and retrofitting old homes to increase energy efficiency, heating homes and water with passive solar systems and even selling power back to the grid. City residents are replacing lawns with solar panels and vegetable gardens, while rural homesteaders are putting farmland back into production and setting aside land for the future. All are making a difference in the total ecological footprint of our region.

Wait, Watch and Pay Attention

Once you have decided where you can live most sustainably and found the home or property of your dreams, what is the next step?

Permaculture practitioners advise observing the site where you are planning to live for at least a year before starting permanent construction. Where are the best unobstructed solar sites? Where is there access to water? Are there flood-prone, marshy or especially dry areas? Are there invasive species, important habitat or delicate ecosystems on your site? During this time, you can do soil tests and inventory plant and animal life on your property. You can also hire an ecologist or a naturalist to help you identify wildlife and habitat. Understanding the natural features of the land and what plants and animals are going to be your neighbors will help you pick the best site for any construction and identify areas for permanent conservation or restoration. If you do want to live on the land while observing the natural systems at work, yomes, yurts and travel trailers are good "bridge strategies" to help you live simply while figuring out your site plan.

Conserve the Best, Repair the Best

When choosing where to build on a piece of property, many will gravitate to the mountaintop view, the pristine forest, or the beautiful meadow full of wildflowers, birds, and bees and avoid areas where past residents have left ramshackle building remains, damaged ecosystems or disturbed soil. Resist this urge!

Construction--no matter how "green"--is necessarily disruptive, even destructive, of the natural environment. The concept of "site repair," also used in permaculture, means locating your home on a part of the property where its construction can actually improve the site's ecological health, while preserving more pristine areas for views, wildlife and low-impact activities. A good measure of the "greenness" of your home is whether at the end of your construction project your property and your community are healthier than when you began. If your home and property are actually helping increase biodiversity, cleaning the water, building the soil and eradicating invasive species, then you are truly living green.

The "best" or most beautiful ecologically rich and least disturbed areas are the areas that you should consider protecting permanently for future generations. This can be done with a conservation easement, a legal tool to help preserve land in perpetuity. Conservation easements enable landowners to permanently protect land from development, deforestation or other damage; landowners retain ownership and stewardship of the land and can receive tax benefits.

Another option to protect your land in perpetuity is to donate all or part of your property to a land trust. Some people donate their entire property and lease their homes back from the trust for a nominal fee. Many intentional communities are set up so that all land is held in trust rather than privately owned, and homesites are leased to community members. Advocating for public funding for urban and suburban Community Land Trusts (CLTs) takes land conservation a step further, enabling more people to protect land from overdevelopment and simultaneously preserving the affordability of housing for future generations. With the concept of site repair in mind and land trusts and conservation easements in your toolbox, you can save working natural systems and help repair damaged or compromised areas.

Enjoy It, Don't Destroy It

Sometimes what attracts people to a piece of property as a homesite--forests, streams, open fields--are the very things that disappear or are damaged as the property is "developed." Continuing in the vein of site repair, find ways to enjoy these attractions without harming them. To borrow a phrase from Laurel Valley Watch in Madison County, NC, "Enjoy it, don't destroy it!"

If you love the trout stream on your land, walk to it on a footpath so that the water will stay clear enough to support trout, rather than building as dose as possible to it. In nature, the land that borders streams and rivers is unique and important. And the number one pollutant in North Carolina waterways is dirt--sediment from construction runoff and other human activities--which destroys aquatic life. Under no circumstances should you build in the floodplain of a river, and riparian zones around waterways should be maintained--this means no clearing or grading near the edge of a river or stream.

Find ways to enjoy views without damaging slopes and ridgetops. This usually means clustering buildings and roads on level, stable areas and avoiding steep areas. Clear only as necessary to accommodate the footprint of your home rather than clearing the whole site for "open views." Remember that in trying to obtain a view, you are often cluttering other people's views and damaging fragile slopes.

Expand Your Definition of "Home"

Truly living in a sustainable way that heals and honors the planet requires an expansion of the circle of caring beyond the walls of our physical homes.

To protect and restore the environment that is our home, we need to advocate for changes in policy--including increased public monies for conservation, changes in building codes to allow for greener construction and renovation, strict enforcement of environmental regulations, protection of vulnerable and ecologically sensitive areas, comprehensive land use planning, energy independence and other political approaches that will help repair, restore and preserve our natural world.

When we come to think of building a green home as having the ability to not only create a healthy space but also a healthy place, from our communities and region to our planet, then we have gone beyond green building to green living, at home in the natural world.

For more questions to think about and eco-friendly approaches to take, see Beth's expanded article online at www.newlifejournal.com.

Beth Trigg is a writer and activist who has worked for social, economic and environmental justice in the nonprofit sector for more than ten years. She is also a homesteader and gardener who has been experimenting with permaculture and sustainable living in urban, rural and ruburban environments for most of her life; Beth can be reached at [e-mail].