The Greenest Home on the Block?

In the summer issue of The Atlantic I came across an article titled Xanadu: A california couple seeks to build the world's greenest home. The article enumerates the many high-tech gadgets, monitoring systems, and solar panels used to make this house one of the greenest on the block. And it only cost the owners about 2 to 5 percent more than the average home in the area. Incredible! Oh wait, turns out they are rich folks from silicone valley where the average home costs $5 million dollars. Also turns out their super-fancy-greener-than-thou home is an exurban 5,600 square foot compound. But their pool contains no chlorine and their five electric cars are charged by solar energy and their climate, lighting and irrigation is controlled by iPad and they tore down the fences so all the nice deer can wander unhindered through their property and eat the native flowers. Wowsers!

The occupants say they built the home "to edify others and inspire them to build sustainable, regenerative houses", but this type of so-called inspiration probably does more harm than good to people looking to make their lives more sustainable.

It sends the message that to be green you have to move out of the city, become a technocrat, and spend a fortune to build a sprawling McGreension. In reality, living in dense urban neighbourhoods, in smaller apartments or row-houses, biking or using transit, spending some money for good insulation, and buying less manufactured crap is greener than this Xanadu house will ever be. I mean, they're going to have to fill that 5,600 square feet with something.

Of course, the green economy must love houses like this because it provides a home for all their manufactured technically-advanced goods. Hardly any airtime is given in our capitalist society to the fact that living more sustainably means acquiring less stuff. And yes, that even applies to stuff like solar-charged electric cars and super fancy water monitoring systems. I don't mean we all need to live like Monks, but taking a serious look at our consumption is one of the greenest things we can do.

Xanadu houses encourage over-building and over-consumption, which are two of the things that got us into this mess in the first place. You want to know the best option for the surrounding wildlife? It's not tearing down the property fence so they can walk through, it's not building your house there at all.

This is something that is laid out well, if not a bit repetitively, in David Owen's Green Metropolis. His entire argument is that living in dense cities is about as green as you can get, and he shows this point in a number of ways. However, his argument becomes hypocritical once we learn that Owen himself lives out in the country in a large poorly insulated old house with only his wife (the explanation being that if he moved out of that house into the city, someone else would end up living there and probably be not as green conscious as him--a pretty piss poor argument).

Regardless, his points are well made. Houses, like the Xanadu house, discourage and breed apathy amongst would-be green homeowners because it makes sustainability some unattainable feat reserved for only the super-rich with their digital toys when, in reality, the little old lady who walks to the grocery store from her apartment is leaps and bounds ahead in living green and probably doesn't even know it.