Not all that can be counted, counts. And not all that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein (but more likely William Bruce Cameron)
My purpose in this blog is a two-testical punch:
1) shed light on the "elephant-like-thing" that is in the room
2) shed light on the elephant scrotum that is NOT in the room, or rather, add some realism to our runaway imagination on what this green home growth is all about.
If there were an elephant in my room, I wouldn't be asking for a symposium about elephants, but instead, I'd be asking for a tutorial on window latches. Solutions, immediately, please!
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| It's a hose? It's a rope? It's a tree trunk? It's a fan? It's a rock? |
I'll be the first to admit, "green" is exciting, but it's tricky. I wish the green label meant that something was regenerative and nourishing. Instead, it's a nebulous term, impossible to quantify, and susceptible to hi-jacking. As in the old Indian fable, ask six blind people to define an elephant and you'll get six answers. Ask a dozen people for definitions of "green" and you're likely to get a baker's dozen back. So instead, we cave to the temptation to define "green" by an assemblage of proxies. Is your building lead-safe, water-wise, grid-smart, high efficiency? Does your car get good fuel economy? Is your coffee shade-grown and fair-trade? Is your neighborhood pedestrian-friendly? Is your corn dog all-natural? Blah blah blah-Certified
That is why I like the way my buddy Dr. Bob Dahlstrom likens "green" to a compass's magnetic north. We never really arrive to "north", but it's a useful orientation. The weakness, however, is that the direction of our vector can be made rosy even if the magnitude is gloomy.
The proxies for green-ness come in all different forms, but they usually implore metrics that fall short and sometimes miss the mark completely. Then the system is left suffering the classic system archetype behavior known as Seeking the Wrong Goal (1)-- defining our success via corrupted metrics. Here are some examples of perverted green metrics that end up warping our loftier goals:
Perverted metrics:
1) Number of wind farms contributing to the grid
2) Miles per gallon of new car
3) Percentage of citizens recycling
4) Number of LEED Certified homes built in the city
Better metrics:
1) Megawatts of coal-sourced power contributing to the grid
2) Number of gallons of gasoline consumed in a year
3) Pounds of organic matter composted in a year
4) BTU per square feet of newly constructed homes
If your goal is become healthy, but your metric is "amount of diet food purchased" then success looks like a whole lot of Snackwells (Jevon's Paradox). If your true goal is to educate children, but your metric is defined as "dollars spent per pupil", then success inevitably look like a perverted game of cash explosion.
What if, instead, the educational metric were changed to...
-number of words in student vocabulary?
- height of survived egg drop divided by weight of egg drop protector?
- minutes of dialogue spoken with a foreigner?
- number of students willing to pay their teacher for having offered them an amazing experience before they graduated?
Obviously, if these metrics were in place, the system would demonstrate remarkably DIFFERENT behavior (good, bad, or ugly).
For goodness sakes, get to the point, Chris!
What is this elephant in the room that we are afraid to acknowledge?
GROWTH. As it pertains to aggregate growth of the Gross Domestic Product-- I propose we start to treat "growth" like cuss word. When you hear the politicians say it on the radio, as a fix for the country, just substitute that word "growth" with "elephant scrotum".
"What we need, my fellow Americans, is not four more years of failed policy, but elephant scrotum."
Random Presiential Candidate 2016
"Growth" is an elephant scrotum of wonderfulness...as in, it is poorly-imagined, mis-guided, and non-existant wonderfulness (which Herman Daly does a better job illuminating). It is a case of seeking the wrong goal, since GDP has much less to do with the welfare of a culture than most Americans would think. As an accounting mechanism, we universally know and admit that the GDP metric fails our end-goal in at least three major ways:
1) it ignores the AWESOME non-market goods/services (like parenting or pollination);
2) it ignores the externalized costs of harmful activities (like pollution);
3) it allows equivalency tradeoffs between necessary things (clean water and air) versus luxury things ("boats and hoes").
That means that the services provided by stay-at-home parents are bad for GDP but the purchase of a pack of cigarettes is good for GDP as are the cancer treatment drug sales down the road. The purchase of LED light bulbs and riding your bike are bad for GDP but driving your car and changing the tires is good for GDP.
Some alternative accounting mechanisms, like the Index of Sustainability Economics and Welfare, actually show an inverse correlation in between GDP and Americans' welfare. That means that as GDP grows, our welfare is worsening!
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| Source : Lawn, Philip A. (2003) |
I wish I had a more current graph, as there are obvious biases and complications that need refining in any index attempting to capture the full meaning of human welfare. It is in fact, impossible. But that doesn't mean it's not useful. At least that's what I think Albert Einstein was getting at in the quote I intro'd with. Here's a reminder-
"Not all that can be counted, counts. And not all that counts can be counted.".
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a scrotum as there is nothing intrinsically wrong with growth. But let us not forget some basic rocket science-- when things grow, they get BIGGER. We must recognize that the economy is a SUB-system of a larger organism. The "scrotum" is within the elephant just as GDP can only live within the resource limits of the planet. There are natrual limits to growth, many of which we are currently finding and overshooting, in our oceans' fisheries for example.
Now, on to a shining light.
As GROWTH pertains to homes, the good news is that our super-size-me-fication trends of the last three decades have been flattening. Even though last year, the U.S. Census reported that the average new home size increased 88 square feet to 2480 sq. ft., this anomaly bucks a four year shrinking trend. We will probably see a continued decline in home size, as realtor trackers report growing demand for down-sized homes. Yabbadabbadoo!
In two weeks, we are excited to welcome Sarah Susanka, author of The Not So Big House and The Not So Big Life, and other "Not So Big" publications. A brilliant architect, she will be the keynote speaker at our Green Home Summit. Her inspiring designs remind us better than words of what it is about our homes that makes them so valuable and nourishing. Quality trumps quantity.
What I like about her approach to green building is that it doesn't begin with the building at all. It begins with the life.
What is a good life?
What makes a home special?
What is a home's relationship to sense of place?
Here's your enormous juicy elephant scrotum of business opportunity
I love chatting it up with Klaus, our office handyman, about green construction and home building techniques. I asked him if he had a chance to tour any of Cincinnati's green home shows over the years. His response had me rolling on the floor laughing my ass off:
Big homes with 2x6 framed walls and geothermal systems.
I've been building all my walls 2x6's for the past 20 years.
And a geothermal system doesn't suddenly make a $300k home magically worth $500k.
C'mon, I want my 10 bucks back!
Is this incremental improvement the future of American home construction business?
Or is there viability in some of the more radical approaches?
TO BE CONTINUED
(Or maybe not. We'll see if I have time orenergy between now and my big race in September)
(1) For the greatest book on systems ever, read Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
An excellently composed essai, monsieur! If there was any comment that I would add, it would be that the eminence of such ill conceived metrics as the GDP or the Dow Jones reflects not a mere error of emphasis or focus, but the imperatives of financialized growth and accumulation that inhere with a capitalist mode of production. These imperatives in turn are not ad hoc, but relate intimately to two decouplings - that of concrete ends from the concrete means of their realization, and that of social ends from the social means of their realization. With regard to the former, crafts are no longer pursued for their own right, but for monetary gain. So when it is asked why a baker bakes, the answer, "to make bread," acquires a sinister equivocacy that implies perhaps a problematic choice of ingredients in the dough. With respect to the latter, under the rubric of private property's sanctification the social or public character of many of the challenges that confront us has been altogether obscured within a fog that has bred the most paradoxical of 'psuedo-solutions'. The ascendency of the private automobile over public transport systems is a paradigm case. Indeed, to bring the matter around the horn, we are afflicted by an elephantitis of the car. Fortunately, numerous treatments are available...not least an ingenious machine known as the bicycle.
ReplyDeleteThanks, for your input, QuixoticTom. To your point--what do they say...a developed country is not where the poor use cars, but where the rich use public transportation?
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