The Case for Local Solutions by Dan Imhoff

It has been said that one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the late 20th century is the fact that the Earth is a community, and that what happens to any part of that community also affects the whole. If this is true, and the Earth can only healthfully function as an interrelated and diverse community, it follows that our outlooks, approaches, and solutions must become more locally oriented. Considering the globalizing trends of cultures and economies, such an emphasis on community interdependence and local knowledge may seem outdated or even implausible. Yet creating diverse sets of local resources is among the greatest accomplishments we can achieve in the 21st century.

This realization of the importance of reviving vital, diverse communities comes at a time of unparalleled ecological threats. Global warming, species extinction, and pollution of all kinds are the byproducts of cultures increasingly addicted to faraway sources of basic necessities and luxury items, oblivious to how or by whom these products are created and what their real environmental and social costs are.

Consider contemporary residential construction. While many practices of yesteryear are happily forgotten, in the past 50 years we have strayed far and wide from the community approach of bygone eras. Materials and vernacular designs, once derived from local labor and resources and informed by regional climatic conditions, have become homogenized. It is as common to see Southwestern-inspired architecture outside the Southwest today as it is to find imported wood or stone featured in a region that is, or once was, abundant in local sources of both. It is even more increasingly common to find gigantic houses that don’t blend in with either the landscape or the regional architecture and that are dependent upon consuming vast quantities of outside energy for heating, cooling, and electricity. We are living in the age of the industrial house, where traditions and limits seem no longer to apply. To build without a sense of history — of regional architecture or of the origins of the materials that go into a project — is to work in a vacuum without connection to place or future legacy.

Building A Vision: From Exploiters to Optimizers
This book, the second in a trilogy, is about building methods and materials, particularly those that optimize, minimize, or substitute for wood and wood products that are recycled or third party-certified ‘well managed.’ While its main focus is to present a conceptual overview of ways we might reduce our transgressions on the Earth’s increasingly fragmented and diminished forests through our building projects, it also pertains to a larger movement in which many people are deeply engaged—that of restoring resourceful solutions to creating shelter. We are fortunate that the environmental building community has been actively growing and evolving in all parts of the country for well over three decades. Even though real progress in ‘green’ construction may just now be getting underway, a great many models, examples, resources, and products exist to reduce wood consumption, provide alternatives, improve materials use, and move us toward ‘construction without destruction’ and ‘building as if forests mattered.’ On the other hand, time is running out for the last of the Earth’s great native forests, which can’t afford to wait for the many generations it may take to create truly sustainable forestry and revive diverse building communities.

Presenting and addressing such a massive and complex issue as reducing wood consumption and creating more resourceful building approaches requires the participation of a wide range of people on a variety of levels — and by resourceful, we mean making full use of the chosen material and minimizing waste. Pioneers have already been trying for decades to change the course of ‘building as usual.’ One direction this exploration has taken is toward more highly processed building components such as steel studs, recycled plastics, engineered wood products, and manufactured housing. Another approach has been to revisit the past for modern solutions, using traditional and vernacular building methods in a present-day context. This book offers a broad overview of materials and approaches from both paths; not all of the ideas presented here will suit every philosophy. Advocates of ‘natural building,’ for example, may be unwilling to accept the use of styrofoam panel systems, despite their ability to significantly reduce a building’s operational energy. At the same time, the extremely important and craftsman-like work being pioneered by natural builders — such as straw-bale, light straw clay, and rammed earth — won’t trickle down to the general public without adaptations that substitute technology and mass production for hand labor to make them more affordable. These two seemingly opposed ‘camps‘ are meeting with increasing frequency on the green building community’s expanding playing field. Architects and builders are creating hybrid structures that combine both industrial materials and natural approaches in an attempt to balance aesthetic, code, performance, budget, and other considerations.

Any building project carries with it an ethical as well as aesthetic contract with society — as it requires resources first to be built and then maintained, restored, and eventually disposed of. Simply put, to build is to choose, and the choices can be complex and challenging. Each new home or remodel adds or detracts from the quality of life for its inhabitants, the local community, and the hundreds of places where the individual building components originated. In the best of all worlds, any new project would account for as many of the ‘true costs’ of building as possible. Were toxic chemicals involved in manufacturing? What impacts were created in the communities where raw materials were mined, harvested, or obtained? Does the building take advantage of the site’s natural solar heating and cooling opportunities? Will the materials and building assembly produce a longlasting structure or one that will need quick replacement? Are local or regional materials and labor emphasized? While no one can have all the answers, anything short of trying to optimize with what we presently understand and continually asking deeper, more penetrating questions, is to fall short on the building’s social contract with the community and the planet.

Green building is not the sole domain of idealists and artisans, nor is it only for the rich or environmentally minded. Rather, green building comprises the full aesthetic, economic, and ecological spectrum of contemporary building, from some of the country’s most high-end buildings and residences to low-income redevelopment projects, such as the exemplary Casa Verde Program in Austin, Texas, or the reSourceful Building Project in Emeryville, California. It is in the spirit of presenting the broad scope of this work in a refreshing light that we have embarked upon this project. We hope that builders, architects, property owners, and anyone undertaking a construction project will consider these ideas in the early phases of design and conceptualization, joining the party and inching us, one project at a time, a little closer toward building a vision, toward the highest possible quality of living for all of Earth’s species.

A Concise View of Wood Use in America
It is easy perhaps to perceive resource depletion and land mismanagement as byproducts of 20th century economic industrialization and globalization, but the roots go back thousands of years. In North America, Europeans began burning and sawing their way through the continent’s 850 million acres of ancient forests almost as soon as they arrived, annexing territory, establishing settlements and agriculture, constructing buildings, and providing raw materials for a burgeoning trade in ships and lumber. Ben Franklin wrote that by 1774, “wood, our common fuel which within these 300 years might be had at any man’s door, must now be fetched near [160 kilometers] to some towns, and makes a considerable article in the expense of some families.” ¹ According to architectural historian Lester Walker, early colonists built with a variety of materials: wood in New England; brick in the Chesapeake Bay region; stone in the Delaware Valley; and numerous resources in the Hudson River Valley. Vernacular architecture evolved as local knowledge and materials bases grew. After the American Revolution, however, Walker writes that national and international influences began to supercede local knowledge.²

By the time President Thomas Jefferson dispatched Lewis and Clark to explore a route from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, wood was consumed for fuel more than for any other purpose, while timber framing and log cabin building remained the norm in residential construction. According to author, teacher, and artisan builder Steve Chappell, that began to change in 1840 when a Shaker woman devised the circular saw blade, a technological innovation that eventually launched the revolution in stud- or stick-frame construction, which today accounts for at least 90 percent of residential buildings in the United States.³ During the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, demand for quick, cheap housing rose dramatically. The circular saw’s gains in speed and efficiency made it economically viable to cut smaller pieces of lumber which were far easier to transport, and thus provided construction materials to expand communities long after local resources had been depleted.

In some areas of the country, such as Nebraska and the Southwest, where access to wood was limited, construction methods using straw, sod, and adobe were developed. The story of late 19th century settlement and development in the United States is probably best summed up, however, by the myth of Paul Bunyan, the archetypical lumber jack who clearcut miles of forest with a swath of his axe and whose giant bovine sidekick, Babe, drank entire rivers dry in the taming of the wild West. By the close of the 19th century, one-third of the United States’ forest land base had been liquidated. The Forest Service was established in 1897, with the express mission of protecting our forests from uncontrolled exploitation. But the idea that the forests provided irreplaceable benefits to the planet as a whole rather than just trees as a commodity resource — while advocated by visionaries like John Muir — fell prey to the engines of industrialization. Pressure in Congress soon increased to open the forests to timber interests, and by 1899, the first commercial timber cutting began on National Forest land. In the years following, the logging industry and the Forest Service developed a cozy partnership. A recent editorial written by a coalition of forest activist organizations summarized the politics of 20th century industrial forestry this way: “Timber companies got a cheap wood supply, the Forest Service got a bloated budget from timber sales, and Congressmen got huge campaign donations from the industry.” ⁴

The post-World War II era saw an unprecedented growth in construction, inducing a lumber boom fueled by rapid changes in technology. According to Kathryn Kohm and Jerry Franklin: “By the 1950s, all new Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service timber sales in the Douglas fir region called for clearcutting. The result is a fragmented landscape in which species have been pushed to the edge of extinction, the productive capacity of many sites [has] been depleted, and public outcries have originated over landscape aesthetics.” ⁵ Throughout the past 50 years, the timber industry has also shifted from manual labor to capital-intensive, mechanized technologies that have facilitated the extraction of massive volumes of trees on public and private lands. The amount of primary forest worldwide is now reported to be just 16 percent of its pre-industrial amount — and dwindling by the day.⁶

An Acre of Trees per House; Six Decks per Minute
It is estimated that an acre of forest — up to 44 trees — goes into the 12,500 board feet that make up the average 2,000-square-foot home in the United States. With approximately 1.5 million homes being built every year in the United States, this adds up to enormous pressure on the forests from residential construction and remodeling alone (not to mention paper, packaging, and fuel wood). In addition to wood products, the extraction of minerals and fuels needed for metals, glass, plastics, concrete, and other materials required to build the average house gouges out a crater equal to the size of the house itself, according to geologist John Wolfe.⁷ And outpacing the early 21st century housing market’s annual growth rate is the decking business, which completes six decks every minute in the United States, for a total of more than 3 million per year. Then there is the building industry’s global footprint: 40 percent of the material resource and energy flows in the global economy are attributed to constructing or maintaining buildings. The global transportation of building materials and other related resources carries other impacts. Invasive diseases and organisms are regularly relocated via ship ballasts, raw logs, and other cargo, contributing to an escalating extinction crisis. With the broad-scale introduction of such exotic pests as the Asian long-horned beetle, the global logging and building trade carries with it serious threats to public and private forests.⁸

With only four percent of the United States’ old-growth forests remaining, and wood consumption still rising, the forest products industry is resorting to the use of smaller, younger, trees each year. Quality lumber and plywood made from mature trees are being increasingly replaced by engineered products manufactured from chips and strands of adolescent or faster-growing, introduced, plantation species, bound together for strength with toxic substances that can negatively affect workers, homeowners, and habitats. The majority of chips come from virgin wood. In the southeastern United States alone, over 100 remote, high-capacity chip mills have been established within the last decade. Following 70 years of substantial regrowth in the region, the native forests are being rapidly transformed into clearcut, lunar landscapes, primarily serving the short-term interests of the global chip and paper pulp trade.⁹ What’s more, as a recent report published by The Pacific Forest Trust explains, forest industry carbon-emissions — largely the result of deforestation — are the second largest source of CO2 emissions globally. At the same time, healthy forests represent our best chance to safely sequester CO2, the most heavily emitted greenhouse gas. The authors argue that just the opposite management practices are needed to restore forest health and optimize our ability to store carbon — longer rotations, more selective cutting, and an augmented forest land base.¹⁰

Wood industry propaganda often touts the fact that there are more trees growing today than in bygone eras. In fact, the volume of timber harvests on private land outstripped tree growth throughout the 1980s and 1990s and is accelerating.¹¹ Another frequent industry claim is that industrial forestry practices, such as clearcutting, are beneficial for the forests because they mimic natural events, like fires and hurricanes, necessary for forests to regrow. These 20th century views have proven erroneous and indefensible. Most experts concur that industrial clearcuts do not generate the ecologically beneficial heat or ash that wildfires do, nor do they recreate soil conditions that often follow wind and ice storms. Fifty years of industrial logging, applying simple formulas over broad areas, has resulted in fragmented wildlife habitats, diminished water quality, the loss of heavy leaf and acorn production needed by many species, fisheries destroyed due to siltation and the loss of shade over streams. People living in forest communities realize that it’s not the quantity of trees that matters, but the health of the ecosystems and watersheds that can sustain forests (and therefore forestry) over time. Large stands of diverse, older forests are far better able to survive natural events than are fragmented, fragile areas. They are also far better at storing carbon.¹² While important initiatives are underway to safeguard natural forests, it is clear today that we can’t just have a few well-managed forests within entire zones of ecological sacrifice. Forests of the 21st century must be managed at the local level and be seamlessly connected to the larger landscape so that they can protect the breadth of biodiversity.

Wood: A Material of Choice?
Even with all of these ecologically urgent concerns of industrial forestry taken into account, it is important to emphasize that wood — sustainably managed, third party-certified, recycled, salvaged, or milled on-site — is often an appropriate material for building projects. Wood can create extremely durable structures and can require less fossil fuel energy to harvest and manufacture than many alternative materials. It can also be argued that wood building products store carbon as long as they remain in use.

There is no escaping, however, the implications of increasing human population growth coupled with intensifying global industrial development. Given our present appetite for and rampant waste of paper, packaging, and building materials, no management plans can hope to stem the overharvesting and losses of our forest ecosystems. Unless demand for forest resources is drastically reduced, we face a future far more bleak than what we know today. We face a future where a commonly asked question might be: “Is that real wood?”

Throughout the past ten years, the defense of our native forests has fallen on the shoulders of activists who often risk their lives doing the very jobs that our public officials and state and federal agencies are empowered to execute but often do not — thwarting logging practices and timber harvest plans that are ecologically destructive. With economic growth demands far outpacing the forests’ natural abilities to recover, the pressure has almost become insurmountable. Fortunately, nonviolent protest and litigation are not our only options. Architects, builders, and consumers can join the movement as well, by looking for better sources of wood, by optimizing the use of the wood we do consume, and by using alternative materials and building methods.

Lenses for Building with Vision
All buildings are endowed with some sense of vision. Building as if the forests matter requires some figurative time travel: foreseeing the impacts and outcomes of construction before the work takes place. Once underway, a construction project gathers a resource-consuming momentum all its own, like a marathon ride in a taxi cab with the meter running. The more extensive the research and advanced planning, the more control one has over the outcome. At the same time, it can be easy to dwell too much sometimes on details or one single charismatic material rather than on fundamental design issues. As the following discussion indicates, there are larger, systemic concerns at stake — such as the size of the house, its solar orientation, its operating energy needs, whether it is replacing versus remodeling a structure, its impact on the local watershed — that can be even more important than choices of materials or building methods. Details do matter, but keeping one’s sights on the building’s larger, overarching, environmental impacts, especially in the conceptual phase, is vital.

Most methods of assessing a building’s environmental impacts attempt to create a ‘life cycle analysis‘ of some sort. Such evaluations are perhaps more art than an exact science. And while there have been many attempts to create standards for what constitutes an environmentally acceptable material, a generally accepted authority is still lacking. Instead there are a few basic concepts that inform this complex decision making process.

First is the materials perspective: how and where they were sourced; whether or not any species were imperiled or ecosystems ravaged in their harvest or extraction; whether the raw materials are renewable or not; how much energy was required to produce them; whether or not they contain toxic or ozone-depleting chemicals; the effects of production, recycling, and disposal.

The amount of energy it takes to extract raw materials, transport them, then manufacture a product and install it is referred to as its embodied energy. Highly-processed standard building materials, such as steel, concrete, and aluminum, generally have a higher embodied energy than wood products. Recycled materials often (but not always) have less embodied energy than new materials. Salvaging and reusing buildings or their components and parts rather than starting again from scratch can substantially reduce the embodied energy of a building project. Moving toward natural building methods or traditional, local materials can also reduce the embodied energy of a project. Embodied energy values may even include factors like the transportation of laborers to the site.

A building’s operating energy involves the total amount of energy the building consumes in its lifetime, including the energy supplied by utilities (or locally generated power and hot water) in order to maintain it. Factors such as building size, site orientation, engineering, and quality of insulation influence operating energy.

Fortunately, some general rules of thumb can help us make good decisions. According to the Guide to Resource Efficient Building Elements, “Environmentally aware builders, designers, and homeowners can usually identify building products with relatively low embodied energy. Building components made from recycled materials or minimally processed local materials tend to have less embodied energy than building products that are highly engineered, imported, or made from virgin resources. Choosing durable building products that require little maintenance will also help builders reduce the amount of embodied energy in a structure. It is only by addressing both components of energy usage — the operating and the embodied — that Americans can reduce the vast amount of energy consumed by buildings.”¹³

Architect Larry Strain, of Siegel & Strain Architects in Emeryville, California, has developed a strategy for assessing green priorities for a given project, based on more than a decade of experience. “First we identify where the building’s biggest impact will be,” says Strain. “If it’s a wood framed house we try to use FSC-certified products and use ‘Optimum Value Engineering’ to minimize the amount of framing materials required. On slab foundations, we try to maximize the amount of fly ash we can substitute for cement, which is energy-intensive and polluting. We often look at energy performance over time, and that can lead to some counter-intuitive decisions. For example, recycled cellulose insulation may have higher manufacturing impacts than a fiberglass product, but in the end, might perform far better by limiting air infiltration. A product such as fiber-cement siding might be energy-intensive to initially produce, but it also comes with as much as a 50-year warranty, making it a long-term option over wood siding that may last only 20 years.”

Strain continues by differentiating between the priorities of a building’s interior and exterior. “Inside a building, indoor air quality comes first, followed by resource impacts and durability. We avoid at all costs using carpets because they can severely compromise indoor air quality. The whole field of green construction is a continual learning process that improves one project at a time. We increasingly find ourselves trying to figure out big picture priorities, rather than tiny details.”

Architect Gayle Borst, founder of the Austin-based firm Stewardship, Inc., chooses from a number of design options to optimize and substitute for wood. For interior partition walls, Borst regularly specifies light-gauge steel studs, autoclaved aerated concrete block or concrete block, straw board acoustical panels, or cob. Steel is also used for floor and roofing systems (with few thermal breaks) when she is not framing with certified wood studs spaced at 24 inches on center. Increasingly, Borst has been building with natural wall systems such as straw-bale, rammed earth, and cob, limiting wood to highly visible applications whenever possible. Numerous recycled wood items are incorporated into her projects as well, including salvaged doors, finger-jointed studs, and headers made from job site scrap.

Size Matters: Small, Tall, and Anti-Sprawl
Regardless of how thoughtful we are about materials or construction techniques, one of the best ways to minimize all of a building’s environmental impacts is by designing smaller, more durable spaces. The average house size doubled between 1950 and 1990, with a present average of nearly 800 square feet of living space per person. Even while family size is diminishing, the floor area of new homes keeps growing. More than any other factor, square footage rather than quality or environmental impact defines the desirability and cost of development in virtually every real estate market in the country. Remnant woodlots, open space, and rural communities are the victims of this space and sprawl orgy.

Beyond environmental arguments, there are some obvious advantages to downsizing. The budget for durable materials and finishes can be upgraded, as can the fee for an architect to craft intelligent and utilitarian spaces. Building smaller can also potentially ease financial burdens, either by lightening the mortgage or by reducing heating and cooling costs over the life of the building. Small is not by definition always beautiful or material-efficient, however. A poorly designed small house can backfire, increasing stress and clutter. Increasing the complexity of the building design, particularly the perimeter, can also boost material use and labor cost.

Luckily, an increasing number of articles and books are appearing to chart these waters and offer many design tricks worthy of mention. Generous outdoor living spaces, such as covered porches, patios, gardens, and cooking areas, are one way to make smaller homes less restrictive and create usable space without excessive infrastructure and finishing. Inside, a number of moves can be made to give the illusion of big space in a small area, such as high ceilings and varied ceiling heights, incorporating subtle elevation changes to accentuate the differences between rooms. Creating built-in window seats, sleeping alcoves or lofts, sliding doors, bookshelves, and benches can also provide functional bonuses that make small living spaces more dynamic.

While building smaller homes is garnering increasing attention, perhaps an even more urgent need is to contain sprawling development. After all, even ‘green’ sprawl carves into vanishing open spaces, bringing with it roads, public services, and other infrastructure. While designing smaller homes is important, building taller structures in dense urban areas helps to contain construction impacts. Many resources in this book are suitable for multi-story buildings. Denser urban development can also be built to high standards of quality and aesthetics, as well as offering residents access to more amenities than sprawling suburbs do.

Projecting A Vision
What is the vision that this book sends out to the realm of residential builders? That the building of our homes becomes more responsive to our communities and regional resource bases. That the buildings we design and construct today truly merit their environmental costs many years from now, by enduring not just decades but centuries, by being totally recyclable, by optimizing the resources they do consume, or even by being made of materials that will innocuously return to the earth. That we continue to delve deeper into these complex issues and find ways, within every construction project, to build as if all forests mattered.

Notes
¹ Tracy Mumma, Guide to Resource Efficient Building Elements, 102.
² Lester Walker, American Shelter, 17.
³ Steve Chappell, The Alternative Building Sourcebook, 8.
⁴ “Clearcutting in Your National Forests?” Turning Point Project advertisement, New York Times, September 27, 1999.
⁵ Kathryn Kohm and Jerry Franklin, eds., Creating a Forestry for the 21st Century, 3.
⁶ Thomas Spies, “Forest Stand Structure, Composition, and Function,” Creating a Forestry for the 21st Century, 12.
⁷ Tracy Mumma, Resource Efficient Building Elements, 106.
⁸ “Warning—Bioinvasion,” Turning Point Project advertisement, New York Times, September 20, 1999.
⁹ Dennis Haldeman, letter to the editor, Environmental Building News, July/August 1997.
¹⁰ Laurie Wayburn, et. al., Forest Carbon in the United States: Opportunities and Options for Private Lands, 16.
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² Ibid.
¹³ Tracy Mumma, Resource Efficient Building Elements, 108.