Your Ecological House Part 1: Understanding Your Home Ecosystem

Section 1: What Is an Ecological House?

Introduction: The ecological house concept

Why is the series of newspaper columns republished in this book named Your Ecological House? Why isn't it called Your Environmentally-Friendly House, Living in a Green House or even This Old Sustainable House? For that matter, what makes an ecological house different from a solar house, an energy-efficient house or a house that blends in well with its natural environment?

As it turns out, there's a story behind the ecological house concept: it grew out of the San Francisco Institute of Architecture's (SFIA) Ecological Design Program which I helped create and directed for more than a decade beginning in the early 1990s. That program, and the concept of ecological design that underpinned its curriculum, was the product of a fundamental reassessment of all previous assumptions about the purpose and function of architecture, consruction and city and regional planning.

At SFIA, the reassessment process began when three fellow students and I met to brainstorm the contents of the Ecological Design Program's very first course and quickly discovered that we were unsure what it was that we proposed to teach. Sustainability was the watchword of that era — the United Nations was promoting the concept of sustainable development — and we knew that we wanted to create a course in sustainable architecture.

But what did that mean? What made a building sustainable? (At the time, we were mostly concerned with individual buildings rather than communities, cities or regional planning.) Should a sustainable building be made with durable materials such as stone or concrete that would last for generations, saving the economic and environmental costs of building it again? Or should it be made of less durable but more readily renewable materials such as wood and bamboo?

How should a sustainable house relate to its environment? Should it be off grid, that is, disconnected from the electrical grid and self-sufficient? Should it be small and have a minimal footprint (ground coverage)? Should it even be a single-family house, or would the sustainable habitats of the future be multi-unit dwellings?

There are, of course, no single, simple answers to these questions. As the discussion continued — both on that first evening of brainstorming and during the following years as the program grew from a single course into a series of interrelated courses — one thing became clear: a building could not be considered in isolation, but only in its social, historical and especially its environmental context. A sustainable building's design is determined by its purpose and the resources that are available for creating it, but most of all by its relationship to its larger context: whether it is on or off the grid, a building is a component of its environment, part of a larger system.

What kind of system? An ecosystem, or course — and that applies whether the building is in a natural or an urban setting — by the side of a lake or on a busy city street. For it is ecosystems on all scales — ranging from local wetlands to the global biosphere — that we are trying to preserve by creating sustainable architecture. We are sustaining the planet, not just our buildings and our civilization, because civilization will soon cease to exist if the planet is not managed sustainably — all that will be left of our sustainable architecture is the empty, deteriorating shells of our buildings.

Ecosystems, not cells or organisms as has generally been supposed, are the fundamental organizing structure of life. That's because no cell or organism can long survive without the "ecosystem services" that its ecosystem provides. Those services include the storage of solar energy in usable form (food), the removal of toxic wastes and their reduction to nontoxic substances, climate control and so on. In isolation, without these services, the individual organism or species perishes, and fails to pass on its DNA to the next generation.

During the 3.6 billion years that life has existed on this planet, millions upon millions of species have come into existence and gone extinct, only to be replaced by others. But their replacements fill the same roles in ecosystems as their predecessors did: They were (and still are) food producers (plants); food consumers, both herbivores (animals that eat plants) and carnivores (animals that eat animals); and decomposers, organisms that break down waste products and dead tissue and make it into chemical components that plants can use for food, completing the nutrient cycle. (Or, in ecological design terms, closing the loop.)

So it is not the individual species, but these roles, these relationships, that have remained constant, have been sustainable since life first appeared on the earth. The dinosaurs, the plants that fed them and most of the organisms that decomposed them came and went, but new species in the same producer, consumer and decomposer roles emerged in the age of mammals. Indeed, the persistence of those roles made the age of mammals possible.

So the natural ecosystem, my fellow students and I gradually realized, was our model for sustainable development and sustainable architecture. If we could base the design of human systems on the functional relationships of natural ecosystems — essentially by capturing, storing and recycling solar energy — we could design habitats, ranging from individual houses to communities and cities to bioregional developments, that would be more self-sustaining and have less of a negative impact on the planet.

How would those systems work in practice? While there are as many possible designs as there are problems to solve, adherence to the ecosystem model must be the underlying principle in every case. Translated into less abstract, more familiar terms, we should always strive to design systems that "reduce, reuse and recycle."

All living systems, and all systems designed to support living beings, require energy — and almost all natural ecosystems are driven by solar energy. Plants (producers) gather the sun's energy and use it to build energy-storing molecules and the building blocks of their own structures which are optimized for efficiency and therefore reduce extraneous development and energy expenditure; ecosystems conserves energy because they reuse those molecules, and the energy that’s stored in them, and pass them along to insects, animals and birds (consumers), in the form of food; and, once the consumers extract most of the available energy from the food molecules, the ecosystem's decomposers break down their waste (and their carcasses) into simplified, relatively low-energy chemicals that, with the help of more solar energy, can be recycled into new plant tissue. The individual organisms do their part to sustain the system which, in turn, sustains them.

It is easy to see how the ecosystem model can be used as a guideline for designing, or redesigning a city. The city should capture as much of its own energy, on its own land, as practicable. (Every city has at least some access to sunlight — some have a superabundance of solar energy.) It should conserve the energy it captures through the intelligent design and operation of its components such as buildings, transportation systems and outdoor spaces. It should grow as much of its own food as possible, and recycle its organic waste for growing more food. Thus, it can reduce its impact on the wider environment and become more self-sufficient, sustainable and resilient.

How can these same principles be applied to the design, refurbishing and maintenance of your house? That is the subject of this book.

NOTES

...San Francisco Institute of Architecture's (SFIA)... See Resources for this section.

...three fellow students and I met to brainstorm... The other three founders of the Ecological Design Program were Dave Deppen, an architect, Steve McCoy, a builder and Cloud Porteus, then an architecture student and later a successful software architect. We began our brainstorming session by spreading a collection of books on solar buildings on the floor of Steve's living room to see what ideas they might engender. Most of the books were written two decades before, in the 1970s, as there hadn’t been much updating of the available material since then. It was our job to write a new chapter in the history of ecological design.

Along with the ongoing contributions of its four founders, the Ecological Design Program benefited from the contributions of many creative individuals. Most were in the design and building professions, of course, but among our teachers and lecturers we also had an urban ecologist, permaculturist, geologist, map maker, the principle architect of the Biosphere II project, a dog trainer and even the director of an organic gardening program for prison inmates. From these varied experts we learned, among other things, that the ecological design of a building and the environmentally-friendly behavior of its occupants — living a sustainable lifestyle — went hand in hand

...series of interrelated courses... Eventually the program included a classes called "Biospherics" based on the operating principles that guided the design of the Biosphere II project in Arizona; Principles of Ecological Design, an overview of the field; the Ecological Design Studio (practicum); Urban Ecology, a course in environmentally sensitive city planning; "Permaculture" (see definition in Glossary); an ongoing series of weekly guest lectures and occasional short seminars by experts in ecology and different aspects of design.

"…ecosystem services…" See Glossary.

...In isolation, without these services, the organism or species perishes... Environmentalists have long recognized that the preservation of species is dependent on the preservation of their habitat. See article 5.10, Yard by Darwin -- building backyard biodiversity.

"…bioregional…" See Glossary.

...reduce, reuse and recycle. See Glossary.

...almost all natural ecosystems are driven by solar energy. Some ecosystems, mostly in the deep sea, derive their primary energy from the heat of thermal vents. However, these represent a tiny portion of the earth's many ecosystems, and the biomass they support is minuscule compared to the earth’s overall biomass. Also, although they do not derive their energy from the sun, these ecosystems have the same producer-consumer-decomposer structure as their solar-driven counterparts.

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1.1

What is an ecological house?

Do you want to live in an environmentally friendly house, but wonder what that really means? Does your house have to be loaded with expensive green gadgetry, or built with recycled tires? Is it practical to retrofit your existing house to make it more green? Will your new eco features help the environment, or are they just more stuff to consume — trendy, but ultimately damaging to the planet?

Though there is no single, set definition of an environmentally friendly house it's critical to think about what you're trying to accomplish before beginning any projects. I've found the concept of the ecological house — new or retrofitted, big or small — useful for determining project goals.

An ecological house is modeled on the energy and material flows of natural ecosystems, and thus enhances rather than degrades the environment. Like an ecosystem, an ecological house conserves resources (energy, water, food and materials). It also produces resources, or at least gathers and stores more of them than it uses. The extra resources are distributed back into the larger environment to support life elsewhere.

A standard house, by contrast, is a resource sink. Life's necessities flow into it, are dissipated or degraded until useless, and are dumped off into the environment, sometimes as toxic waste. The flow is unidirectional, from source to sink to waste.

1.1 HUMAN and NATURAL SYSTEMS: In natural ecosystems energy is conserved through the recycling of nutrients which contain embodied energy captured from the sun. In most human systems, energy is wasted as resources are not reused or recycled. An ecological house mimics nature by recycling or reusing as much food, water and material as possible.

In an ecosystem, and in an ideal ecological house, there is no waste because the resource flow is circular. Like houses, ecosystems import energy — mostly solar energy in their case. Unlike standard houses, however, ecosystems store their energy and reuse it. It's stored first as plant biomass (tissue), which is eventually distributed as food to the ecosystems' myriad consumers of plants. Further, and this is the real key to the sustainability of ecosystems, the stored energy continues to circulate, as exchanged nutrients, until it makes its way back to the plants. In the scenario known to every sixth grader, plants make animal food and animals make plant food.

1.2 ENERGY FLOWS IN NATURAL SYSTEMS: This extremely simplified diagram shows the basic producer/consumer/decomposer relationship that has helped sustain life on earth for 3.6 billion years. Mimicking this sustainable system in human habitations systems on all scales — from houses to cities — can conserve significant amounts of resources and energy.

Ecologists and ecological designers describe this behavior of ecosystems as the closing of nutrient loops. By contrast human habitation systems — from cities to houses — typically create one-way energy and material flows, leaving loops open. Ecosystems unconsciously practice the reduce, reuse, recycle dictum and have sustained themselves for billions of years. Human systems have been around for only a million years or so, and might not exist much longer if they don't start conforming to nature's rule that nothing is wasted, that waste equals food.

How can you mimic nature and close a loop at your house? One way is to compost your food scraps and use them to grow a garden. The standard, open-loop approach to consuming food eliminates nutrient-rich scraps as waste, which requires energy in the form of a gas guzzling garbage truck for disposal. If you turn your unused organic material into plant food and use the sun's energy to produce human food, you've closed a loop and reduced your family's demands on the larger environment.

1.3. OPEN or ONE-WAY FOOD CONSUMPTION PATH

1.4 CLOSING FOOD CONSUMPTION LOOPS

As well as circulating nutrients internally, ecosystems contribute to life in their region and the biosphere by releasing unused food, water and minerals into their surroundings at appropriate times. Similarly, a home ecosystem can redistribute a resource such as gray water — for example, shower water, which is clean enough for certain types of reuse — and store that water in plant tissue, say, in fruit trees grown on the property.

At harvest time, some of the water is circulated back to your family as fruit, closing a local loop, and some is evaporated by the trees (transvaporation) into the atmospheres for healthy recirculation (as opposed to unhealthy and energy-intensive treatment of your shower water in a sewage plant). When the trees lose their leaves in the fall, they dry up, releasing more water into the air. The dried leaves, of course, can be used as compost and mulch for next year's vegetable garden.

There are endless possibilities for creating intertwined closed loops in your home ecosystem. Using nutrients from your yard, you can profitably grow products ranging from hardwoods, bamboo and herbs to exotic fish. Your house can produce more electrical energy than your family uses and direct the excess to environmentally benign applications, such as heating a food-producing greenhouse in winter. Or, you can feed the public utility grid for credit toward your monthly electric bill.

Ecosystems can be used as models when approaching any problem in ecological design. For example, optimizing a house's life cycle — the amount of energy and material needed to create the building, its ongoing demand on the environment and its final disposal — can be facilitated by observing how ecosystems use local resources and recycle their chemical materials.

Of course, it's important to understand that ecosystem function is a model or guideline for ecological design, not a formula. We should try to incorporate the principles by which ecosystems organize themselves and function into our designs, not slavishly copy every relationship or characteristic of a given bioregional ecosystem or the adaptations of its organisms to their particular environment.

By understanding the general structure of ecosystems, and the particular ways that structure is expressed and adapted to by the organisms in your locale — hot or cold, wet or dry — you'll find that nature herself is your best guide to designing and living in your ecological house.

Notes

...built with recycled tires... [From Wikipedia] An Earthship is a type of passive solar house made of natural and recycled materials (such as earth-filled tires), designed and marketed by Earthship Biotecture of Taos, New Mexico. See Resources for Section 1, article 1.1.

...an ecological house conserves resources... mostly by storing them in its biomass, the living tissue of its plants, animals, people and other organisms. (Passive solar houses also store heat energy from the sun.) However, just as a healthy ecosystem can also be thought to conserve a resource such as water for its own use, for example by protecting soil moisture beneath a forest floor littered with leaves, a household can mulch its property to conserve soil moisture.

...It also produces resources... In the vast majority of ecosystems, plants are the primary producers: using sunlight and simple, inorganic chemicals, they manufacture more complicated chemicals which store energy. That energy is released when these chemicals are broken down in the food metabolizing process by the plants themselves (producers), animals that eat them (consumers) or organisms that break down their dead flesh (decomposers). (See Illustration 1.2.) Houses can produce resources such as electricity from solar panels, used on site or exported to the grid, or other products such as food, wood from trees and so on.

...waste equals food. This is short for the waste of one organism becomes the food of another. For example, a grazing animal drops manure onto a field; soil organisms and bacteria eat that manure and decompose it into simplified chemical components, which in turn become their waste products, excreted into the soil; those chemicals, along with carbon dioxide from the air, are taken up by plants as the food from which they build their tissue (biomass); the plants are then eaten by grazing animals which return the unused portions, the waste, to the soil in the form of manure.

...a resource such as 'gray water'... See article 4.4, Why gray water is green.

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1.2

Should I build new or retrofit?

When we think of an ecological house, we usually get a picture of a shining new edifice made from straw bales, adobe or experimental materials, complete with solar electric panels and a high-tech heating system. Perhaps the building has an unusual shape, resembling a dome or a crystal, or is built underground. To many, their ideal eco house is just a bit outside of a city, away from civilization's annoyances but replete with every modern convenience.

It all sounds great, until we contemplate the price — and the cost to the environment — of building such a house. If affordability and being really green, as opposed to trendy green, are considerations, I'll argue that no matter how environmentally correct its architecture, building a new house, especially in a remote location, will always have a greater negative impact on your budget and the environment than retrofitting an existing home.

It's obvious why a custom, high-tech home on an ideal lot would be expensive. Less often discussed are the detrimental effects of land use and the infrastructure required for the new building — usurped farm land or forest, felled trees, rerouted drainage, new roads, wires, pipes, wells and septic systems.

Also, if your house is out of town you'll have to commute, at least for supplies and probably to work. Unless you plan to walk or ride a bicycle, which becomes less practical as the distance increases, choosing to commute, even in the most fuel-efficient automobile, is choosing to impose an extra burden on the environment.

Added to the location and infrastructure issues is the simple fact that new homes have a lot more embodied energy — the total amount of energy and materials required to create them — than retrofitted existing homes. Even if an existing home needs to grow to accommodate an expanding family, adding a couple bedrooms is far less taxing on the environment, and your pocketbook, than building a house from scratch. And although converting a standard home into an ecological house ideally would be finished in one fell swoop, adding insulation, solar panels, gray water systems and other eco-friendly features to a house is straightforward, and can be done in affordable