McMansion under construction by merfam

Remember when people where trending on such topics as “downsizing” and “simple living?”  It seems like just yesterday.  With untold McMansions listing in their weed-infested suburbs across the U.S. it would seem that the time was indeed ripe for reason to reenter our housing market and smaller footprints and more practical usage of square footage to be valued and rewarded.  The only problem is that downsizing is easy to talk about and hard to do.

American’s love things big.  As my wife and I have listed our 4 bed 3 bath, 1990 sq. ft. home in SLC for sale we have discovered that it is too small to demand top dollar (in our current crappy homes market).  I thought such a home would be ideal for all the people who have been talking about downsizing from their 3,000 sq. ft. 3 bed and 3 bath houses.  But, apparently there aren’t any such people.  What there are, are people who are looking for their first home and finding that 2,000 sq. ft. just isn’t big enough.

Redonculous.  Undergirding current U.S. home sales, or lack of them, is a symptom of our addiction to size.  Appraisers and Realtors still evaluate homes by dollar per sq. ft.  I realize this is a handy little tool to come up with a quick and dirty estimate of a home’s value.  But seriously.  Any builder can come up with stupid ways to waste square footage in order to drop this ratio.  The 1990’s stand as proof.  For decades now U.S. homes have attempted to find all sorts of ways to bloat themselves just for the sake of bloatage – no practical use at all.

I design a home with practical and usable spaces, small bedrooms, custom-built closets and multi-use family spaces and it gets undervalued in the market because it doesn’t waste space well enough.  Realtors advise their clients to steer clear, because after all, they can find a home with more square footage for the same price.  And we all know that bigger is better.  Well, my family’s is about to experience a gypsy’s square footage, if we can ever sell this just less than 2,000 sq. ft. house.  Maybe I’ll add a 1,000 sq. ft dirt room on the back.

Yeti by Philippe Semeria

The only question in regards to the death of the current green enthusiasm is, “Will the new green fad die via popular adoption, or via wholesale abandonment?”  Well, I guess this is the first question, not the only.  The second one would be, “What will green living look like when it is either abandoned or adopted?”

An intelligent reader (I know you are out there!) would of course respond, “Well, economical solutions will be adopted while unrealistic and utopian greening will be abandoned.”  And while making sense, this sort of reasoning with the American people is redonculous at best and dangerous madness at worst.  Just look at corn ethanol, still going strong all these years despite its fairly wide-known economic unfeasibility.  And we all know that the milk of the female Yeti could be a financial boon for holistic medicine if someone would just put in the hard work to create a Yeti milking program, or at least learn to synthesize the stuff.

All good fads come to an end.  Bad ones sometimes uncannily remain, but good ones, they always end.  Some of these fads become the next compact disc or Garth Brooks Juice Tiger juice diet – loved and embraced by all, effectively ending the fad.  Compact fluorescent bulbs have reached this level in the green world.  LED’s are currently still just a fad, but they may reduce CFL’s to vinyl status eventually.

On the other hand, some fads fade away like goldfish shoes and Scientology (ouch! I am such a insensitive jerk.  Luckily, jerkiness is hear to stay.)  Within the green living movement there will certainly be many such fads that never cut the mustard. (Mmmm, green mustard…)  A list of undecideds include smart home meters, ERVs (energy recovery ventilators), urban chicken coops, hemp diapers, anti-polyethylene-terephthalate and/or polycarbonate mania, cloth shopping bags, not wasting water on Kentucky Bluegrass in Utah, and duel-flush toilets.

New technologies are sexy, and they can make going green seem Hollywood.  Getting a green app for your iPhone can be a breathless affair, but this is all a bunch of who cares in the end.  Sure LED lights, if made affordably and practically, could once again radically alter energy consumption from structural lighting.  But so could turning off the lights when you don’t need them.  So why is it that buying flashy new bulbs is hip while insisting on turning off unused lights is totally fuddy-duddy?

I, for one, think that this latest fad of green living will actually die a death of wide-spread adoption.  It will no longer be a fad due to being mainstreamed more than forgotten or ignored.  While this makes my dirty, hairy toes all tingly with excitement like a cool squish in the mud on a hot day, I also fear it may not matter much in the end.  If the lasting heritage of this round of green living includes only a smattering of genuine technological innovations clumped together with a bunch of persisting yet questionable green devices, then who cares?  Really?

Behaviors have to change and Yeti’s must be milked if this new green fad is to become anything that will matter in the end.  If only our behavior would truly be driven by economic sustainability and a rational passion for sustainable free-markets, then we might see some wonderfully amazing and surprisingly simple ideas.  These could include wasting less, workable new energy sources, sweatshop-free labor, more shared-space and less consumer-product redundancy (a TV in every room and a lawn mower in every garage).

It ain’t sexy, but it would be a future enhanced by the fad.

The Harris Tweed Shop

The textile and clothing industry, like every industry, has been facing the green facts.  Cotton, the big fiber on the block, is taking its hits. Being half granola and half redneck myself I can feel both sides of the issue.  My father and grandfather supported themselves with cotton, yet I like to strut around in nothing but hemp.  Good enough.

But as it turns out, cotton makes wonderfully soft and affordable clothing while using relatively high levels of chemicals, resources from the soil and lots of water (during growth and processing).  But, if we know all this about cotton, why do we still wear so much of it, and more importantly, why do we keep so much more of it hanging in our closets and tucked into our dressers?  Most of us keep buying clothes as if we intend to throw away a brand new green suit once it gets its first bit of pheasant blood on it.  Sheesh.

Once again, we can learn something here from our Redneck brothers (I’m not so sure about sisters).  Rednecks are particular about their clothing.  It has to be functional and affordable.  And now, I’m not making light.  These are two very serious considerations in clothing that I am not so sure civil folk understand.  For a redneck shopper these two dueling forces create a dilemma kin with taming the jackalope.

Functional means the garment of clothing should work properly for many, many a donning.  Working properly means a variety of things such as holding dead quail, repelling manure of various forms, and at a picnic being able to transition from cowboy volleyball to goat roping to neckin’ on a blanket (the ideal date, by the way) all the while disguising the discreet bear belly.  Many, many a donning of an article of clothing implies that the owner of said article can’t quite recall its purchase.

And all of this has to come at a redneck value, and rednecks know value.  Jeans that tear the first time you cross a barbed-wire fence ain’t no value.  Fireworks that can’t even blow up a mailbox ain’t no value.  And a beer that can’t make life look better certainly ain’t of no value.  Clothing is to render its promised service, to cloth the naked form and allow said form to function in an hostile environment without suffering undue harm.

A brand name isn’t worth anything more than that very promise of function.  A redneck might pay considerably to attain that function, but too much, and the brand risks looking disingenuous.  Because, after all, Adam and Eve got on just fine in the raw, and if it comes down to it, I reckon I can to.  And that is the bottom line, isn’t it?  Clothes should serve a function, and if style happens to be a derivative of that function, then fine.  But no self-respecting redneck would be caught dead with a closet full of brand names knowing he came into the world, and he would go out, in nothing but his God-given birthday suit.

U Car Share provides another alternative, alongside riding a bike or taking a bus, to individual car ownership.  This sort of thing has been going on for years in romantic locals such as McMinnville, Berkeley, Portland and Madison.  But, alas, I have never lived in any of those places.  I do, however, live in Salt Lake City.  Thus I should be thrilled to have access to car sharing.  Yeah!  Woohoo.  Yep.  Hizzaa.  Woopty doo.

I just can’t think of a reason to use it.  I get it.  I do.  I just ain’t excited.  Bear with my math.  My wife and I pay roughly $4000 to $5000 a year to own, maintain and fuel (this includes the 8,000 we paid for it divided over the period of time we have owned it) our only car, a Honda Civic.  With the current rates for U Car Share I could share a similar car for about 8 to 10 hours a week (depending on how many miles/gallons I drove it) for around the same $5000 a year.

We live about 4 blocks (like 8 normal city blocks) from the nearest U Car Share drop-off and pick-up point.  So, we could sell our car and drive nice, new U-Share cars for up to 10 hours a week instead and still pay the same amount of money.  Cool, huh?  Huh.  O.K.  both my wife and I work on the nearby University campus, where there are also pick-up and drop-off points.  So, we could use the car in the morning (after a brisk 12 minute walk) and leave it on campus.  Then we could take it home again in the evening.  But one of us would need to take our son, and we might not leave at the same time, or one of us would need to come back.  But maybe one of us would just stay home with the kid anyway.  So one hour twice a day for 5 days to get to campus.  That is our ten hours.

Nah, we would just take the bus or trax to do that.  So, what about shopping?  Going out to eat?  Visiting friends?  Driving up into the mountains for a hike?  I just don’t get using the U Car Share program for any of these.  If I wasn’t so lazy I would just be riding my bike around for most of this anyway.

You say, “Hey, jerk.  This car sharing stuff isn’t meant for people like you — young, urbanite, granola couples with adopted children and too busy trying to simplify in order to care.”  O.K.  who is it for then?  Well, maybe students for one.  Afterall, why should students park their car coffins on campus just to collect dust while they exercise their minds in ways to save the future?  But when I was a student I wouldn’t have paid $15 dollars to share a car and drive to Walmart when I could have ridden the light-rail system for free, or just borrowed a friend’s car.

I don’t know, maybe I am a big jerk.  Maybe my searing hatred for U-haul is blinding me to their non-profit grubbing, earth-saving ways.  Now that my city finally has a car share program I just can’t care.

Orvis is the only clothing store with a website that sells hemp pants in size 34×34 for men.  I know.  A powerful statement made by a man wearing cannabis crafted clothing, but true.  Nowhere else could I find my coveted pants.  Orvis had two colors to chose from in 3 different inseams and several waist sizes.

Outdoorsmen and farmers have known for over a hundred years that hemp makes a durable yet breathable pair of pants — pants you can do real work in.  This is something many granolas apparently don’t know about.  While they sit around in yoga poses wearing their drawstring, high-water pants, I am sitting in my cushy, office chair in my durable, work-capable hemp pants.  And you know what, I might go do some real work when the weather warms up.

For now, I’ve got more NFL playoffs to attend to, and I’m glad I know I can rely on my new hemp pants to keep me cheering in style.  For now, Granolas are down 7 to 0 against Outdoorsmen.  If you would like to join me wearing the only pair of sustainable Hemp pants available on-line click here.

Good new desert dwellers.  Although Utah is the second driest state in the U.S. (Nevada

Wyoming's Red Desert by Sam Cox

being the first) we don’t let that get us down.  We still have the second highest use of water per capita.  Nothing beats back the summer heat like a tall glass of cold water while you wash your car in the driveway at the same time your automated, leaky irrigation system waters your Kentucky Bluegrass lawn during the middle of the day.  Ahhh, refreshing.  And as long as there is an increasing amount of snow in the mountains every winter ad infinitum, we won’t ever get our comeuppance.  No comeuppance, you here me!

St. George is located in the driest county in Utah and it has the highest per capita water consumption rate for an desert city in the U.S. at 335 gallons per person per day.  Yeahaw!  Now, I realize that it is of dire importance to all of us to keep those golf greens in St. George green, but explain that to a land that just can’t support such water usage.  But what to do?

Over 100 years ago water in Utah became a for-profit commodity.  Along with that came government subsidies historically around 50%.  All of this means that Utah has some of the cheapest water prices in the country, and this in the second driest state in the Union.  Common sense? or a disaster waiting to happen? or a disaster in progress?

Utah has been growing in population consistently for many years, and yet somewhere in the neighborhood of 87% of our water goes to agriculture.  Farmers are important to our state, no doubt.  But the crops that we grow, and the manner that we grow them in this state have to change.

The Utah Rivers Council promotes raising our conservation goal by 5% up to a 30% increase total.  While realistic, this goal doesn’t strike me as sufficient.  The Council has also been promoting practical steps like the “rip your strip” initiative.  Water Wise Utah is promoting the use of an on-line water calculator.  Utah needs much more severe legislation, using a creative combination of carrots and sticks, and a smarter, better educated public.  But ultimately, Utahans simply haven’t cared enough about their precious water resources while living in a desert.

So we may not be as screwed as the Spartans were when it came to the battle of Thermopylae, but we aren’t helping our cause any by sitting around on our methane exuding asses.  I mean come on.  McKibben wrote his first book on Global Warming 20 years ago when it was still a farce.  Now, the enemy of our indeference and affluence has loomed much nearer, and we need to respond.

Now before you cast off into the world of finger-pointing and accusation saying, “China! China and India! Those bastards.  What can we do?”  or even, “Belize! Those slash and burn maggots!” It is time to take some of our own medicine.  Here in the grand ole U.S. of A. we consume more carbon emitting energy per capita than anyone else on the planet.  I know.  Even more than the tea swilling Brits.  Americans pump off twice as much carbon per person than Europeans do and four times more than the Chinese.

Yes, we are going to need China and India to back off on their mad quest to follow in our footsteps.  Yes we will need small-fry countries around the world to stand up against us and the other developed countries to defend the last vital remaining resources in the world.  But we will also need to use hand-cranked espresso machines in the morning, and learn to grow some hemp under a strategically placed shade screen in the back yard.  (Note to DEA:  I don’t grow hemp under a shade screen in my back yard.  I don’t have a shade screen, or a backyard.  I promise.)

We have been world leaders in Global Warming so far.  Why stop now?  350, prepare for glory!

For now I leave you to ponder the ultimate sustainability in clothing… the loincloth.  But wait.  It gets even better.  A loincloth made from hemp.  You heard it here first.

I keep wondering when the “lease revolution” is going to take hold for the individual consumer?  But alas, the stigma of “leasing is for the least” seems to be clinging to our culture like stank on the unshaved armpits of a female U of M (Montana) graduate.

Part of this could be due to the fact that the only two real players in the consumer leasing business are Rent-a-Center and Aaron’s.  And RAC seems to be doing more payday loans and high price rentals that anything.  I’m still a little foggy about what Aaron’s actually does.  Both stores are mysterious via website.

I realize that leasing has been going gangbusters in the corporate world for over 40 years in the U.S., starting off its big kick with IBM and Xerox.  But I keep thinking that it should become mainstream to rent washers and dryers and computers and T.V.s any day now.  It certainly would encourage sustainability.

Currently the manufacturing and consuming models in the U.S. involve producing lots of crappy, “low-price” merchandise with big mark ups and expensive extended warranties that will presumably break down and have to be completely replaced within a few years.  Besides being really annoying if you desire a quality product, this model is the worst possible when it comes to sustainability.  It uses maximum resources for manufacturing, transportation and maintenance.

But it seems next to impossible to find even a single appliance available to me locally that I can lease without ever intending to own.  It seems like it would be a win, win, win (for the producer, consumer and the earth) for me to lease a quality product at a consistent monthly price for which I would never have to worry about repair.  This arrangement would save me hassle, provide the producer a more steady income to survive manic induced capitalist freak-outs (otherwise known as recessions), and the earth would be spared having to birth and subsume multiple crappy consumer goods.  So get out the soap, Granola Girl.  It’s time to wash off the stank.

To continue my theme on blemishes within the American Dream that hinder sustainability I thought I would turn to a nurturing image in celebration of Mother’s Day.  I know, so sentimental.  Anyway, the problem here in the USA is not that our breasts are shriveled and dry (if only they were), rather the problem is that we suck at the wrong tits (if sustainability is what we seek.  And it isn’t, but it should be.).You see, the Mother’s Milk of consumerism comes from the twin breasts of repetition and redundancy.  For survival we need to buy a new car every two years and a new computer every 18 months.  We need every family to own multiple cars, a washer and dryer, a lawn mower, a foot massager, an oven, microwave oven, toaster oven and grill.  When was the last time a company was rewarded for reducing the number of items we need or the frequency of which we purchase them?  Don’t even get me going on the need for extended warranties (again).

Occasionally one product or service replaces the need for another, like my cell phone has replaced my land line.  But, I still need to buy a new cell phone every year or two (and amazingly this isn’t because I loose them or drop them.  They just suck.).  At least my old phone that used to sit on my desk worked for several years.

So basically we can’t share, and our industries build stuff to break and be replaced.  These two basic realities have fattened us for the last couple of decades until we have reach super-sized proportions.  Now we have high blood pressure and bad cholesterol.  Somehow we need to find healthier milk to sustain us.  We need to suck from the breasts of community and quality.  If we could learn to share redundant goods in community and reward industries that create quality goods (perhaps by broadening a lease system)  we could continue to grow big and strong in a sustainable fashion.  But first American society is going to have to be weened away from the milk of waste.