The Nature of a House: Building a World that Works

By George M. Woodwell

Is it possible for a group of the world’s most respected environmental scientists to truly practice what they preach? Can their expertise in climate change help them in transforming an old house and its nine acres into their new office building and campus—a building that is as energy efficient as possible, uses local materials, and generates all of the energy it consumes? In this candid, charming, and informative book, the director of the renowned Woods Hole Research Center tells a story that will interest anyone who has ever thought about doing a “green” rehab, has tried to build green, or just wonders what’s actually possible.
 
The Woods Hole Research Center is an international leader in identifying the causes and consequences of environmental change. When the WHRC needed a new administration building, its scientists and staff decided that the building should utilize “state-of-the-shelf” green building techniques and materials. However, the new office had to conform with the laws and building codes of the time, and with materials that were then available—no matter how frustrating these requirements were to the resident scientists and contractors.
 
The author, George M. Woodwell, founder of the WHRC, was intimately involved in the design and construction of the Gilman Ordway Campus, which was completed in 2003 in collaboration with McDonough + Partners. He details the challenges they faced, some of which are familiar to everyone who tries to “build green”: the vagaries of building codes, the whims of inspectors, the obstreperousness of subcontractors, the search for appropriate materials, and the surprises involved in turning an old house into a modern office building.
 
Woodwell puts the building in a larger context, not only within the work of the Center and the tradition of Woods Hole, but in the global need to minimize our carbon emissions and overall environmental impact. Building a world that works requires rethinking how we design, reuse, and live in the built environment while preserving the functional integrity of the landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jun 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781610911375

Book preview

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PREFACE

A Small Matter of Habitat and Housing

Cassandra sits in high places today.

—John Sloan Dickey, President of Dartmouth College,

addressing the Great Issues course in 1950

I undertake this writing more than fifty-five years after hearing John Sloan Dickey discuss with graduates of Dartmouth College the hazards of life in the new political context of a nuclear-armed world, then only five years old. We have not outlived the nuclear threat, but we have survived it. We have survived to encounter an additional set of biophysical environmental challenges that are in fact far worse than threats. They are transitions in the earth’s systems that systematically undermine the human habitat even as human numbers and needs for resources soar. The threat of a nuclear Armageddon continues, worse in many ways for the spread of weapons into the hands of rogue states, combined with the emergence of new rogues from once responsible states. But, so far, it remains a threat, not a reality, despite the periodic eruption of irresponsibility among the nuclear-armed nations. In contrast, the erosion of the global human habitat has become reality and scientists now recognize that, unless we can make drastic changes immediately in this fossil fuel–powered civilization, we shall find ourselves quickly, year-by-year, on a new, increasingly unstable and hostile planet, a disaster no less final than the nuclear Armageddon we have feared for so long.

Even that thought, simple as it seems, has had a long gestation and will be developed further as experience accumulates from experiments such as the one described here as the Woods Hole Research Center explored how well it could do during the very first years of the new millennium in constructing its new campus within the famous scientific community of Woods Hole. It is not adaptation to an irreversibly eroding environment. It is a cure, boiling up from the bottom with all the optimism and vigor of science. Not muddling through, but actively reaching for a big step into the new world we have to envision and build. We are not alone in envisioning a major transition in human affairs, but our emphasis, in contrast to the social and political stirring that Hawken has defined so eloquently,¹ is on the biophysical core and keeping it functional.

1

BUILDING A WORLD THAT WORKS

She had a giant puffball, a fungus from the woods, fully ten inches in diameter, white with traces of brown, on a platter. She had opened the door of Hilltop House to our knock. It was midmorning, but she was in her nightgown, absorbed in admiration for her find, which she announced was on its way to The Café Budapest, her Boston restaurant. There was no question. Livia Hedda Rev-Kury had one of the world’s wonders on a platter, a product of the forested eight-acre tract we had just arranged to buy as the new campus of the Woods Hole Research Center. I could not but admire her knowledge that there are no poisonous puffballs and her confidence that this monster was at that early, meaty, edible stage, well before the spores that are the puffball’s real business had started to form. Spores make poor eating but a wonderful display as they emerge in an explosive cloud for a reproductive celebration that justifies the puffball name and spreads the fungus around the world. We admired the puffball, a saprophyte, slow growing, expanding toward the moment that is difficult to ignore when its millions of spores flood the world. It was an apt analogy as we set out in 1998 on a new phase in our mission of seeding the world with the new insights into the science of ecology and the political support for the massive transition from a fossil-fueled and failing world to a solar-powered and infinitely renewable world that can serve indefinitely as a human habitat.

The puffball had appeared at the right moment to add to the excitement surrounding our central purpose and the opportunity we saw in testing our own principles through the transformation of Hilltop House into a model for the new world. No matter how much we dream or wish it otherwise, we have but one habitat, and it is now eroding under the ever larger demands of an expanding human presence. Where are we headed in this complex but finite world? Is there but one direction, the continued erosion of the human future?

It need not be so. Does not an environment that is fully supportive of the public interest lie at the core purpose of both science and government? That was our vision, polished over years as we built research programs in ecology in the Woods Hole Research Center and before. Our vision took on new vigor as we contemplated reunification on a single campus. Here we might build anew using the principles of ecology that we develop and honor and set as an example for a world under siege from cumulative local failures. Changing the global course requires both top-down and bottom-up leadership, local revolutions, cumulative, contagious, local successes that silently enter the public realm and erupt into a new world.

The complexity of the global crises of environment is real enough, but the problems are far from impossible. Central among them is growth. Growth in human numbers, growth in demands on all resources—water, air, space, forests, food, shelter, and energy; growth, fed by an insatiable demand for more in every aspect of the human economy. The growth has been enabled by explosive industrial development built on cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy—coal, oil, and, most recently, gas. The combination of cheap energy and industrial genius has seemed capable of solving all problems and of allowing boundless expansion of the human undertaking. Growth has become the touchstone of success in business and in government throughout the capitalist, greed-driven, western world. As we have continued to honor growth in the present context, we have in effect denied the limits of the earth and set a course that changes the earth out from under this civilization. The future promises a progressively dysfunctional and impoverished world.¹ That is the urgent message of the moment brought home by the details of the climatic disruption as they emerge as the final limit to the fossil fuel age from beneath the fraying canopy of industrial expansion and apparent successes. Suddenly, the world is again small and fragile and seriously threatened as biophysical limits—always real, but long ignored—become