Conspicuous Green Consumption

Derek Reiber, a native of Bellingham, earned his bachelor’s degree in environmental journalism from Huxley College, where he also served as editor of The Planet magazine. He’s now editor of Tidepool (http://www.tidepool.org), a nonprofit online news service focused on the environment, community and economy of the Pacific Northwest bioregion.

Giant ‘green’ homes, organic professionals, and the LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) marketplace—is the eco-conscious movement in danger from American’s penchant for conspicuous consumption?

Homebuilders across the country commonly host “Street of Dreams” showcases that display the latest trends in home construction and design. The events are often tours of jaw-dropping model homes that are spacious and luxurious, boasting all the modern amenities today’s American typical family lusts after. The huge homes, sporting floor plans often more than 4,000 square feet, can top out at over the $1 million mark, making them gaudy examples of suburban excess that few of us will likely ever attain.

Lately, a new version of the Street of Dreams idea has sprouted—tours that highlight new environmentally conscious “green” features that some architects and builders are incorporating into new homes. While many of the key elements of green design are present—energy-efficient appliances and lighting, water conservation measures, recycled materials and the like—the gaudiness and size of the homes hasn’t decreased.

As the Denver Post reported a few years back on just such an event there: “More is more when it comes to what’s new in home design, judging from the colossal casas on display at this year’s Parade of Homes. Why have one hot tub when you can have a pair? The $1.2 million ‘renaissance’ built by Orchard Homes features a tub that will accommodate a crowd on one deck, while another spa just off the master bedroom is built for two. The two dishwashers in the kitchen will come in handy when you’re entertaining a crowd.”

This juxtaposition—a massive house with multiple hot tubs, yet incorporating green design features—raises a troubling question for green building advocates: if a house includes the latest eco-friendly design and materials, yet has a giant footprint, does it still qualify as “green?”

As Portland author Linda Baker reports for Salon (in an article that first appeared in the March 2004 issue of Sustainable Industries Journal), 50 years ago the average house size was 1,100 square feet, and the average household size was 4.2 people. Now, the ratio has flipped—the average house size has grown to 2,150 square feet, and the average household size has dropped to 2.3 people.

“That’s a killer combination,” said Mike O’Brien, a program manager with Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development, in Salon. “In the space of 50 years, we’ve reversed the equation completely. In spite of everything we’ve done to make the building envelope more efficient, we’re still using more energy in our homes.”

According to Environmental Building News, smaller directly equates to more efficient. A 1998 comparison showed that a 1,500-square-foot home even with low energy performance standards will still use less energy for heating and cooling than a 3,000-square-foot house with high energy performance. It all boils down to resource use: larger homes simply eat up more materials. For example, a 5,000-square-foot house will use three times as many resources as a 2,085-square-foot house, according to Environmental Building News.

But that comparison hasn’t sunk in with many homebuilders and homebuyers, even those who desire to go green. As reported in Salon, Seattle architect Rob Harrison designed a 4,100-square-foot home for a single family in Redmond. Besides the house’s garage and greenhouse, the house uses advanced framing, Forest Stewardship Council-certified lumber and sustainably harvested cork floors. The south-facing roof will someday hold solar photovoltaic panels, and the driveway uses porous paving.

“We had many green features,” Harrison told Baker. “But ultimately, because of the size, we are still using more resources. House size is probably the most important criterion and often the most difficult one for us to meet.”

Aside from size, other simple green measures can be overlooked in favor of more showy eco-conscious materials such as bamboo floors, recycled composite lumber and low-emissivity glass.

As architect Peter Pfeiffer notes in the LA Times, a low-cost method to creating an environmentally friendly home is to take a few simple steps: site it properly on the building lot and design it to keep moisture from entering and to draw moisture out. Attention to these three aspects—orientation, infiltration and air conditioning—and it can account for up to 90 percent of achieving the label of “green.”

Pfeiffer calls proper orientation to the sun—such as turning a house so it faces the southwest—can cut energy use in half and it is the “single most important thing a builder can do” to achieve energy efficiency.

Interior design can help as well. Placing a stairwell opposite the side of the house facing prevailing winds can form a thermal chimney to draw heat out of the house. And even a basic move such as a light-colored roof rather than a dark one, which absorbs heat, can help.

Circling back to the pervasive American ethos of “bigger is better” for a moment, it strikes me that mindset is but an offshoot of our broader penchant for conspicuous consumption, which according to Thorstein Veblen, the economist who coined the term, is a symptom observed in individuals in any society where over-consumption has become a social norm or expectation. Some of us believe that acquiring more material goods—even if (and especially if, in some cases) they’re labeled “green”—will change us, or perhaps project a desired image to the rest of the world.

As one would expect, marketplace forces have quickly seized upon the environmentally friendly, eco-conscious trend, and as we’ve seen with so-called “green” mansions, the trend is becoming co-opted by the broader market. There’s even a whole market segment, called LOHAS (an acronym for “Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability”), that is now a $226.8 billion U.S. marketplace for goods and services that appeal to consumers who value health, the environment, social justice, personal development and sustainable living, according to the industry’s magazine, the LOHAS Journal.

“The LOHAS marketplace was originally identified by research conducted by Natural Business Communications, publisher of the Natural Business LOHAS Journal, in 2000 and is made up of five sectors,” reads the Journal’s Web site. “Within these five market divisions are products and services that improve health, safeguard ecosystems, develop human potential in a sustainable manner, reduce the use of natural resources, allow mankind and the natural world to live more harmoniously and are created or conducted in a socially just manner.”

Yet aren’t we missing something here? Can products really “reduce the use of natural resources” as the Journal suggests? In actuality, don’t products actually consume more resources than they save? And if the LOHAS market really wanted to stand by its green-leaning identity, wouldn’t a central plank be to reduce our ecological footprint, in much the same manner a home’s size determines its resource appetite?

These apparent paradoxes sprang immediately to mind upon reading a recent piece in The New York Times about wealthy city folk fleeing the concrete canyons for the lush hills of New York’s Hudson Valley. These so-called “organic professionals,” or “oppies,” bring with them a love for the “organic lifestyle,” but according to the piece, they ideally do so in “a spiffy new Ford Escape hybrid (nearly $3,500 more than a similarly equipped conventional model), or with a picturesque country house from the reign of George III that has been “future-proofed,” that is, wired for eco-sensitive climate-control technologies not yet invented.”

Besides sparking growth in Hudson Valley’s market for all things organic and green, these urban transplants, who often are forced to make weekly commutes to the city to keep their jobs and maintain their incomes. have also brought with them a spike in property costs, more traffic on rural roads and a growing friction with native residents over development issues. The article cites debate surrounding a proposed cement plant in the valley, with transplants viewing it as a threat to their newfound rural utopia while locals favor the plant for the jobs it could bring.

So where will this clash of social status desires and green lifestyle go? Is it possible to achieve both, or will critics always view “oppies” as practicing a conspicuous brand of green-tinged consumption? As Salon’s Baker sums it up in her piece, the future of the sustainability movement at large may well rest in the balance:

“The American proclivity for living large does more than raise questions about whether a 4,000-square-foot single family home should ever qualify as a ‘green’ residence. It also calls into question one of the fundamental tenets of sustainability—that market demand for green products and technologies will save us from environmental apocalypse. If we all go solar, if we install rainwater catchment systems and use sustainably harvested lumber, so the logic goes, then there’s no need to deprive ourselves of the luxuries that space—and the furniture and accessories to fill it—affords. But the issue of consumption, not to mention over-consumption, is curiously absent from the sustainability discourse. And in an era characterized by unprecedented consumer wealth, this could be the movement’s fatal flaw.” §