Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  5. Learn to love public transit. After a few years of taking a comfortable regional bus to work, I was hooked. No more hunting for a parking place; extra time for reading, sleeping, and conversing. Now I’m very excited about light rail coming to my town! When Boulder, Colorado, reorganized its transit system, substituting minibuses for the big old dinosaur buses, and introducing a citywide Eco Pass that buys a year’s travel for just $50, the share of trips made by transit increased from 1.6 percent to 4.6 percent.

  6. Try a car-sharing program, if you live in one of the more than forty American cities that now has a car-sharing organization. These European-inspired, rent-by-the-hour businesses enable a household to eliminate one or all cars in the household fleet. This not only saves payment, maintenance, insurance, and other costs, but equally as important, teaches participants how to avoid making unnecessary trips, how to break the cycle of auto-dependent behavior.

  7. Keep your vehicle well tuned and tires inflated. Regular oil changes, air-filter changes, and spark plug replacements improve fuel economy. Buy low-rolling-resistance (LRR) replacement tires. Minimize evaporation of fuel and keep your car cooler in the summer by parking in the shade.

  8. Lose weight! A study at the University of Illinois found that Americans are pumping about a billion more gallons of gas annually today than four decades ago because extra body weight brings down fuel economy. About 1.7 million cars could be filled with gas for an entire year with that “extra” fuel.

  Sources: Sierra Club Web site (wwwsierraclub.org); Worldwatch Institute, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/1480; “Getting There on Less” by Guy Dauncey, in Yes! Magazine, Summer 2004; Jon Hilkevitch, Chicago Tribune, October 25, 2006, Chicagotribune.com.

  The Currents and Currency of Energy

  “I get about nine miles per potato,” environmentalist Lester Brown told me recently. I knew exactly what he meant—that a potato’s 300 calories fuels nine miles of bicycling (or three miles of walking, since bikes are three times as energy-efficient). Fossil fuels contain calories, too: Each barrel of oil contains the calorie equivalent of twenty-three thousand hours of human labor! No wonder our era has been the most productive—as well as wasteful—in human history; we’ve been coasting on solar energy stored as compressed fossil fuel, which it took nature up to one hundred million years to manufacture.

  Now, forty thousand years after humans learned to domesticate livestock—which also store the solar energy contained in grass as meat and milk—two trends are emerging in our world: Inactive lifestyles are negatively affecting our health and vitality, and the supplies of carbon-rich energy that built our civilization are beginning to decline. These trends are two sides of the same carbonaceous coin, because clearly, we need to use our bodies more and fossil fuels less. (There’s an energy crisis in our bodies, too.) We’re evolving from a hydrocarbon economy, in which stored fuels are burned to release power, into a “carbohydrate economy,” in which solar energy is used directly both by advanced technologies and our bodies. The high cost of energy will soon provide a renaissance of human-powered crafts and creativity—an enjoyable, productive way to spend calories!

  Not since the Second World War, when we patriotically salvaged everything from bones to baling wire, have we had to focus so precisely on the real value of our resources, products, and processes. In recent decades, we’ve been far more preoccupied with quantity, speed, and size than with quality, appropriate scale, or resource efficiency. It’s easy to see why: Variables such as quantity and speed that keep the assembly lines and semi trucks rolling often yield higher profits in a world engineered and legislated for excess. In an era of energy abundance, utilities routinely gave discounts for the consumption of electricity and fuels. The more a large customer consumed, the lower its cost per unit of energy. What has resulted is a society made of cheap energy.

  In the emerging economy, calories stored in plant material will be supplemented by other renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal power—flows that are already here. Energy guru Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute calls the ingenious substitution of renewable energy for combustion “the undiscovery of fire,” an anthropological tipping point that will help put the monster of global warming back in its cage. “The good news about global warming,” says Lovins, “is that it’s far cheaper to fix than to ignore.” For four decades, Lovins has asserted that the best way to generate energy is with efficiency—what he calls “negawatts.” He and his colleagues find hidden treasure in fatter pipes that have less friction so they deliver liquids more efficiently; lighter cars made of carbon fiber rather than steel, so they burn less fuel; and smaller, less expensive heating and cooling systems made possible by adding extra insulation to a building. The cheapest form of energy, he demonstrates, will always be information—in other words, great design and engineering that reduce the need for energy. If each device, method, or building is designed for peak efficiency, then renewable energy—what he calls the “soft path”—will be sufficient to meet human needs.

  I believe this methodical way of thinking can be applied in many other aspects of our lives, from what we eat to what we buy and where we live. If we meet each need precisely—for example, by living in an energy-smart house, or eating food that gives us energy but not obesity, we won’t be constantly craving “more.” A very useful component of Lovin’s soft-path strategy is to use the right amount and the right kind of energy for the job. He’s famous for the analogy that using nuclear-generated electricity to heat a house is like “using a chainsaw to cut butter,” because so much energy is wasted in the fission of atoms, transmission of electricity from the power plant, and reconversion of electricity back to heat. Certainly, the 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit of heat that a nuclear plant generates is overkill; why not use precisely what a given task requires? Passive solar energy, efficient windows, thick insulation, and a superefficient, backup natural gas-powered furnace meet the need for heat much more appropriately.

  Similarly, since conventional lightbulbs (invented back in 1879) produce far more heat than light, they add to a building’s air conditioning load and a utility bill’s bottom line. A global switch to state-of-the-art lighting will trim the world’s electricity bill by one-tenth, says the International Energy Agency (IEA). The energy for lighting releases about three-fourths as much carbon dioxide as the world’s passenger vehicles—a great opportunity for immediate results. The IEA advocates stricter lighting standards in building codes to prohibit lighting such as the halogen uplighter (torchiere), which spotlights the ceiling rather than directly lighting a living room or lounge.4 (Similarly, a person working late at the office often lights a tennis-court-size area with a whole bank of lights when he really needs to light just a desk-size area. And the light coming out of many large homes on a given night can be seen from the window seat of an airplane.

  The compact fluorescent bulb (CFL), now available at a fraction of its original cost and offering a warm-toned light, is a great example of meeting lighting needs precisely. Replacing a 100-watt incandescent bulb with a 32-watt CFL can save $30 in energy costs over the life of the bulb, because CFLs use two-thirds less energy than incandescent bulbs to deliver the same amount of light, and last up to ten times longer. If every household replaces just three 60-watt incandescent light bulbs with CFLs, we will eliminate as much pollution as is generated by 3.5 million cars, according to the nonprofit group Environmental Defense.

  Wal-Mart’s commitment to sell at least one CFL to every one of its 100 million customers sprang from a back-of-the-envelope calculation: Its stores could save $6 million a year just by replacing the display lightbulbs for its ceiling fans with CFLs. Even if each American home bought just one compact fluorescent to replace a 60-watt incandescent, the energy saved would be enough to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island.

  Writes Charles Fishman in Fast Company magazine, “For two decades, CFLs lacked precisely what we expect from lightbulbs: strong, unwavering light; quiet;
not to mention shapes that actually fit in the places we use bulbs. Now every one of those problems has been conquered. Since 1985, CFLs have changed as much as cell phones and portable music players.”5

  Even more appropriate than efficient bulbs for daytime lighting in houses and offices is natural daylight, which makes good use of our solar system’s most efficient bulb, the Sun. To use the Sun most efficiently, invisible space-age window coatings, about 70 atoms thick, are precisely designed to let light in but filter out heat in the summer; and let light in but prevent heat from getting out in the winter. There’s more to it than a sunny ambience: various studies have proven that well-designed natural daylight results in higher quality and reliability in factories, 6 to 16 percent higher labor productivity in offices, and 40 percent higher sales in stores with atriums and skylights.6 Lovins summarizes, “If properly done, measures to protect global climate actually reduce costs, not raise them.” He points to results already achieved by mega-companies such as DuPont, BP, and Wal-Mart, all financial beneficiaries of company-wide efficiency measures. While boosting production by 30 percent in the last decade, DuPont also cut energy use by 7 percent and reduced CO2 emissions by 72 percent, saving $2 billion in energy costs so far. Oil giant BP cut its energy bills $650 million over ten years, and reduced CO2 emissions 10 percent below the company’s 1990 levels.

  Wal-Mart’s recent declaration of efficiency—that the corporation will reduce its carbon footprint by 20 percent in seven years—will create ripples throughout the U.S. economy. Methodically examining how they meet retailing needs, the company has come up with a long list of measures. They became the largest purchaser of organic cotton, eliminating huge volumes of pesticides (and the energy in them) that are used on the most widely sprayed agricultural product. They “right-sized” the boxes on toys, making them just large enough for the contents and saving $3.5 million in trucking costs; and they replaced standard oil-derived plastic wrap with corn-derived wrap on four kinds of produce, saving the equivalent of 800,000 gallons of gasoline.7

  Green design and efficiency pay for themselves many times over. In fact, efficiency has boosted the entire U.S. economy in the last thirty years, reducing energy costs by $1 billion a day. The nation now uses 47 percent less energy per dollar of economic output than it did in the mid-1970s, says Amory Lovins. “These savings act like a huge universal tax cut that also reduces the federal deficit.” What if each business, large and small, were to follow the lead of these mega-companies? What if city governments, churches, unions, and individuals, too, continue to focus on efficiency, basing decisions on how well a given action or device meets the need? With less waste and fewer social side effects dragging us down, our whole way of life will become less burdensome.8

  Lovins makes a strong distinction between efficiency based on great design/engineering, and conservation, based on “doing without.” When Jimmy Carter urged Americans to wear sweaters to stay warm in the 1970s, it felt to some like deprivation. But when Lovins suggests that our economy can save hundreds of billions of dollars every year with efficiency and better engineering, it sounds far sexier. The truth is, we’ll need to use both approaches. Behavioral changes like wearing a sweater inside on the coldest days will seem like less of an imposition as energy costs continue to climb. At the same time, efficiency improvements that substitute ingenuity for resources without significant differences in behavior are a breath of fresh air. When you think about it, the two approaches to using less energy are variations on the same theme—mindfulness. The same tool that enables good use of resources, our brain, can design things more ingeniously and also figure out what daily actions to take. Every time we double up on errands to save gas and time, give a tool we’ve never used to a neighbor who needs it, or tune up the car to get better gas mileage, we rediscover what a good thing it is to have a brain.9

  13

  The Benefits of Right-Sizing

  Better Than Better Homes and Gardens

  I never had any other desire so strong, as that I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them …

  —Abraham Cowley

  A wedding dress or tuxedo is a pleasure for an evening, but few of us want to live in a costume. So why are so many houses filled with gimmicks such as whirlpools, and multiple fireplaces, that don’t fit the actual activities of their owners?

  —Shay Saloman

  Since 1982, an area the equivalent of New York State has been developed—largely by businessmen who buy a chunk of farmland and build five hundred similar-looking houses on it.1 The resources required by each home include 14,000 board feet of lumber (about an acre of trees) and 19 tons of cement. It’s not just pesticides that make spring in America more silent than in our grandparents’ days—it’s also the smothering of habitats. Since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in the 1960s, the size of an average American home more than doubled, as the average household income continued to climb (up fivefold, adjusted for inflation). How many trees will it take to build the 90,000-square-foot home designed for time-share industry billionaire David Siegel and his wife, Jacqueline? The next time you watch a pro football game, imagine a house about as big as the playing field. (Think how long it takes to return a punt from the end zone at full speed.)

  When my ex-wife and I bought our first house, we wanted something smaller than we could afford. We didn’t know at the time that the word “mortgage” comes from old French and means “death pledge,” but we did sense that a big house was a heavy load to carry, and that it took a huge toll on the environment. It was 1973 when we bought a house for $17,000 in the foothills outside of Denver—a log cabin that had been added onto, but not by much. The total square footage was 1,100 square feet, and after ten effortless years of $114-a-month payments, we paid the cabin off. We grew to a family of four (plus a dog, a cat, and chickens who roosted in an old outhouse). We lived in that house and garden for twenty years, and by the time we left, the average size of a Denver-area house had swollen to more than 2,000 square feet. I now live in a 1,750-square-foot house, but I rent the 600-square-foot apartment in my basement. My 1,150 square feet is still plenty of space—especially for a divorced man or bachelor—with its kitchen, living room, bedroom, balcony, bathroom, and home office. (It also helps a lot that my neighborhood has a community building with a guest room, living room, dining room, and terrace.)

  Despite much evidence to the contrary, I believe small houses will be in high demand in the next decade, not just because resource costs are destined to climb, but also because small houses are easier to customize, easier to maintain, and are often located in pre-boom neighborhoods that are closer to the things we need—groceries, banks, libraries, and restaurants. In fact, it occurs to me that we really should call small houses “regular,” and the others “XL,” because for most of our stay as humans, we’ve lived in shelters even smaller than 1950-size houses. Now that single people occupy one-fourth of American households—up from 10 percent in 1950—shouldn’t we accelerate the remodeling and building of regular-size houses? There are distinct disadvantages to XL homes, as financial planner Ilyce Glink points out: “When you buy a bigger home to accommodate your stuff, you pay higher taxes, higher heating bills, bigger cooling bills, a bigger mortgage, plus whatever the upkeep costs are for the stuff itself.”2

  A 600-square-foot house over a garage at the Holiday neighborhood, and the front yard of David Wann’s townhouse in Harmony Village, with strawberries instead of grass in the front yard. Courtesy of the author

  I also predict that within the next ten to twenty years, many of the Hummer homes that now dominate the American landscape will be partitioned and remodeled to accommodate multiple households, with the blessing of local zoning departments. (Already, many immigrants live three or more families to a house.) As coauthor Dan Chiras and I speculate in the book Superbia! 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods, their large, resource-hungry lawns may well become vegetable gardens, mi
ni-orchards, and even fenceless neighborhood parks. In the meantime, many XL house owners are cashing out, regardless of a faltering housing market, and downsizing to elegant little cottages, townhouses, houseboats, bungalows, and lofts.

  A House for Good Reasons

  The American home is the greatest single expression of our addiction to energy. A large percentage of the power plants, roads, factories, and discount palaces service a lifestyle for which the home and yard are the epicenter. The decision to live in a smaller, more efficient, more conveniently located home offers huge opportunities for increasing one’s quality of life while reducing the consumption of resources. Says Shay Soloman, author of Little House on a Small Planet, “Live in less space but have more room to enjoy it. Does that sound like a contradiction? On the contrary, living small frees up your mind, your wallet, and your soul.”3 Admittedly, there are psychological roadblocks to overcome. The house is a perceived symbol of success in our world (ironically, it’s also a refuge from a world so preoccupied with material success). But a person who lives in a smaller house than he or she can afford probably has a healthy level of self-respect, plenty of time, and may also have a desire to do more with his or her life than consume.

  According to sociologist Paul Ray, at least a quarter of the U.S. population—the “cultural creative” sector—look at what’s happening in suburbia, shake their head, and say, “I know I don’t want that.” Instead, they may choose to buy an existing house in the inner ring of the suburbs, built when 1,500 square feet was considered a good-size house. Or they may decide to build a new home that incorporates precisely the features they want, like hardwood floors and kitchen cabinets, lots of skylights, solar energy, efficient appliances, and built-in shelving. An amusing but very affordable example is the house that Jay Shafer built for himself in Occidental, California, where three really is a crowd. His house, one of the units he now markets as president of Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, is 70 square feet—smaller than some walk-in closets or tree houses built for the kids.4