The Santa Fe Review

I received an email today from Mark Giorgetti, the head of Palo Santo Designs, the company that is remodeling my neighbor’s old adobe home. Understandably he objected to my grim view of the project, which has disrupted life on our quiet little street for much of the summer. Mr. Giorgetti’s credentials are impressive (he included a copy of his curriculum vitae) and he has been involved in a number of admirable-sounding endeavors.

	We have constructed numerous sustainable and energy efficient
	homes and remodels throughout Northern New Mexico and Southern
	Colorado [he writes]. These include homes which produce 100% of
	their energy needs with onsite renewable energy and passive solar
	design. Homes built with natural, non-toxic and low embodied
	energy building products such as straw bale and earth, and which
	recycle their waste water. . . . This is not only our expertise
	and successful business model, but also our moral and ethical
	commitment to our environment.

Excavation to enlarge the house across the street, Mr. Giorgetti allows, “has been more energy intensive than is common” because of the need to jackhammer into “unforeseen bedrock,” but he defends the overall integrity of the endeavor:

	This project, in fact, will achieve some very important green
	building improvements, including a super insulated building
	envelope with energy efficient windows and doors, passive solar
	gain (on a North Facing Slope, not easy to achieve) and the
	re-use/recycling of a 60 year old adobe structure (which was
	previously an energy sieve in terms of efficiency).

The result will not be a second home, he writes, but rather the owners’ principal residence. I have corrected my previous post to reflect that.

Energy-saving amenities are always a good thing. But I still think it is quite a stretch to call an enterprise “green” or “sustainable” when it involves hillside excavation and the expenditure of so much energy to convert what had served as a reasonably sized family home into a much larger, more luxurious residence. My gripe is not with Palo Santo itself but with the pennywise, pound-foolish nature of so much of the green building trade.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Almost every morning for the last two weeks, I’ve driven up the hill to St. John’s College to sit in on an event, sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute, called Sustainability Summer School. And every morning as I depart, the jackhammering and scraping of rock against steel has continued as the couple from Houston builds a “green” home.

We’ve written here before how words like “green” and “sustainable” have become hollowed of meaning and turned into marketing devices for the construction industry. When the project across the street is finished there will be one less affordable house on Santa Fe’s Eastside. Neighbors in the surrounding homes will have been robbed of months of summer relaxation, the usually quiet days blanked out by industrial noise. And the builder, Palo Santo Designs LLC, will persist in advertising the project’s greenness because it is installing thermal-paned windows and other filigrees. Maybe there will be solar heating or a recirculating hot water line.  None of that will come close to offsetting the impact of such wasteful, energy-intensive construction.

How refreshing it has been to leave behind this horror show and sit inside St. John’s Great Hall listening to people who genuinely care about the effects that the accelerating development of the earth is having on its inhabitants. The students, from India, China, Chile, Colombia, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Peru, and the United States, are an impressive bunch —  idealistic yet pragmatic, fiercely intelligent. They have degrees in economics, geography, engineering, geology, ecology, philosophy, biology, physics, forestry, anthropology, sociology, and political science. Some of them believe that nuclear energy is anathema, others that it is a necessary part of the energy mix. I listen as they discuss the complexities and ambiguities of carbon trading, climate change modeling, social tipping points, centralized versus decentralized energy, the global tragedy of the commons, technology as a solution or as part of the problem. Arching over this all is the question of just what we mean by sustainability. Sustainable at what level and sustainable for whom?

At the end of the day, my head buzzing with ideas, I come back home and the green builder is still jackhammering into the hillside.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

This afternoon while the construction crew was off for the weekend, I walked through the ruins of my neighbor Eduardo’s old house. He lived across the street from me, one of three brothers who grew up on this end of the block. For 17 years when I went down to my mailbox, I’d see him working in his yard. He told me stories about the old neighborhood — gathering firewood in the Arroyo Chamiso, swimming in the river, or ice skating on the frozen reservoir on the hill behind his house, the one where the fashion designer Tom Ford is still building his mansion. When Eduardo died about a year ago, the last of the brothers to survive, the neighborhood was diminished. His house was sold to a couple from Houston, and a few months ago the parade of backhoes and construction trucks began.

The digging has been relentless: eight-hour shifts of jackhammering, the mechanical scooping and dumping of tons of rock to be hauled away. The work had been going on for so many weeks that I imagined they were excavating a swimming pool, a wine cellar, some vast underground chambers. But no. All of this commotion was just to make room for a foundation so the back of the house could be expanded into the hillside. I wondered if the contractor (”Your Green Building Experts”)  knew that they would be chipping inch by inch, dollar by dollar, through solid bedrock.

Eduardo, a very shy man, had never invited me into his house. Now with the doors and windows removed and the walls stripped bare, I took a walk inside. It had been a charming, modest home, built of real adobe made on site — you can see the rocks in a few spots where the outer walls have been exposed. If the new addition to the house is also adobe, the bricks will be carted in readymade from a factory. All that earth hauled away so that different earth can be hauled in. Nobody used to build houses this way. What Eduardo had owned and lovingly cared for was true Santa Fe style before it became commoditized.

Every morning after it rained, he would be outside with a shovel scooping his driveway back onto the hill. Now his son, another good neighbor whose house is behind his father’s, has taken over the task. After last week’s downpour, I was getting ready to drive downtown when I saw him out in the street combating the erosion. The new owners, a husband and wife, had come by to check on things, and the man had picked up a shovel to help fill a deep rivulet. “Nice rain,” I called out as I backed my car onto the street. The woman grimaced.

I had only meant to be friendly. There is much to learn when one moves to Santa Fe: how rain is not something to complain about, and a driveway on a hill might always be a work in progress.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review