The Santa Fe Review

Paolo Soleri

Late last month Lyle Lovett performed what was billed as the last concert at the Paolo Soleri with no word on whether the All Indian Pueblo Council will agree to spare this architectural landmark if Senators Udall and Bingaman make good on their offer to find federal money for preservation. It would be the perfect face-saving deal. If in the end no funds were forthcoming, both sides could blame the economy, congratulate each other on their good intentions, and let the wrecking balls fly. If money can be found, there will probably be no more rock concerts. The amphitheater might be used instead, as a lawyer friend recently suggested, for public lectures under the stars or Santa Fe’s version of Shakespeare in the Park. “Can you imagine,” she said, “seeing Midsummer Night’s Dream there?”

Whichever scenario comes to pass, both parties will be able to divert attention from their failure to address the illegal destruction of the historic Indian School campus two years ago. The Department of Interior continues to evade the issue. In his most recent missive, Scott Culver, Deputy Assistant Inspector General for Investigations, made the puzzling claim that violations of the National Historic Preservation Act are “outside the realm of the types of things” his office examines. (That should come as a surprise to Senator Udall, who has been perfunctorily passing on my queries to Mr. Culver.) Where else is a citizen to lodge allegations that federal laws were violated by Interior employees? Mr. Culver doesn’t say but offers the opinion, with no substantiation whatsoever, that the demolition “appears” to have been proper.

We have documented here extensively why that simply isn’t true. My future correspondence will be with Elizabeth Martinez, an assistant U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, whose office has the power to convene a federal grand jury.

Meanwhile Bill Dupuy at public radio station KSFR continues to pursue the case with journalistic vigor. In an interview last month, he pushed Senator Bingaman to explain why the Bureau of Indian Affairs was allowed to hand over the school to the Pueblo Council without the federal protections required by law. Click this link to hear the Senator’s waffling reply.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

This morning I heard from Wendy Blackwell of the city Land Use Department, who immediately dispatched an inspector to investigate the mysterious glare from the Davis Mansion. (She apologized for not receiving my earlier emails, which apparently became stuck in City Hall’s spam filter.) The source of the light, she has confirmed, is indeed a row of solar panels.

Regarding the nuisance caused by the reflection, Ms. Blackwell said that her hands are tied. Though city code requires that in the Escarpment District “exterior glazing be nonmirrored with a reflectance of less than 40 percent,” state law exempts solar collectors. (How much energy is being collected when so much sunlight is being cast back would make for an interesting engineering problem.)

Ms. Blackwell did offer some promising news:

	You will be pleased to know that the owners are interested in
	doing some type of screening even though it is not required by
	code. Our staff will be making suggestions as to how screening
	can be accomplished without interfering with the solar
	collection. Netting or low shrubs are possible solutions.

Meanwhile we can rest assured that the largest, most extravagant residence in Santa Fe is generating green electrons.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

I don’t mean to imply by anything I have written here that I am leading the life of Mr. Sustainable. Lately I find myself living alone in a house with far more floor space than I could justify. I wander from room to room enjoying the views from unnecessarily large windows. I think of a scene, not quite halfway through Dr. Zhivago, where the protagonist returns to Moscow from the Siberian Front to find that the family’s stately townhouse has been taken over by the Commissariat. A dowdy party functionary reprimands him: “Comrade, there was living space for 13 families in this one house.” “Yes,” Zhivago concedes. “This is a better arrangement, comrades. More just.” I would be very unhappy if my house were commandeered for the revolution. It is hard enough living with people you love, much less randomly appointed strangers.

On the green side of the ledger, I commute by foot to my upstairs office and rarely drive as much as 50 miles a week. I nurse along a 16-year-old vehicle and a 17-year-old refrigerator, doubting that the energy savings from more efficient models would offset the energy spent by mining iron, rolling steel, and manufacturing new machines.

I recycle with little confidence that it makes much difference. As my incandescent lights wink out I replace them with the weird curly-cue fluorescents, wondering about the implications of eventually disposing of bulbs each containing a speck of mercury. Is that worse than the mercury in the fish I buy? Life’s complexities are beyond analysis. We do what we can and then sink or swim together.

This house was built, as best as I can tell, over about 75 years, added onto again and again as the need arose. I think maybe it was two houses once, joined together at some point by a makeshift hallway. There are rooms made of adobe, rooms made of concrete block, rooms made of lumber — 2 by 6s in the newer part, 2 by 4’s in the rest. Despite the double-paned windows, the kitchen is cold in the winter. It exudes heat. How much energy/money would it take to make it more robust? How much does that matter in a world where the population increases exponentially — and whoever has the money is building a second home in Santa Fe?

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

One day last month when the Sustainability Summer School was meeting at the Santa Fe Institute above Hyde Park Road, I hiked up the Ann Nitze trails hoping to get a glimpse of the lower reaches of the Andrew Davis estate. (Please see Picking on the Davises, September 6, 2005, for background information.) There for the last few months an unidentified structure has been projecting a glare visible from miles away. On sunny days, you can see it in the late morning and early afternoon driving north on Camino Cabra or Gonzales Road. It is also visible during that time through the Santa Fe Review’s northern webcam. Early this summer, I sent a couple of emails to Wendy Blackwell at the city Land Use Department inquiring about the legality of this eyesore, but I haven’t received a reply.

The Davis Mansion

The trail I was following veered off in the wrong direction so I couldn’t identify the source of the light. Some scientist friends at the Institute, who are also curious about the phenomenon, theorized that it is caused by the reflection of solar panels. What an irony that would be. You flatten the top of a mountain to build yourself a 26,000-square-foot mansion and then belatedly join the green revolution.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Mark Giorgetti, the contractor for the project described in my last three dispatches, has offered a rebuttal to my rebuttal of his rebuttal: Even with the pulverizing and trucking away of all that bedrock (solid granite, I bet, or Precambrian gneiss and schist), the new house will use less energy than the old one did. Here is the full text of his email and here are the key paragraphs:

	We are re-using the vast majority of the materials of the
	existing residence (rather than tearing it down). . . . We have,
	as discussed in the previous email, replaced the outdated and
	inefficient windows and doors with high performance (and
	sustainably sourced) windows and doors. Furthermore we will be
	insulating the entire building (original and addition) to beyond
	code, and providing energy efficient heat and hot water . . . as
	opposed to allowing an inefficient building to continue to
	operate for decades more. . . .

	My assessment is that the gallons of diesel fuel which were
	consumed in the rock chipping process will negate only a small
	fraction of the overall energy savings which this house will
	provide as a result of being properly remodeled with efficiency
	in mind.

But how do you quantify these things? No doubt the revamped house will be more airtight than the original. But it will also be much bigger. Will extra insulation and high-tech plumbing offset the energy needed to heat all the additional floor space?

There is also much more glass. In an earlier email we read that there will be “passive solar gain” from the front, north-facing side of the house. What that means is many more square feet of windows in what had been a solid adobe wall. Will the northerly windows, overhung by a portal, really bring in a significant amount of heat during the coldest months of the year when the sun has migrated to the southernmost part of the sky? And how is any energy gain in the winter weighed against the extra heat the new windows will admit during the summer when the sun returns to the north?

Mr. Giorgetti concedes that the answers are unknown:

	Builders (even green builders) are constantly working against
	other constraints (construction budgets, building codes and
	ordinances, client preferences, and other factors) which will
	influence the decision making process and can, at times, cause
	diversion from the ideal. We work within an imperfect set of
	conditions to deliver the best results we can, with
	sustainability always in mind.

Fair enough. For all the suffering it has caused, the new house will probably be an attractive and well-constructed addition to the neighborhood. But should it be welcomed as a contribution to the environment?

It is the old adobe houses that were sustainable — the ones that are being gutted, hyperfenestrated, and expanded all over town. What is happening across the street from me is a single example of a larger trend. In earlier times people made their walls with the same dirt they shoveled from the ground as they dug a new foundation. Lumber was locally grown, cut, and milled. People satisfied themselves with 1,200 or 1,500 square feet of living space. They conserved heat by minimizing the number and size of their windows. If it was too dark they turned on a light. If they wanted a view they walked outside.

We live in more luxurious times. If you can afford to buy a traditional middle-class home in a historic neighborhood and turn it into a show place, that is your prerogative. You can haul off the funky appliances and haul in stainless-steel upgrades with Energy Star labels, shipped perhaps from a factory in China. You can replace linoleum or talavera with marble, granite, quartz, or the latest new synthetic from Dupont. You can take pride in your sense of aesthetics and good taste. But I don’t think you deserve extra points for being green.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review