How did I get here -- facing the Living Building Challenge?

The LBC is a difficult challenge.  It's meant to be.  It's meant to inspire people to try something that will really push them out of their wagon-wheel ruts, jar them into thinking creatively about how they choose to live.  We are often asked, "Whatever led you to want to do this thing?"

Choices of how to live often have really deep roots, and my particular path to this project seems to be based way back when, in both the place and the time where I grew up.  As a teenager in northern California in the 1970's, I could see certain things happening in nature and in the community.  All I had to do was glance out the window of the house and of the car.

One Memory: The Gas Crisis.

The year I turned 16, I had the somehow simultaneously boring and alarming experience of sitting in my mom’s late-model Oldsmobile and waiting in long, long lines whenever I needed to buy gas.  On the radio news I could hear about OPEC's embargo and the politics of oil, and I could see how the system I was growing up in involved habits, like fossil-fuel dependency, with far-reaching consequences.  Those lines made literal my embeddedness in the bigger systems of energy use we as a society had chosen and then gotten stuck in.  It wasn't the freedom I'd imagined I'd feel upon finally getting a driver's license.

Another Memory: The Fog.

Once home, I could often see the fog pouring over the western hills in the summertime.  It looked like a huge suspended river flowing inland as the rising temperature of the season lured the cool air eastward.  I saw the trees on the hills combing the fog for droplets of water, drinking the clouds in the bone-dry months.  The fog was a simple but sophisticated system of energy and nourishment made visible -- so much simpler than the complex and fraught ways we had arranged to power our lives.  I dreamed of a balance, a harmony like that.

These two systems are not interchangeable, but they both got me thinking about the big structures we engage with that can either support or deplete our lives.  The gas lines showed me that so much of what we take for granted is part of a worldview we created, and the fog demonstrated that other possibilities exist all around us.  Those early lessons, barely conscious now, made it easier for me to want to try a deep green remodel, to try learning what a better kind of building might look like if we started from those natural systems of sun and rain, of energy and nourishment.

We are not stuck in line.  We all get to choose something.

Our project was a big challenge, and it was a rare privilege to be able to put many of our choices about how we wanted to live into built form.  Not everyone gets the chance to remodel a house.  But if you have the privilege of a house, and the chance to make it fit your values more closely, it's a moment for you to look around and ask, whose system are you living in?  And, as I wrote in my last post, all of us face equally-important small choices every day in how we spend our time and resources.  Can you recall how some of your choices have led to the way you live now?  How has your experience -- maybe as far back as childhood -- helped shape your perspective, your path, and your idea of home?  Are there ways you can make some early dream come true?

Written by Karen, Homeowner