Sustainability
Your Green Home
From dream to dream come true. It’s all about design.
Design to Survive and Thrive. Design for Joyful Living. eaDesign For Life™.
Imagine…
An EA green home, certified if desired, that’s designed to last longer than you will; costs far less to operate; provides a healthful living environment for your family; commands a minimal environmental footprint; provides relatively comfortable conditions without any sources of power, with harvested rainwater, and optimized yard space, when desired, for growing your own fruits and vegetables.
Our green homes are not a luxury – they are a necessity. As economic, societal, and climate change challenges become the norm, today and hereafter homes in Texas and elsewhere must deliver more than ever before. High performance, life giving, multi-tasking, functional-use, sensible homes are our future.
A properly designed EA green home nurtures life, even in hard times. It shelters you in good health and as you age. Because it is designed to be durable, it requires far less maintenance. It is comfortable and attractive. It provides protection and comfort in times of scarcity. It can provide all your water, energy, and even healthy food from your own garden.
While you may have heard that green homes cost more, it’s not true! EA green homes have rarely commanded a luxury price tag. If you can afford a custom home, you can afford an “eaDesign for Life™” custom GREEN home! A properly designed green home, one designed for life by EA, will result in lower Living Costs, in some cases dramatically. And it will increase your year-round enjoyment.
Our unique wholistic design process combines high performance with traditional values to create earth friendly, healthy homes. Our clients reap the financial rewards of ecological responsibility while enjoying an enhanced quality of life in a nurturing environment, with little additional construction cost.
Environment Associates is a pioneering leader of green building and design for sustainability. Call us to learn how you can have EA remodel or design your green home.
About Sustainability
At Environment Associates, sustainable architecture means striving to
“do no harm to present or future generations.”
So can green home architecture be called “sustainable”? Not really. We strongly believe it misleading and therefore unethical to label buildings or services associated with their creation as being “sustainable, as long as fossil fuels are used in any way to mine, manufacture, build, operate, or maintain a building, or where these fossil fuels are used in any way to transport materials, the workers, and the building users associated therewith.” If we are going to create a sustainable life, a sustainable country, a sustainable civilization, a sustainable world, we must stop deceiving ourselves…and others. A society that depends upon fossil fuels is simply not sustainable. Period. End of argument.
This is why we still call most of our work “green,” because fossil fuels, not renewable energy, is still the main source of energy used to build homes and to manufacture most of the products used in building them. To call anything sustainable, no fossil fuels can be involved. Period! Because by definition, fossil fuels are depletable, not renewable, no matter how much we find and mine. And this is why we must move rapidly from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources for everything we do. (Ideally, this move would be to small scale independent [but interconnected –i.e., interdependent yet isolatable] solar systems so everyone who has the desire can have the ability to achieve energy independence and not be dependent upon and under the control of those who own the grid or supply energy to power the grid.)
So how do we get from where we are, that is, being mostly bad for life, as we have learned lots of things being done have become, to becoming actually sustainable? We think the answer is present in everything we do. That we must put aside all of our goals and reasons for those things we think we must do or have and seriously ask ourselves:
Is this good for life? And not just for human life, but all life.
Or is it just merely “less bad?”
It’s really very simple. Is it good for life or is it bad for life? If it is bad for life, we don’t do it.
But what about less bad for life? Is less bad good? Of course not. But at present, that’s mostly what we as a society, as a civilization, are doing. Until we kick our fossil fuel addiction, our almost total dependence upon fossil fuels, we can never go from “less bad” to good until we wean ourselves completely off fossil fuels. Therefore, the green movement is merely a transition stage between being “bad” to being “less bad.” Instead of “green” being the solution most people think it is for all our problems, it is more like adolescence, a growing /learning stage…a transition stage. That’s all the green movement is. Nothing more.
This is why we must go from “less bad” to doing ONLY GOOD. The sooner the better. For everything.
This principle guides all our work at Environment Associates.
Click here to learn more about EA’s approach to authentic green home design.