Significantly, Sue Roaf has designed and built her own ecohouse. This is significant in terms of credibility. It demonstrates that she has not only a good theoretical understanding of ecobuilding, but also direct, hands-on experience. She provides it as one of the case studies at the end and refers to it from time to time throughout the book. Part of the motivation for designing it, she says, "was to put paid to the notion that pursuing a high quality of life necessarily entailed irreparable damage to the environment," the challenge being "to prove that those in richer countries could maintain an acceptably high standard of living without polluting the planet at the cost of those in poorer countries."
The authors of Ecohouse predict that we will probably all have to live in zero fossil fuel energy homes by the middle of this century, and hope that "[t]he seeds of the ideas sown in this book by then will have grown into the New Vernacular of housing for the twenty-first century and beyond." While the hope is admirable, how this will be achieved is not much discussed. Who can afford to build an ecohouse? Certainly not the bulk of homeowners even in so-called first-world nations in North America and Europe. Of those who could afford to, the vast majority have neither the desire nor the necessary knowledge. The vast majority of even well-to-do homeowners prefer to buy large, hastily-constructed, energy-profligate houses in suburbia or exurbia. These are most often cut-and-paste houses equipped with energy-greedy cooling and heating technologies, houses from which they drive — not walk — to work and the big box store. How we can combat these things is not adequately addressed in this book, nor how to make ecobuilding affordable to the common people.
Also not addressed, though they would have fit so nicely into the discussion of embodied energy and embodied emissions, are environmental racism and green-washing. It may be argued that this is a design guide, not a book of theory, but even a paragraph or two on these topics would have rounded the book out a bit more and at least acknowledged some of the darker aspects of eco- this and that. At whose expense are the products with the most embodied energy and emissions produced? Who suffers the most from the pollution both of producing these products and, increasingly, of recycling them? The feature documentary, Manufactured Landscapes, by Jennifer Baichwal does a decent job of illustrating this, though it has nothing otherwise to do with ecobuilding. It is often those in poorer so called third-world or developing countries. Ecobuilders should pay as much attention to these aspects of material origins and selection.
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