Greening your neighbors
Robert Swinburne
| Posted in General Questions on
This is more of a musing than a question. When building a new home would it be more environmentally responsible to forego the triple glazed windows and put the saved money into insulation upgrades on neighbor’s houses? 10 or 20k would go a long way. Likewise, who is greener? someone who builds a net zero house with 40k of PV. or someone who donates 40k to weatherization programs or even buys 4 solar hot water systems for four neighbors?
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Replies
Robert Swinburne,
An excellent question. At any gathering of environmentalists, you can hear someone say, "The average American family uses enough energy for an entire Indian village." That got me thinking about some overinsulated houses — "They have enough foam under their slab for an entire Indian village."
In other words: When does it make sense to put 16 inches of foam under your new slab, and when does it make sense to share the foam with your neighbors, so four houses can get 4 inches each?
Robert,
You've perhaps unwittingly touched on one of the central features of a truly green economy, the economy that worked for humanity for most of its 2 million years on earth: the gift economy.
In indigenous and hunter-gatherer societies, wealth was measured by how much one gave away rather than how much one accumulated. "Modern" cultures understood this fundamental principle of the Universe and called it the "Golden Rule" or "Karma". In the last short blip of human evolutionary history, the Golden Rule morphed into the "Rule of Gold" - and we are now witnessing the inevitable results in social, economic and ecological collapse.
So, regardless of how the dollar-denominated energy benefits get distributed, gifting (pay it forward) is the greenest of all economic transactions and the only one that is not only sustainable but regenerative.