Sometimes it feels tough to get through a day without despoiling the planet. The products most of us use come through a wasteful global production chain; discarding old stuff is cheaper than repairing it; and our energy supply is inefficient and hard on the earth. Making matters worse, most of this excess centers around the heartwarming center of our existence, the home: U.S. households are responsible for about a quarter of the country’s energy use.

So what to do? A new exhibit at Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum puts green living in the spotlight, providing inspiration for those who dare to dream and a plethora of ways for the rest of us to counteract our wasteful habits.

The Glidehouse in its natural
habitat.

Photo: JMC Photography,
courtesy National Building Museum.

“The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture and Design” aims to show visitors how thoughtful choices — even small ones — can help conserve resources, save money, and support healthier lifestyles. With displays that are complemented by lectures, trips to renovation and construction projects, family programs, and a comprehensive website, the exhibit offers something for everyone.

Those who want to think big can explore an entire environmentally friendly house, which opens the exhibit and serves as a vivid illustration of what’s possible. The Glidehouse, designed by California architect Michelle Kaufmann, features sliding panels to regulate sunlight and ventilation; bamboo floors; recycled, toxin-free materials; and water- and energy-saving features including fluorescent lighting and a tankless water heater.

The exhibit profiles 20 other green houses from around the world. However, its organizers point out that building an entire house is just one way to go green. “The process can be small, at the evolutionary level, even if it’s recycling and renovation,” explains lead curator Donald Albrecht. “Making green houses can be incremental, and also stylish.”

Whether building a house or making small adjustments, how does one begin? That’s where the exhibit’s resource center comes in. The area is, as Albrecht puts it, “a sort of green Home Depot” that lets visitors get up close and personal with 60 different environmentally friendly materials (touching, according to the museum, is encouraged). It also provides tips, models, and diagrams about how best to implement the various options, which include floors of cork and bamboo, countertops made with recycled paper, composite board from sunflower-seed hulls, tiles from recycled aluminum and glass, and a toilet with dual-flush options.

“One decision, one feature can have all these different benefits, on air quality, ecosystem, biosphere, climate change, personal health,” says Jason Holstine, who served as a supplier for the exhibit. Holstine is founder and owner of the Amicus Green Building Center, located in an antiques district just outside of D.C. “We help [customers] integrate [green] thinking throughout the whole building process,” Holstine says of his store, which is crammed with tiles, paints, clays, granite slabs, and other materials. “There is no other business like this in the mid-Atlantic,” he adds, though he notes that such outlets are more common in the Western U.S.

Wood you like to spend time in the
resource room?

Photo: F.T. Eyre,
courtesy National Building Museum.

Noting that energy and electricity inflation is running about 30 percent a year, Holstine recommends as a first step replacing light bulbs with compact fluorescents or LEDs. Besides energy, “the other big inflation cost these days is in health,” he says. To reduce indoor air pollutants ranging from asbestos to allergens such as mold, mildew, and dust mites, Holstine and others recommend selecting paints, carpet, and other materials carefully, and making sure ventilation systems are properly maintained.

For those on a tight budget, energy-saving devices are the most obvious way to go green. “People understand the idea of weather sealing, good windows, efficient air conditioning,” explains Albrecht, adding that it’s easy to find products that meet the U.S. EPA’s Energy Star guidelines: “Everything now is somewhat more green than 40 years ago. If you have a pre-1970s air conditioner, you probably should buy a new one. It will pay for itself in the short run.”

Ultimately, says coordinating curator Reed Haslach, the exhibit’s organizers hope to convince visitors of the benefits — and ease — of going green. “The choice to sustainably build or renovate … gives people a personal sense of agency to both benefit the environment and make their houses healthier and more comfortable places,” she says.

In other words, there are good, solid reasons to choose this route. Or, as Albrecht told The Washington Post in May, “Going green does not mean going weird.”

“The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture and Design” runs through June 3, 2007, at which time it will begin a national tour. A companion book by the same name is available online. The National Building Museum is currently planning a follow-up exhibit on green communities.

In the southeast corner of Washington, D.C., the capital of the most powerful nation in history, lies a polluted, neglected neighborhood known as Anacostia. Slated for a grand renewal project centered on the local river that gives it its name, the area stands at the juncture of poverty and opportunity. If plans move forward, it will one day be a showcase of urban design, with revitalized neighborhoods, verdant parks, rolling pedestrian and bicycle paths, and an occasional eagle soaring overhead — in other words, a paradise. Today, Anacostia is more of a nightmare.

Capital improvements are coming to
D.C.’s other river.

Older residents of the area recall a time before incomes and population plummeted, a time before the exodus of the black middle class, a time when the banks of the Anacostia swelled with beaches, bathing, and fishing. But for decades, the story of the river — which is fed by Maryland tributaries, then melds with the Potomac on its way to Chesapeake Bay — has run a different course.

“Washington has always been a tale of two rivers, what you could call the white river and the black river,” says Jim Dougherty of the D.C. Sierra Club, who sits on the national board of directors. While the Potomac has been blessed with plentiful green space, with the Jefferson Memorial and the Marine Corps War Memorial gracing its banks, the Anacostia has been home to the jail, incinerators, and power plants. Activists have continually fought projects that threaten to encroach upon the already degraded corridor — projects that, according to Dougherty, “would never be allowed in western D.C.”

As a result, the place and its people are suffering. Old tires are only the most ostentatious artifacts, with great mounds of litter here and there, and speckles of glass and paper woven among grassy banks. Contaminants affect such bottom-feeding fish as the brown bullhead, which have cancerous growths on their skin and in their livers, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and others. With a 100-year-old, combined-use sewage system intended for a much smaller population, the river suffers dozens of overflows a year, during which strong rains bring untreated human waste rushing to its waters.

Glen O’Gilvie.

Photo: Ethan Goffman.

“The state of the river has an impact mentally,” says Glen O’Gilvie, president and CEO of the Earth Conservation Corps, which has worked with local residents to clean up the area since 1989. For those who live in the most impoverished portion of our nation’s capital — where violence, unemployment, and lack of opportunity have shrunk the population to well under 100,000, with 38 percent living below the poverty line — O’Gilvie says, “this is one more avenue of hopelessness.”

Six years ago, full-scale plans to revamp the area began in earnest with the signing of the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative, a favorite project of D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams (D). The manager of the ambitious project, Uwe Brandes, explains that it reflects a “new perspective, that rivers can play an important role in the regeneration of cities. Historically they’ve been seen as a way to dump pollution. Now, the national resurgence of the river itself can be the green engine of growth.”

While Brandes’ optimism is reflected by supporters of the city’s efforts, others are more guarded, wondering what price local residents will pay in exchange for an “improved” neighborhood. “Restoration is always a two-edged sword,” says Robert Boone, president of the Anacostia Watershed Society, a community group based in Bladensburg, Md., which bleeds into the blighted urban areas of D.C. He worries that the city’s efforts will end up benefiting those who need them least: “When you start restoring, the poor get forced out. That’s inevitably how our culture works.”

It Runs Through a River

The city’s 25-year redevelopment plan includes creating a network of paths to nearby neighborhoods by restoring green spaces long turned brown. These areas, such as Kenilworth Park & Aquatic Gardens, Kingman Island, and Watts Branch Park (soon to be renamed Marvin Gaye Park), are saddled with trash, frequented by drug dealers, and often contaminated with toxic chemicals. Leaders also seek to create new housing, including low-income options, and to connect isolated neighborhoods with a trolley system. And after a century’s worth of sewer overflows, relief is expected soon: newly installed pumps and valves should result in 40 percent less raw sewage making its way to the river.

Residents get a raw deal.

Photo: Ethan Goffman.

A more complete solution to the sewage problem is some 25 years removed, according to Brandes. Pollutants flow from the Anacostia’s numerous Maryland tributaries, thousands of little capillaries and veins that zigzag just north of the district. “Over 80 percent of the watershed is in Maryland, so automatically there’s an environmental-justice issue there,” Brandes explains, “and that is that the District of Columbia, being downstream, is essentially the recipient of all of this pollution.” From the Anacostia, the combined waste flows onward to Chesapeake Bay, itself the subject of grand and unfulfilled cleanup aspirations.

The Waterfront Initiative is coordinating efforts on the part of community groups, businesses, and local governments to minimize tributary runoff through such techniques as rain gardens, swales, and green roofs. (Known as “low-impact development” and largely pioneered in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, these techniques are now integral to numerous D.C. projects.) All told, says Walter Smith of the advocacy group D.C. Appleseed, “It’s going to be a huge, costly, and a decades-long process.” Brandes agrees: “There’s a lot of goodwill, but there’s a long way to go.”

Despite the long haul, local communities are ready to dig in. “All of the communities that reside east of the river have been advocates for revitalization,” says southeast D.C. resident and Sierra Club D.C. environmental-justice organizer Linda Fennell. “They have always been at the forefront.” Fennell believes the passage of the Waterfront Initiative prompted “an increased level of energy, with communities advocating for better libraries, better parks.”

According to Smith, development plans include significantly more low-income units than projects in the 1990s that displaced low-income residents as western D.C. gentrified, and will also reserve 51 percent of jobs for the local labor force. As Brandes puts it, “We’re attacking this in terms of jobs, in terms of housing affordability, but we’re not limited to that. We’re also attacking it with regard to actual capital-equity participation.” As Anacostia redevelops, existing neighborhood businesses will be drawn into the process. “In other words,” says Brandes, “we have requirements that local, small, disadvantaged businesses in the District of Columbia participate in the redevelopment process directly.”

While D.C. community organizers believe those behind the initiative are seriously concerned with helping the community, they worry that the efforts will not be enough. “Everyone’s saying the right things, and everyone’s heart is in the right place,” says Robert Nixon, chair of the Earth Conservation Corps, “but I haven’t seen a plan yet that involves the entire community.”

Many longtime residents of the watershed are also skeptical, fearing deeply entrenched historical patterns will play out here. Impoverished areas have commonly been denied amenities and granted minimal basic services. As they begin to attract attention and become desirable, environmental degradation is cleaned up and services are enhanced — but swelling housing prices often drive away those who have suffered through the worst years.

Alexandria Lloyd, a resident of Prince George’s County, expresses a common fear. Revitalization, she says, “pushes poor people back into other neighborhoods. Then [rich] people tend to get antsy, taking over neighborhood after neighborhood — and then the gentrification cycle begins all over again.”

Hopes and Fears

The Earth Conservation Corps holds classes, planning sessions, and activities in a historic pumphouse on the river’s banks. Prior to its 1994 restoration, the structure was a blighted shell surrounded by “a snowplow graveyard, with snowplows piled 50 feet high,” says O’Gilvie. Inside, bird droppings reached knee-level, while holes in the floor allowed a glimpse of the brown water below. The degraded pumphouse served as a fine metaphor for the state that has been allowed to fester along the Anacostia. Amid such despair, violence is endemic: the corps suffered a murder each year during its first decade.

Still, the number of participants has continued to grow. Today it stands at 45, and the group’s influence has expanded exponentially. Its first river cleanup attracted 300 people; this year, 5,000 volunteers picked up some 30 tons of trash and debris. The pumphouse, too, has altered dramatically; today it is a tidy brick building full of life. The group’s most prominent achievement, perhaps, is helping to return the bald eagle to the nation’s capital. But as its film Endangered Species asks: if the bald eagle can be restored, why do the youth of Anacostia remain endangered?

During their year of service, corps participants cultivate skills that create future opportunities, from cleaning and operating equipment to learning the ins and outs of computers and boats. O’Gilvie explains that the program seeks to help “solve youth crime and violence, train local residents, and allow them to compete for jobs.”

Indeed, the program claims an 85 percent success rate, based on graduates’ education, employment, and continuing community involvement. As the Waterfront Initiative brings new opportunities, O’Gilvie says, local residents will have the background to fill positions that would once have gone to outsiders: “Skills and training cannot be gentrified.”

His fellow community organizers hope that he’s right. D.C. Appleseed’s Smith fears that the restoration process will be subverted, that it will fail to help those who most need it, that if planners get behind in their goals, “there’s a risk they’ll never catch up.” And the history of the region suggests little margin for error.

With climate change manifesting itself in the melting of Arctic glaciers and the drowning of small Pacific islands, in widespread species extinction, forest loss, desertification, and impending water shortages, the scope of environmental problems has changed. Long-term alteration of the earth’s climate is moving us into terra incognita that’s difficult or impossible to reverse. Recently, Hurricane Katrina provided a dreadful example of how human alterations multiply natural impacts. And this is only one of many escalating global environmental crises.

As Jared Diamond puts it, “the only question is whether” the world’s environmental problems “will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways … such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies.” Given current inaction, at least in the United States, the unpleasant options seem the likelier.

The globalization of environmental problems means that environmentalists — and economists, labor leaders, and other citizens — need to embrace a concept increasingly being touted, albeit in rarefied policy circles: a single global group with real power, a World Environment Organization.

Global problems require international strategies and coordination, particularly for such goals as maintaining biodiversity, keeping the oceans clean, and lowering carbon emissions. But all too often, national sovereignty divides the world into untenable slices. The European Union, for instance, has developed a coordinated approach to tackling greenhouse gases through conservation measures and technological development. Yet, absent cooperation from the United States, China, and other major powers, such a task might come to seem quixotic. The formation of a World Environment Organization would provide global environmental standards with real teeth. It would also provide an umbrella for environmental organizations, and counteract the problem of single-issue solutions for linked problems.

Currently, the closest we have to such an organization is the United Nations Environment Program. Begun in 1972, UNEP suffers from a lack of executive power, as well as of political and financial support. With a miserly core budget of $60 million and a staff of 300, UNEP’s influence is limited. Its fragmented and ineffective structure has led many to suggest an alternative — as Frank Biermann of the Global Governance Project sums it up, to “grant the environment what other policy areas long had: a strong international agency with a sizeable mandate, significant resources, and sufficient autonomy.” Biermann’s recommendation, that UNEP should be “upgraded” into an independent organization, would grant the agency a gravity equal to its task.

Some critics in the environmental and development communities claim that a WEO would reflect the kind of centralized structure that has failed in the past, and that only local solutions can work. These critics make the mistake of applying to globalization-as-we-know-it the lesson that globalization is, by its very nature, bad. Suspicion of a WEO may stem from fear of the World Trade Organization, which looms as a model of monolithic decision-making largely in the interests of corporations tied to the global north. Globalization as currently practiced, for instance, often leads to a reallocation of resources, labor, and waste to countries with weak environmental-protection laws. But these environmental injustices, too, must be tackled on a global scale.

In fact, a WEO could act as a strong counterpoint to the WTO. Currently, the WTO’s Committee on Trade and Environment effectively puts the burden on environmental laws to avoid disrupting trade, rather than integrating environmental standards into trade rules. The committee’s decisions run counter to much of the good environmental work being done at a variety of levels. My own state of Maryland, for instance, has been an innovator in smart growth and low-impact development, and is working to implement wind power. Yet local — and even national — solutions are no longer enough. A WEO is necessary to coordinate and guide numerous local programs, to share knowledge and technology.

Internationalizing knowledge is the easy part. Granting a WEO real authority to enforce best practices, and to punish those who most harm the environment, is the hard part. Following what the WTO says rather than what it does, a WEO must be intensely democratic, transparent, and take into consideration the needs of developing countries. It must provide for an inclusive spectrum of voices and look beyond short-term business interests. It must be run by leading environmental thinkers who occupy a place of real power. And it must have a guaranteed source of substantial funding, perhaps partly via an international tax on polluters.

Given the escalation of environmental crises, pressure for the formation of a WEO is likely to build over the next several years. Among U.S. environmentalists, a call for a coordinated global response to potential catastrophe would provide an alternative vision to the narrow nationalism of the Bush administration. It would offer a new progressive goal that views the United States as part of a community of nations, and that responds to crisis by leading us on a grand quest forward, rather than a myopic journey into a romanticized past.

The WEO vision is one of human and ecosystem interdependence. If the world fails to address its problems systemically, the consequences will be grave. Ignorance, fear, nationalism, and scapegoatism may very well rip us apart, even as we fall ill, starve, suffer agonizing thirst, fight, and die together. In an interlocked world, only a World Environment Organization would possess the unity and authority to help.