Boxing Day Bonus: The Zero Ambitions Podcast

I cohost a two-part episode where we start talking about wood and end up all over the place.

The Association for Environment Conscious Building(AECB) is "a network of individuals and companies with a common aim of promoting sustainable building." Its CEO is designer and builder Andy Simmonds, who recently wrote an important article with Irish journalist Lenny Antonelli. It is published in full at Passive House + under the title "Seeing the wood for the trees - Placing ecology at the heart of construction." The intro:

“In recent years, as energy efficiency targets for new buildings have tightened, attention has turned to cutting the embodied carbon of buildings by switching from materials like concrete and steel to lower carbon alternatives like timber. But if we are serious about solving the ecological emergency as well as stabilising the climate, we must look even further than embodied carbon, and think more deeply about the core values we apply to materials and buildings, and the manner in which we use them.”

I thought it was one of the most important articles I had read in 2021, and when I started my occasional gig as a guest host on the Zero Ambitions podcast, they were at the top of my list of people to interview. It was such an interesting conversation; my wife Kelly, who can only hear one side of the conversation when I am taping it, noted that I had never been so quiet, listening rather than talking. We went on for 2-1/2 hours, so Dan has broken it into two episodes. Here they are:

Seeing the wood for the trees Part 1

Seeing the wood for the trees Part 2

My summary:

The issue of embodied carbon is one that the construction industry is just coming to grips with, as is the acceptance of mass timber. But Antonelli and Simmonds have been there and done that, and note that embodied carbon is "just the beginning." They have moved beyond the basic issues of carbon and to the larger question of what they call the biodiversity emergency.

Antonelli and Simmonds write:

"If climate change has been a rather nebulous concept, ecological collapse is arguably more so. It is happening all around us, yet is easy to miss because we are so disconnected from nature. It also challenges the idea that we can ‘fix’ environmental crises through technological solutions, instead requiring a complete reinvention of our relationship with food, materials, and the rest of the living world."

They question whether we can continue within a framework of endless growth, writing:

"Knowing how to respond effectively to ecological collapse is difficult from within a technological and growth-based mindset. But just like reducing our consumption of meat and dairy, which generally require more land than plant-based foods and thus put greater pressure on natural habitats, we can also seek to limit the area of land, and the quantity of raw natural resources, required to produce and maintain our buildings. We can also explore specifying materials that are, or could be, produced as integrated by-products of healthy ecosystems."

Antonelli and Simmonds are not the first to note that while we all love wood, it is not a magic bullet. We still have to rethink what and how much we build. Antonelli and Simmonds write:

"While material substitution — replacing high embodied carbon materials with lower embodied carbon ones — is important, it will never be sufficient within a growth-driven system. And it is not more important than fundamental measures such as building less and building more modestly, prioritizing the retrofit of existing infrastructure, developing a genuine circular economy for building materials, and creating low land-use, zero-carbon construction materials."

The authors then get into many of the points I have discussed previously and in my books, notably sufficiency, simplicity, circularity and design efficiency. Indeed, Simmonds acknowledges it and writes, "thanks for your own thinking that partly stimulated us to write this article in this way." You can read the full entry in each category on Passive House +.

This was an introduction to a longer piece that’s still on Treehugger at time of writing.