BY |DANNY LACHANCE PHOTOGRAPHS BY |GREG HELGESON

These days, if you’re giving yourself a green makeover, you’ll probably start by picking up the yellow pages. Troubled about the impact of your gas burning on global warming? Buy a Toyota Prius. Worried about the inefficiency of global food markets? Buy locally grown produce. Concerned about the carbon footprint you leave behind as you tie the knot? Hire a green wedding planner.

It wasn’t always this easy. If you were trying to go green in 1970, the first thing you would have picked up wouldn’t have been the yellow pages, but a brick to plop into your toilet tank, says environmental studies professor Chris Wells.

“After the first Earth Day, there was a big emphasis on personal responsibility,” says Wells, also a historian of U.S. environmental thought. Putting a brick in a toilet was something people knew they could do to consume less water: “It took the then-standard five-to seven-gallon toilet tank and, by displacing a brick’s worth of water, turned it into a smaller tank.”

For some, the shift from do-it-yourself environmentalism to buy-it-in-a-catalog environmentalism is alarming. Environmentalism, after all, is supposed to be about reducing consumption, not expanding it. Some fear that by framing environmentalism in terms of consumer choice, collective action and advocacy for large-scale policy change may become less likely.

EcoHouse residents brave winter on their front steps (clockwise from lower right): Austin Werth, Heidi Evans, Avery Brown, and Kim DeLanghe. (DeLanghe replaced Rachel Brunner this term.)

This is a discussion I’m having with sophomores Rachel Brunner and Heidi Evans as they hoist the top off the toilet they share with fellow sophomore Avery Bowron and junior Austin Werth. Together these four are the pioneering inhabitants of EcoHouse, Macalester’s newest on-campus theme house.

Since last fall, they’ve been living in a 1950s ranch house on Vernon Street that the college has transformed into a live-in lab for testing conservation products and strategies. The house has been retrofitted with energy-saving supplies, adaptations, and equipment—everything from compact fluorescent bulbs to a hotwater heater powered by solar panels. Armed with monitoring equipment and a commitment to sustainable living, the residents of EcoHouse are testing how well technology-supplemented conservation efforts work in real-world conditions.

The house is the brainchild of Wells, who led his spring 2007 environmental studies senior seminar students through multiple phases of the project’s design: conducting research about sustainable living and home design, envisioning the house’s features and philosophy, and writing grants to secure funding. The Xcel Energy Foundation responded favorably with a $5,000 grant. The college provided the rest of the project’s seed money, as well as the house, which it had purchased in 1994. Meanwhile, Macalester senior Justin Lee spent summer 2007 spearheading house renovations, overseeing everything from insulating walls to installing a dualflush toilet.

Peering over the edge of the toilet, we see a large black plastic device—a lumpy, shoebox-shaped water regulator— the 21st century’s answer to the brick in the tank. Push down the toilet handle, and you replace 1.1 gallons of water in the bowl; pull it up, and you replace the now-standard 1.6 gallons.

“Not very exciting,” Bowron says. He has a point. Despite the home’s extensive renovations, it looks less like an environmentally savvy home of the future and more like the modest 1950s rambler it is. But in a way, that lack of flashiness is the point, the EcoHouse residents explain as we sit down for a communal dinner (vegan stew prepared by Brunner). They’re rejecting the elitism that has recently surrounded green living by demonstrating how modest changes to a modest house can make a big difference.

“This project is about trying to make conservation feasible and accessible,” says Bowron. “It’s a demonstration of ‘this is possible; it’s not outrageous to do this,’ which could make it easier in the long run for people to support legislation that will change building codes.”

The home’s new energy-conserving refrigerator, for instance, was ranked in the top 10 percent of Energy Star–rated appliances in terms of energy conserved, but at $550 is by no means top of the line in terms of price.

The goal is to normalize rather than fetishize environmentalism to educate community members about how they might make changes to their own homes that don’t require a sense of ongoing sacrifice—or adopting a style that seems foreign to them. “It’s less about ‘turn the water off when you’re brushing your teeth’ and more about ‘there’s an aerator in my faucet, so I’m saving water all the time,’” Bowron explains.

What draws them together, members of EcoHouse say, isn’t a desire to see who can consume the least, but a desire to figure out how to consume efficiently and live collectively. Indeed, Evans says that the house motto might be summed up by an aphorism the group collectively created using magnetic poetry on their refrigerator: “Green is always better and more delicious.”

Selected from an applicant pool of 12, each of the house’s four residents brings a relevant eco-history to the project. Brunner was just 11 when she attended her first environmental conference, the annual meeting of Canada’s Society for Ecological Restoration. She sat through a speech on climate change, which was a new concern at the time, and finally understood the source of her mother’s passion for sustainability. “This wasn’t just ‘trees are good.’ This was systemic, trying to grapple with the scope of an issue that nobody was really talking about.”

Evans’s mother told her stories about the cooperative lifestyle she had lived in her twenties, and the battles between the hippies and the Marxists over whether environmentalism or egalitarianism should be their first priority. As a kindergartener, Bowron told his teacher he wanted to “plant trees where there had been clear-cuts” when he grew up.

As for Werth, he grew up on a farm in northern Colorado, where his family raised their own steers, chickens, and turkeys, and where eating locally, being thrifty, and conserving resources were a way of life.

To create a sense of community, the four shop and prepare meals together. “We like the symbolism of having the kitchen in the middle of the house,” Evans says. “It represents how a community is formed around food.”

They’ve also been engaging the community beyond Macalester. Dozens of people toured the house when it was part of the 2007 Minnesota Solar Tour. And local media outlets such as Fox 9 News, Minnesota Public Radio, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune have carried stories about it. As more people become concerned about their impact on the environment, Wells explains, the hunger for the kind of information provided by EcoHouse will increase.

“Most of us live in existing housing,” he says. “And if you live in this neighborhood, where most of the houses were built in the 1920s, how much can you really do? That’s the informational black hole we’re trying to address.”

Once all the house’s energy monitoring systems are in place, its residents will record and post data on the Web, making it accessible to the public. Open workshops given by EcoHouse students on their experiments in energy-efficient living will help Twin Citians put their own goals into practice.

“We haven’t yet hit the point where this stuff is normal,” Wells says. “It’s still fringe. So part of what we hope to do is to help push past that. It’s a lot easier for homeowners to make some of these investments if they know someone else who has done it, and if they know that it has worked, saved money, reduced energy use, and measurably improved environmental relationships.”

Ultimately, EcoHouse is trying to break down the split between grassroots “brick-in-the-toilet” environmentalism and elitist consumer-oriented environmentalism. These days, bricks-inthe-
toilet may be something that we buy in the form of dual-flush toilets, but that kind of change can and should accompany largescale structural change, Wells says.

“If people would like to buy a heating system for their home that will have a substantially lower environmental impact, it’s good they have the option. It’s even better if that option is affordable. And it’s best if that option is built into a set of requirements that manufacturers must adhere to,” Wells says. “The key is to push forward projects like this one, which are working hard to make information on environmental products accessible, democratic, and free. There’s a balance between how people choose to behave, how they buy, and what they insist on politically. Ideally, it should all work together.”

With EcoHouse, it just might.

DANNY LACHANCE is an American Studies graduate student and a regular contributor to Macalester Today.