How to Live a Green Life

How to Live a Green Life I'm name is Tom Harned and my wife and I built a home in the Wood River Valley here in Hailey. It is a lot of green philosophies and green technologies. How I understand with carbon footprint is all the petrochemicals in general that are used to transport food and items that we consumed in our daily lives. And so what I do to reduce my carbon footprint is simple things like riding bike when I can, carpooling, walk my kids to school, we grow around food, our garden. So a lot of the vegetables that we consume come from our backyard. Some of the other things I do is I buy some local produce at the Farmer’s Market so they see in town. Some of the other markets have some locally produced items that I can buy. There are meat suppliers, there’s some milk that comes out of -- that’s pretty good stuff and some eggs. So, most of the things we consume during our days are produced easily within 100 miles. If not, even closer than that. Part of the LEED process is really considering what you do with your water usage out in your landscape. The term that a lot of folks will use is zero scale and what you are trying to do there is just plant as native as possible with low water usage plants, plants that develop in this region to live on very, very little water in the summer time. So we’ve incorporated a lot of that into our landscape here. If you’re going to put water on the ground, why don’t you go ahead and put it on something that you can eat more than just providing food for your family, provide family time. One of the neatest things that we found with our garden is the time that our children get in there. I watch my son walked through the garden and he’s hand and mouth with so many of the fruits, the beans have come off the plants and the lettuce and the basil, he just pops that in his mouth and chews away and it’s a great way to get vegetables into his body. Back here, we have some -- you can see a yellow squash back there. It looks like it's actually ready to go. We have some zucchini’s behind me. We’ve got lots of tomatillos planted in this section, a little bit small this time of year, it’s a hard growing season. We have some carrots, planted in between the tomatillos over there. We've got some broccoli, some more carrots and beets and lettuce and chard. We have some sugar snap peas and snow peas. Now back behind you, we have some bush beans, that’s some more broccoli, some cabbage and tomatoes and some potatoes. So, this is one of the great ways that have ever smaller carbon footprint and also save yourself some money. You can see here on the left we got power from the sun electricity and here on the right we have panels that we got hot water from the sun, things that we all use everyday of our lives. When we’re not using the power that’s created by the whole power has set up with us, but we will contact -- back them. So that helps to pay off the cost of the panels, but about a 100% of our hot water in needs will come from the sun. When you’re talking about paying for gas to heat your water, that can really save a big chunk of money. We have constructed wetlands. What it is a pool filled with gravel if you would and what that does is it captures the sewage before it hits the ground water. This is the constructed wetlands, which is pretreatment before the water goes into the ground. Most folk systems, most septic systems is the way they work is as holding tanks and then it’s pumped directly into the drain field. These wetlands are in line between those tanks and the drain field and what it does is all these plants and the microbes that live within system here biodegrade the effluent before it hits the drain field. So it’s even cleaner when it goes into the ground. It is a lot cleaner than most people’s systems. And as you can tell there’s no smell. So, it’s not like you have sewage plant in your backyard, you don’t notice it at all. It’s all wetlands. All these plants are wetland plants, we have sedges and rushes. We have some of the irises that come up. So it’s a real different landscape to put into your yard because most folks don’t have wetlands in your yards. These folks will have mosquitoes if they do. There are no mosquitoes associated with this because it’s all gravel base, there’s no water on the surface but the plant roots can’t get down into the water so you can’t have a different type of plants living in your yard. If you’re going to need building a home, make sure you plan to have the sun warm your house. It’s called passive solar design, people have been doing it for thousands of years. The sunlight comes in, you have a lot of thermo mass inside, will grab and hold of that heat, hold on to it and release it nice and slow during the evening hours. In the summer time, you want to make sure you have some shade because you don’t want that sun in keep the sun out. In the winter time, you want to make sure you have plenty of southern glass so you have a lot of sunlight coming into your home. If people start thinking differently, those thoughts can be lived back so those actions are truly going to change our community and our lifestyles. The green building has really opened my eyes to a larger picture and that is pretty fascinating when I talk with people to find out how many other people wondering what is how to go about doing it and like I said it’s just taking the baby steps and always keeping it in back of your mind, when you turn something on, recognize what it’s doing, if using power from somewhere and trying to change our habits just a little bit at a time and it can make a big difference in the big picture.