Passive Homes, Passive Earth
Massachusetts
2024, Junior, Creative Writing
Now imagine this: You are cold in your little apartment. What do you do? Turn on the heater, that’s what. Then you notice something; you’re not getting any warmer. You check your windows and doors; they aren’t leaking air. Then you feel that the metal frames of the windows are ice cold. You realize the windows are not insulated, and if the windows are not insulated, your little hand-held heater can’t warm the room up enough. The big fancy heaters that can keep you warm are way too expensive for your wallet to handle. What do you do now?
I have grown up learning about passive homes because my father works with people who build them. He tells me that passive homes are houses specifically designed to be as heat efficient as possible. All you need is a little battery heater in the ventilation system, just in case. Passive houses have other benefits, too. For example, radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas in the soil that seeps through foundation cracks in traditional homes and is known to cause lung cancer. One study found that the average level of radon in traditional homes is three times that of passive homes. (Passive House + Sustainable Living, “Radon in Passive Houses,” Issue 35, Sept. 2020).
I have done additional research into passive homes because I am interested in how they can impact climate change. For example, when I saw architect Bryn Davidson’s Ted Talk, I was fascinated. (“Green buildings are more than brick and mortar,” Bryn Davidson, TEDxRenfrewCollingwood, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEUShQ7r_tE, November 26, 2014). He talks about how we’ve been determining how green a house is solely by looking at how thick the walls are and how much green tech, or “Green Bling,” is on it. He wants people to ask some other questions: Where is the house, and what does it replace? He gives us examples of expensive Green Bling filled houses that achieved net zero on greenhouse gas emissions but replaced meadows and forests in the middle of nowhere. Bryn Davidson explained that since that building is in the middle of the wilderness, its owners need to use cars for frequent transportation. Moreover, the building replaced a forest that was trying desperately to save the Earth. As he says, “The squirrels weren’t driving around in little cars!”
After this, I started thinking about how these aspects of “green” homes would outweigh the net zero passive house’s effect. Instead of tacking on more and more Green Bling, we should be building a typical passive house in a very walkable city. Then, we might actually help lower the greenhouse gas emissions. By reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we can help slow down climate change, which is what’s happening right now.
For those of you who don’t know, climate change is the Earth heating up because of trapped heat from special gases we call greenhouse gases. These gases include carbon dioxide and methane. Since everything circulates and balances in nature, if we disrupt something, it will all come back on us full circle like a boomerang. Either by the food chain, deforestation, polluted water, or some other dangerous hazard we just happened to have also caused, one day, Mother Nature is going to snap under this pressure and strike back.
To prevent that, we have thought of many solutions, most of which would use high-tech machines that would probably take years to develop; by then, it is going to be too late. Others are thinking about just cranking up the production of Green Bling and putting it everywhere. That’s nice and all with that green energy, but that is expensive. Who will pay the bill? Then there’s putting together the Green Bling, which also uses up a lot of energy. Where will that energy come from?
Instead of these seemingly impossible ideas, we have a way that doesn’t require advanced technology or infuriating amounts of money. We could build an ordinary passive house in a city that promotes walking, biking, and public transportation. Then we can just make sure that this new house replaces an old house that has a lot of greenhouse gas emissions, then add in lots of plants to clean the air. If we design this house to be as space and energy-conserving as possible, then make as many similar houses in similar conditions as possible, then we will save the planet.
Works Cited
“Green buildings are more than brick and mortar,” Bryn Davidson, TEDxRenfrewCollingwood, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEUShQ7r_tE, November 26, 2014
Passive House + Sustainable Living, “Radon in Passive Houses,” Issue 35, Sept. 2020, https://passivehouseplus.co.uk/magazine/insight/radon-in-passive-houses
Reflection
Reflection
I always wanted to protect the Earth because I didn’t want the Earth to become a random desert in the middle of nowhere, like in the movies. I’ve seen pictures of trash piles and dirty water, and oh my goodness, I do not like that at all. It’s like slimy chocolate milk with hay and trash cereal in it. It‘s disgusting. The thought of how that trash monster would spread everywhere makes me feel bad about not recycling. Thanks a lot to Bryn Davidson for his Ted Talk; it gave me a lot of great ideas. I learned from him that a good passive house isn’t all concrete, bricks, and green bling. I’ve also learned that passive housing provides a lot of other benefits besides living in utmost comfort. I feel proud to create something that will spread the word about climate change. I want to tell my readers that we can stop climate change once and for all if we work together. Moving forward, I will participate in the Eco Bricks activity in our school, where we fill up plastic bottles with plastic we can’t use anymore. These bottles will then be used to make blocks and shipped to economically disadvantaged areas to build houses.