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The Goddess of Green Lane
Posted: 2009-02-04 11:45:09
East of Wilson on Green Lane sits a home built from recycled Styrofoam and heated with passive and active solar. A Toyota Prius sits behind the solar-powered garage doors.
The home belongs to a woman with pepper-colored hair and hazel eyes. That she designed and built it herself is just one way in which Nancy H. Taylor walks the walk. The longtime valley resident also teaches a green building class, "The Art of Green Living and Building" and writes the "Going Green" column for Planet Jackson Hole, often with her 19-year-old cat Babe purring on her lap.
Taylor's latest endeavor is a book released earlier this year entitled
"Go Green: How to Build an Earth-Friendly Community." And yes, it's printed on recycled paper.
According to the 61-year-old self-taught green building expert:
This book is for people who are interested in going beyond changing their light bulbs.Taylor's book outlines both community and individual steps people can take to curb their energy use.
"Go Green's" chapters range in topic from Green Schools and Hospitals to Local, Organic, Sustainable Food and Renewable Energy. Each chapter begins with a quotation and ends with Action Points for readers to apply to their own lives. She mixes her conversational prose with statistics, case studies and personal examples, teaching people how to remodel an existing home, conserve water at the office and bring programs to schools, hospitals and towns that will reduce carbon emissions.
The 135-page soft cover is capped by a 21-page resource section complete with contacts at green architecture firms, stores that stock the latest in green diapers and even green burial services and blogs.
Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, who wrote the book’s foreword, praises Taylor's community focus.
The community is the right scale to address these issues. The individual alone is too small and powerless; national government and Fortune 500 corporations too clueless, too powerful, and out of listening range. But a community is small enough to be real and reachable, something we can all as individuals influence and affect.
At the community level, Taylor serves on the Green Building Action Team, which is drawing up voluntary green building guidelines for Jackson and Teton County. Better building practices, she says, is one major initiative our community should adopt to reduce energy consumption.
People get sticker shock when they hear that green building materials and things like more south-facing windows are more expensive up front. But what people need to take into account is all the savings – from reduced energy costs in the long run to the improved health and retention of workers – all of those savings combined far outweigh the up front costs of building green.
Taylor admits that our isolated community in Jackson Hole – where "everything is trucked in, including our food and ourselves" – has a long way to go, but, she said, she's very optimistic.
I'm growing tomatoes and lemons in my greenhouse during January and it’s 20 below outside. There are ways we can change without depriving ourselves. People working together is what's going to both be fun and make it easier, so we’re not in this alone. I’m not holier than thou at all. I'm trying to find ways along with everybody else to curb my appetite for consuming.
In addition to living in an efficient home, Taylor buys Green Tags to offset the fuel she uses while traveling and buys Green Power from Lower Valley Energy. She also composts her food waste; she’s excited that Terra Firma Organics is working on a food compositing program for Teton County.
To skeptics, Taylor says people will start realizing something needs to change as fossil fuel prices increase and favorite vacation spots start disappearing.
As we indulge in our consumptive lifestyles, we are killing the very thing that we moved here for. We need to connect the dots between our actions and the disappearance of the things we love, like pristine waters, wildlife and clean air.
Taylor first built a solar house during the 1970s and has been committed ever since to living as efficiently as possible.
It was all self education through reading, seminars, conferences and really wanting to find ways that humans can maintain a great lifestyle without taking five planet earths to do it. Now, in our community, I think we have enough ingenuity to skillfully come up with creative solutions. I feel very positive and I have a lot of faith that we have the capacity to get ourselves out of this mess.
For more information on "Go Green: How to Build an Earth-Friendly Community," visit Taylor's Web site. Taylor is also a green building consultant and teaches a green building class each winter.
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