Compare that with the typical reception the public has to what a hundred micro entrepreneurs do for our community. These individuals, hidden away in home businesses, contribute vital income to their respective families, yet rarely do press conferences announce the jobs they create, because it is not sexy news. Even though these 100 micro businesses are doing the same thing our forefathers and foremothers did — contributing to our economy, and raising children who will take our civilization forward – collectively, they are often not viewed as being on the same scale of enterprise. A hundred jobs are a hundred jobs, so what gives?

The micro entrepreneurs are like those seedlings in the forest that may become really big trees. Those little seedlings often come out of the fire, and many will not make it, due more to a lack of knowledge than a lack of capital, although insufficient financing may still bring down quite a few. It is knowledge and a support network that the micro-entrepreneur needs. I just reported on one of those companies – a sign business that started out with one guy bending neon in a garage and now has grown to a large corporation with manufacturing facilities serving Fortune 500 companies.

I enjoy writing business articles reporting news from large corporations. I have the opportunity to interview large manufacturing executives in several industries, as well as tech company executives. It is a fun job, and I enjoy my writing career in my little micro-business world. I do write about mom-and-pop entrepreneurs, too.

One of the obstacles to increasing entrepreneurship is that larger businesses often prey upon fledging entrepreneurs, as they view these micro business owners as merely potential purchasers for a product or service. It is the big fish eating the small ones, until the pond dies, contributing to the destruction of the community’s economic diversity. A new entrepreneur that is “green” in the sense of not having hands-on experience may find precious resources sucked away by a huge army of highly convincing business-services salesmen.

I have found that often, in a micro business, the strategies for success are very different. In a major startup, a lot of capital is crucial. In a small one-person or two-person business, too much access to capital too early in the startup may destroy it, just as too much fertilizer destroys a young seedling. Ideas are like water. Having less money is better, because it forces an entrepreneur to depend on knowledge first, and capital second. Restrained access to capital is truly the mother of invention! There is usually a cheaper, more efficient way to run a micro business, but if a startup borrows money, or buys expensive business services, they may never know this until it is too late. When predation occurs, many entrepreneurs quickly become weighed down with purchases they should not have made, using money they should have never borrowed.

In the early 1990s, a visionary economic development worker in Astoria, Ore. was awarded a grant to create a “Greenhouse For Business” program through a local community college and I was the program’s first teacher. The project was a brilliant move to transfer that hands-on experience of a micro-entrepreneur to those living in a community that needed to grow micro businesses at that time.

Micro businesses are phenomenal. People keep looking for more big ideas for our economic doldrums, but they focus too much on big business, and miss the beautiful abundant saplings on the forest floor trying to push through those first few years. Spokane is truly blessed to have some programs that promote micro businesses. What we need is for our community leaders to fan the flames of those startups all the more. Think small, Spokane. We have so many untapped resources. Revise your telecommuting and home business ordinances to make it even easier for micro enterprise to flourish here. There are also many people working on figuring out how to raise capital for startups in new ways and I applaud their efforts. Just make sure you leave the door open for micro financing, too.

According to a Nov. 29 Bloomberg report, “Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Europe’s second-biggest airline, plans to be the first carrier to test biofuels on regular passenger flights as the industry seeks ways to lower carbon-dioxide emissions and save on fuel purchases.” The article also reported a forecast from Boeing predicting as early as 2015 that one percent of the jet-fuel market would consist of biofuels.

Lufthansa, Europe’s number-two airline company, planned to have kerosene derived from plant oils contributing to as much as half of the fuel mix for an Airbus SAS A321 flying on the Hamburg-Frankfurt route.

In my 21st year, when I moved to Seattle from Jacksonville, Fla., where I was raised, I experienced the luxury of a six-month sabbatical. I spent that time reading the great novels of the 19th and 20th centuries, and writing poetry, while wandering the byways of a slimmer, youthful Seattle, before Microsoft came along.

By 1987, I was now mothering a preschooler and a toddler. That’s when I launched my first magazine. It was called New Families, and it was about mothers and fathers discovering and sharing new ways to combine work and family. This was not a new idea. It was simply a return to the old ways, which were still as rich and meaningful as ever. However, the 1980s were a decade in which many were seeking that coveted corporate space above all else, leaving little time for family relationships.

While women were adopting ill-fitting business suits, I wrote about new ideas at the time: telecommuting, flexible working arrangements, and the rebirth of cottage industry. I learned those hard, rewarding lessons of what it was like to work at home with small children, when few women were doing it. I discovered how to juggle a toddler on my lap, while working on my Mac SE. And, even though this was pre-Internet, I began to form relationships all over the U.S., receiving tutoring in this new way of life from other women who were pursuing the same lifestyle. The magazine, though it did not make money, (as is true for most small lifestyle magazines) gave me insight and wisdom that was priceless. I discovered I was right, after all. It was possible to throw off the chains of corporate slavery and freely reinvent a life as a work-at-home mother.

From that experience, over the next few years, I wrote a how-to book, “Growing a Business/Raising a Family.” Then, came interviews with national media, which found our family a fascinating news topic. Health Magazine paid what was likely a ridiculous sum of money to send a crew, including a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, and a truly odd German photographer to profile our family of five. Our clients at that time included several national family advocacy organizations that contracted with us to produce both newsletters and books.

The intensity of my life increased when I took on a half-time job reporting for The Oregonian, covering breaking news on the North Oregon Coast. I said to myself, “O.K., I’ll start a business journal so I won’t have to run out of the house with my notebook and camera when a boat sinks, or a flood comes. I can stay home and control my time.” I published that monthly journal — Lower Columbia Business — with my husband, for three years. It was a lot of fun getting to know all these creative small business owners and sharing their stories.

Once the community discovered what a business journal could do for the town, I was asked to run for the Astoria City Council. Life became absolutely crazy after I was elected to office. Even though my work continued to be flexible, now with a fourth child on the way, it finally dawned on me that time actually is finite. If you divide it into more and more pieces, eventually, those little slivers give no time for meaningful relationships with anyone. You really can spread yourself too thin.

So, after two years of flexibly juggling an insane amount of stuff, I just quit everything, and we uprooted our family of four children, resettling on 40 acres with a shack in Kentucky. It was an absolutely amazing and wonderful experience. I wrote a couple of practice novels in my first year there, and I discovered that I loved the world you could spin inside your head. At the same time, I began to work as a freelance magazine writer for national trade publications. E-ink did not yet exist, print was still king, and these publications paid a handsome sum compared to today’s standards.

When my last child was born, I put my writing down for a while, and then I picked it up again with different eyes, as I had become a Christian, following a near-death experience while pregnant with my fifth child. Now there was a whole new field of writing before me: theology. As I wrote devotionals for a tiny Kentucky newspaper, and accounts of my personal religious journey, it kindled a renewed sense of wonderment at how amazing life really is. I loved going back and forth between the worlds of theology and business writing. I worked in my little garden, producing an amazing array of the best-tasting food I have ever experienced before or after. It was a beautiful time in my life filled with the wonders of raising five thoughtful, ethical children, while continuing to practice my writing craft.

Today, after parenting for almost 27 years, for the first time in my life, I am now writing fulltime, as my youngest is in her first year of college. I live in Spokane and still dream of my days as a gardener in Kentucky. My hundred or so houseplants in my townhouse apartment serve to remind me daily of the beauty of living plants.

It’s a tough time to be a writer. The days of being paid a dollar per word as a general trade writer are gone, not to mention that a dollar is worth just half of what it was when I first began to write for trade publications. I used to be paid $1,200 in inflation-adjusted dollars for an 800-word article. I was paid $1,500 a month (adjusting for inflation) for a half-time freelance job with The Oregonian. Today, people regularly recruit writers, while offering to pay a penny a word. Before click-through ads made their debut, advertisers could not accurately measure ROI. Now, they are in a position to drive a hard bargain with content producers. Google is the giant in the writer’s office, offering both rich research resources, and, at the same, constantly tweaking a search engine that still allows mediocre content to reign freely.

That’s the down side to all this: the more the Internet has populated e-space with higher and higher word counts, the more meaningless it all threatens to become. A society saturated with bazillions of words loses the ability to see the beauty and wonderment of the fine art of crafting ideas and sharing knowledge. The most important word for the craft of writing is editing.

As I pick my way through the flood of words, spewed out at ever-increasing speeds, I aspire to carefully and thoughtfully wind my way along the path as a writer. I will always love the craft in all its various forms. It is my life’s passion.

Fiction calls to me. And, now is the time for a new beginning.

“KB Home is already a leader in building energy-efficient homes that can provide homeowners with meaningful savings on their monthly energy bills”
“KB Home is already a leader in building energy-efficient homes that can provide homeowners with meaningful savings on their monthly energy bills,” said Jeffrey Mezger, president and chief executive officer of KB Home. “With this announcement, we are raising the bar even higher and taking an important step in making our homes even more efficient and affordable for our homebuyers over the long term, especially when compared to resale homes.”

“If consumers respond as positively as we expect to the tremendous financial and environmental advantages of these homes in the marketplace, we plan to expand this industry-leading initiative to our other markets across the country,” continued Mezger. Read the rest of the story here.

Here is the link.

And here is another article in the same issue that I wrote about a nine-month training program in composites marine technology.

Unlike some ecological-minded advocates, this team of environmentalists doesn’t object to fur coats. That’s because they are born with them.

This team is comprised of beavers: cute, docile, and the best dam engineers in the animal kingdom.

Amanda Parrish heads up the beaver project for The Lands Council, in Spokane, Wash. The project began in late 2008 as an alternative method of creating more local water storage using natural methods, as opposed to a previous generation’s solution, which was constructing concrete dams.

Watch interviews with five women who work for The Lands Council.

Parrish says the amount of water stored underground, below a pooled area that beavers have created, can be five to ten times the amount that’s visible above ground.

“The Lands Council got the idea that beaver dams could store water with low impact. It’s a newer branch of The Lands Council’s focus,” says Parrish. “They are the future in management of hydration of all American streams.

“We seek to educate the public on the benefits of beaver and try to change public opinion so that they’re not viewed as a nuisance species that are negatively impacting an ecosystem,” she says. “In North America, they are historically the dominant managers of hydrology and vegetation in all of our stream systems.”

In 2010, four beaver families, with eight to nine beavers in each family — 28 beavers total — were relocated to forested sites in Ponderay County, Valley, Wash., Republic, Wash., and the Colville National Forest, says Parrish, who trapped the beavers. Several of those sites were on private land, as Parrish says some landowners see having beaver on their land as a beneficial arrangement.

A video showing the relocation of the beavers was broadcast on KHQ, a Spokane television station.

Parrish says, despite their awesome choppers, beavers are gentle. “They are gregarious little animals, even though they try to act tough,” she says. “They slap their tails, and huff and puff.”

Yet, she says they are still considered a nuisance species. “It’s easier to get a permit to kill them than to relocate them.”

Nature’s little engineers produce abundant benefits, says Parrish, healing an ecosystem. By flooding areas where invasive species have infiltrated — like reed canary grass — and thereby eradicating those invasive species, the habitat becomes more favorable to hydric wetland plants, she says.

“There are a fair amount of folks who don’t agree with what we do: agency folk, and landowners that are skeptical about the beaver project,” says Kat Hall, The Lands Council’s Conservation Program Director. “A lot think beavers are a nuisance.”

Hall works with the organization’s Spokane River Toxics program, which she says helps empower population groups that may not understand or know about the health risks from PCB and heavy metal contamination through consuming locally-caught fish. The program also does outreach in testing at-risk children for lead poisoning.

The Lands Council has seen its share of skeptics over the organization’s history.

Debbie Boswell has been the administrative director for the council for 20 years. She says the origins of the group came from the region’s medical community.

In the early 1980s, according to The Lands Council’s website, “John Osborn, then an intern at Sacred Heart Medical Center, decided something needed to be done to protect the land he called home. A group of area physicians, concerned about the environment’s effect on people’s health, agreed.”

The nonprofit, grassroots organization came on the scene at a time of intensive conflicts over forestry and logging issues on public land, says Boswell.

Advocating for an alternative to clear-cutting was looked at as extreme environmentalism at that time, says Boswell. “Now we are working together more collaboratively with the Northeast Washington forestry coalition.”

The documentary, From Controversy to Common Ground: The Colville National Forest Story,” is a 2010 five-part documentary that describes that change in approach.

There are two ways in which The Lands Council is unique, says Parrish. “In our collaborative work, we really work together with ranchers, federal foresters, mill owners, and politicians to see mutually respectful solutions. And, we do a fantastic job of keeping our work in the public eye. A lot of organizations recognize us as having a really strong public relations component for a number of our programs,” she says. “Without the public, there’s no longevity. It’s important to have an open dialogue — to be really transparent.”

Photo: Debbie Boswell and Amanda Parrish.

The Spokane C.O.P.S, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, was launched in early 1992, following the shocking murders of two young girls, who were snatched from a front yard in Spokane’s West Central Area. C.O.P.S stands for Community Oriented Policing.

“One girl’s body was found under a pile of burning leaves in Riverside State Park,” says Christy Hamilton, director of Spokane C.O.P.S. The other child’s body was never found. The chief of Spokane’s police department at that time was Terence J. Mangan, who is now retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“The timing was right for community activism,” says Hamilton. “Terry [Mangan] was ‘an outside-the-box thinker,’” she says. “Mangan and Dave Ingle thought about making it a nonprofit, and in 1992, Bob Lipe donated space for the fledging effort, she says.

With a dozen neighborhood C.O.P.S shops now in Spokane, and 300 trained volunteers, the organization is unique in the nation. “It’s the only community policing that is purely non-profit and not police driven,” says Maurece Vulcano, C.O.P.S program manager.

Today, there are new threats to businesses and their employees that were not yet on the radar in 1992: identity theft and cyber crime.

For those businesses and city residents who don’t think they have the time to learn about crime prevention, “being a victim of crime is going to rock your schedule huge,” says Hamilton.

Cindy Shackelford’s position with the C.O.P.S program, as a crime-victim advocate, is combating the rising tide of identity-theft victims, and is funded through a grant from the Washington State Department of Commerce’s office of crime-victim advocacy.

“It’s a way bigger piece than we had envisioned it to be,” says Shackelford. “It’s the number-one crime in the country.” Shackelford says it’s easy, fast, and rarely prosecuted. “They don’t need that much information to steal your identity.”

Hamilton says a criminal who gains access to your garage can be the beginning of an identity-theft nightmare. “Cut shrubs, don’t leave your laptop in your car, take your insurance information out of your glove compartment. There are rings of people that will steal everything from you,” she says. “There’s so many avenues criminals can use to commit ID theft.”

The good news is that there are a lot of things business owners and employees can do to create a safer work environment, when it comes to protecting against crime, says Hamilton.

For businesses, C.O.P.S offers assistance in launching a Business Watch Program, in which neighborhood businesses work together to prevent crime. It’s similar in concept to Block Watch, a national crime-prevention organization.

Businesses can form a business phone/email tree, says Vulcano, alerting one another when there’s strange activity or crimes occurring in the neighborhood, or if there’s a noticeable uptick in vagrancy or “dumpster diving,” for example.

C.O.P.S staff offers businesses help with crime prevention, and will guide business owners in creating a safety plan. This includes analyzing what specific crime-deterrents are needed in a business — such as placement of convex mirrors for better aisle visibility — and devising a more open floor-plan, as well as holding drills and doing training for employees on how to respond to a criminal attack, or to prevent one, said Vulcano.

“Having a safety plan for employees who work there, and protocols for opening and closing the business,” is important in case a crime occurs, says Hamilton, particularly if it’s something as dangerous as armed robbery.

“Also, look at landscaping,” says Vulcano, taking note of areas that provide potential cover for criminals. “We look at crime prevention through environmental design,” she says. “Look at lighting outside and inside. Look at window presentations. The more visibility on both sides of the window, the better.” She urges businesses to take advantage of C.O.P.S.’s free services. So much of crime prevention takes so little time, she says.

The problem may soon be worse. “If budget cuts come through, there will be less officers,” says Shackelford.

Another service the nonprofit offers is training for multi-family housing landlords and property managers. The two-day training session covering document management, tenant screening, evictions arising from criminal activity, and crime prevention is offered twice a year for a modest fee.

“All of us do presentations. Nobody calls back. We’ll work with people on implementation,” says Shackelford.

“People need to step up and take ownership of their own safety, but it’s like leading a horse to water. It’s very hard,” says Vulcano. “Taxes pay for this, but it’s human nature — we don’t like change. We want to stay in our comfort zone. ‘Leave me alone.’”

Spokane’s C.O.P.S shops, which are open to police 24 hours a day, also provide a safe haven, with online connectivity, where officers can fill out reports, says Hamilton — a refuge that became all the more important after the tragic shootings a year ago in a Tacoma suburb, in which four police officers were shot to death while sitting in a coffee shop. She says police officers make 20,000 visits a year to the C.O.P.S shops.

“They can get out of the car and decompress for a few minutes,” she says.

“If you are a victim of a crime, we can help you walk through the steps to decrease the impact on that for you in the future,” says Hamilton.

Visit the website for more information on Spokane C.O.P.S.

The Nov. 15th luncheon featured presentations from two of Unico Properties LLC staff, who discussed the strategies used in greening Spokane’s Bank of America Financial Center.

Brett Phillips, sustainability manager for Unico Properties, LLC, and Liz Fitzgerald, Unico’s Property Manager in Boise and Spokane — who both were involved in the implementation of sustainable practices — addressed a group of 40 to 50 people at the Spokane Club.

Phillips said the built environment consumes 30 percent of the nation’s energy and 60 percent of the nation’s electricity. “Every year the commercial office sector emits over a billion metric tons of carbon,” he said. The term, built environment, refers to human-made surroundings, including infrastructure.

He cited seven years of decreasing snow-packs in the Cascade Mountain Range, and said increases in energy costs across the Northwest are having “a significant impact on our bottom line.

“Every year Washington State imports 15 billion dollars in foreign oil from overseas. That’s fifteen billion dollars that are not reinvested here in Spokane in local businesses and in small businesses creating jobs.” Phillips said such large imports and use of oil is “environmentally irresponsible and economically unsustainable.”

Phillips, along with Clarence Clipper, and Mike Bedsworth, received a BetterBricks Award from the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance in 2010. The BetterBricks Award is given to honor accomplishments in achieving greater energy efficiency.

“At Unico we have identified serious problems [in energy usage] but, we also see we have great opportunities to 1) reduce our impacts, 2) to generate profit, and third, to make positive contributions to our economy, which is essentially what the triple bottom line is all about.

“So I think first it really starts with corporate leadership, and I think about Unico’s story and how sustainability became a part of who we are and is engrained in our corporate fabric, and it really started with a former CEO of ours who understood that the built environment is an intergenerational concept.”

Phillips said the company is committed to achieving LEED certification across its portfolio.

“In our opinion, LEED really identifies those key aspects to creating a high performance building: from water to waste, to your indoor environmental quality, to the materials and resources that you purchase and move around your buildings,” said Phillips.

He said that since 2008 the company has achieved LEED certification for over 75 percent of the firm’s portfolio. “It’s the largest portfolio in the country of LEED certified buildings by percentage of square foot,” said Phillips.

Unico offers LEED certification services to help a variety of owners, property managers, and tenants navigate the LEED process, improve Energy Star scores, and achieve LEED certification, according to the company’s website.

According to the U.S. Green Building Council’s website, “LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system, providing third-party verification that a building or community was designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance across all the metrics that matter most: energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts.”

Phillips said 70 percent of Unico’s buildings have achieved Energy Star certification, which is an international standard for energy efficiency.

Liz Fitzgerald, Unico’s Property manager in Boise, Idaho, and Spokane, Wash., told the audience the firm’s success was attributed, in part, to increasing sustainability through small steps, “If you don’t hear anything else in our presentation today, big steps seem very, very daunting. If you drill them down to small steps, it’s so easy.”

In this video clip from the luncheon, Fitzgerald describes the baby-step strategy that led to a successful project in increasing the sustainability of the Bank of American Financial Center building in Spokane.

Fitzgerald said Unico’s management and engineering staff began tracking “all the minutia,” including “independent metering of those kind of uses to make the tenant think: ‘Do I really need to cool my server room at 70 degrees? Can I get away with 75 or 76?’ And, so we had a really great exchange,” said Fitzgerald.

The event was fourth in a series of 2010 Green Business Networking Luncheons, and was hosted by Sustainable Local Investment Partners, a Washington State nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering environmentally sustainable, socially responsible, and economically viable community in the Inland Northwest.

Spokane-area event sponsors included: Sun People Dry Goods Co., Avista Corporation, and Spokane Teachers Credit Union.

[Disclaimer: The author, Jan Fletcher, is a board member of Sustainable Local Investment Partners, and as such, produced the video of the event for the nonprofit.]

Straw is an agricultural waste product all over the world, and that means that even the poorest regions can benefit from its low-tech, low-cost insulating qualities, says Lerner.

Straw-bale construction is not just helping conserve energy in the Northwest, but it’s having a huge impact in Mongolia, says Lerner, who helped a Seventh Day Adventist relief agency construct straw bale homes in Mongolia.
“I was working with Dan Smith and Associates in Berkeley,” says Lerner. “They are one of the pioneers of straw bale construction in California.” She says in Mongolia, the government, [social] agencies and schools all spend money on heating, and people who have very limited income may go without other necessities in order to heat their dwellings.

What is a straw bale house? The straw bales are on the inside, stacked inside the walls, providing the structure not only with energy-conserving insulation, but also with earthquake-resistant properties, she says.

“There’s a tremendous interest growing in it,” says Lerner. “Eco-building is continuing to be very busy, even during the economic downturn. As energy prices rise, people are also more aware of toxic chemicals in formaldehyde, and various building materials. They want to preserve both health and financial health in the future,” she says.

Lerner came to Spokane in the fall of 2003 and started her first architectural project in the Inland Northwest in 2004. Tom Soeldner and Linda Finney asked Lerner to design a straw-bale house for the couple in the Valley Ford area, says Lerner.

Currently, Lerner is in Sweden, living in a small town on a “mini” sabbatical while her partner, Alli Kingfisher, attends graduate school in Sweden. Kingfisher is a Green Building/Sustainability Specialist with the Washington State Department of Ecology, in Spokane.

Kingfisher’s study involves strategic leadership for sustainability, says Lerner, “and her class is made up of an amazing mix: classmates from 30 countries.”

While in Sweden, Lerner says she has noticed, “bikes are everywhere.” In Sweden, she says the culture discourages “ridiculous car trips, through a public outreach that encourages people to embark upon eco-confessions.

“After they confess [their most ridiculous short car trip], they tend not to do that anymore,” says Lerner.

No stranger to world travel, Lerner spent a month in Asia in 2009, promoting the concept of straw-bale construction. In 2005, Lerner was named by Natural Home Magazine as one of the top 10 eco-architects in the United States. Lerner was also honored by the United Nations, as recipient of the World Habitat Award for her work introducing straw-bale construction to China.

Lerner says that when the Adventists first heard about straw-bale construction in the mid 1990s, they took the idea to the United Nations. “In 1997, I went to the Mongolian Adventist to United Nations Development Program, and that was my introduction in international development work.”

Lerner still spends at least 10 months a year in Spokane, a place that she chose from among several Northwest destinations.

Originally from Goshen, Ind. — a small town — Lerner came to Spokane via the San Francisco Bay Area, after she had graduated from the University of Oregon in Eugene, Ore. and moved to the Bay Area. She says she found the Bay Area too populous. “There were so many people there. I like to be able to get out into the countryside.”

She says she also prefers an inland climate and her choice eventually came down to three cities: Spokane, Boise, and Bend. “Bend is a tourist town, and Boise is politically conservative, but Spokane has a good liberal voice — like you can make a difference.”

She says Spokane also offered a middle ground that appealed to her upbringing. “Spokane feels very Midwestern,” she says. “People are a little more reserved, and taciturn. It’s more conservative, and more moderate, compared to San Francisco.”

Lerner says there is currently a tremendous interest in eco-building that is growing. Architecture in general — not specifically building green design –is just not as busy as the eco-building segment of the industry, she says. “It’s continuing to be very busy in the economic downturn.”

Her interest in straw-bale construction has fueled her passion for something she says is much larger. “It’s like we’re going down a really bad road, and we’re basically going to kill ourselves, if we don’t go down a different road.”
Lerner says her work is “a small piece of how to live really, really well, but with less.”

She points to building trends that originated in Germany that yield almost net-zero energy usage for the inhabitants. “It’s getting the house very, very tight. You have air circulation, but the energy usage is way, way down. It’s the most restrictive energy use. In Europe, everyone is looking around and seeing different things ahead.”

In the states, she says part of it is culture, as housing is a “very, very conservative” economic segment.
“There’s super high liability and you don’t want to take a lot of chances. ‘Is this going to work?’” But, she says as energy prices continue to rise, more people are taking a harder look at building materials, including a growing awareness of the toxicity in various materials, like formaldehyde.

She does about three to five remodels a year in the Spokane area, as well as “full-on houses at one or two a year.” She says she prefers residential work, because she likes the “hands-on, touchy feely” that comes with those jobs. “I like the relationships.”

For Lerner, there’s a bigger question: “How do you really enjoy life? How do you meet all of your social needs, and your physical needs, but use a lot less resources? We are starting to run up against resource limits,” she says. “How do you continue to live well or even better, and stay within limits of the planetary ecosystem?”

Lerner says one thing she often tells people is to “just slow down and do less and start paying attention to where you’re putting your energy. Be more aware.”

As for how to bring down energy usage, Lerner says it “all depends on where your passion lies. Notice the most comfortable place in the house. That’s the area typically with the most impact.” Tackle the energy leakage with sealing, caulk and weather stripping, she says.

“Maybe you turn down your hot water heater, or look for energy star rating or better. Tackle the biggest hole,” she says, noting that “everybody is on a path, so do those things that you can that work on your path.”

Lerner says one big benefit to conservation is that as people do more conserving, “they don’t have to do as much work and they have a little bit more time with friends.”

Photo: A straw-bale house in Spokane.