Green building expert David Johnston will be in Grinnell on Thursday to talk about residential contractors and how to go green. He is the co-author of “Green from the Ground Up: A Builder’s Guide to Sustainable, Healthy, and Energy-Efficient Construction.”As a green building consultant, Johnston has advised cities and states on standardizing environmentally friendly practices and making building permit procedures and new constructions greener. He is the president of What’s Working, a consulting firm in Boulder, Colo.

Johnston is also no stranger to remodeling. He has written an award-winning book: “Green Remodeling: Changing the World One Room at a Time” (2005). He was also named one of Remodeling Magazine’s Top 50 Contractors.

Johnston will present his ideas in a seminar, “Green From the Ground Up: Green Building Education for Residential Contractors,” at Grinnell College on Thursday, May 8.

He spoke with the Iowa Independent last week about how green practices are being mainstreamed into the building industry.

Iowa Independent: Oakland activist Van Jones has said that “In the future there won’t be any such thing called ‘green building,’ it will just be called building. And there won’t be green technology, it will just be the way we do things.” Do you agree?

David Johnston: “Exactly. Van is a good friend of mine; I know him well.

In the green building world, in the last five years, we’ve seen green building hit the tipping point and beyond.

The National Association of Home Builders and their market research division have declared green building is becoming mainstream. A few years ago the president of the NAHB said that if you’re not building green in the next decade then you probably won’t be in the building industry, and I think that’s where we are right now.

And the same thing with renewable, the same thing with most green technologies as we call them today. Solar is becoming more and more common. We will see more and more homes have some solar component to them — so Van is absolutely right.

We’re at a point of no return socially and globally, meaning that we’re never going to have $50 barrels of oil again; we’re not growing any more old-growth trees; we’re using more and more synthetic materials for buildings in particular but in every aspect of our lives, and those are the drivers for green building.

We’re not making more water; we’re going to run into water crises literally all over the planet. We’re getting food riots across the planet right now because we’re turning corn into fuel in Iowa.

We need to stop burning our food and start feeding the poor. All of these drivers are leading towards the inevitable, and I’m looking at the series of technologies in my work that are inevitable: social, cultural and technological transformations. Green buildings are the tip of that iceberg.

Solar is another inevitability because we are the only species on the planet that does not live on its income lives, on its stored capital. The stored capital are the dead dinosaurs that we burn, the fossil fuels. Solar and wind are absolutely inevitable.

I’m working with a number of developers who are looking into the crystal ball of their own future and seeing that they need to be building far more sustainable communities than they have ever considered in the past whether they be wind-powered where possible … just place after place industry after industry we’re seeing the conversions starting to happen in a dramatic fashion.

I’m working on a sustainable dairy right now in Idaho.”

II: In Iowa City I noticed a house in my old neighborhood that had been torn down and rebuilt completely. The new building has solar panels and other environmentally friendly features. Is that the way to do it? Should we dump all the old, inefficient homes and start over?

DJ: “One of the greenest things we do in the housing industry is remodel existing buildings. There are lots of considerations that go into it. Was it an appropriate building for that place? Was it going to be harder to insulate it than you’d ever get a return from?

Was there already existing mold to the point where remediation becomes challenging and can absolutely compromise the livability of the home? Mold is one of our biggest issues today that we’re facing countrywide. It’s almost an epidemic. Some black mold is nontoxic, and some will kill you, and it’s hard to know which is which until it’s analyzed.

So there are a lot of considerations in exactly the situation you’re talking about. It’s hard to say.

Boulder, Colorado, where I live is looking at a new law that would make it virtually impossible to do what you’re talking about, which is commonly known as a “scrape-off.”

The embodied energy in an existing building, if it’s at all possible to re-use that building, then we, in the long term, are not requiring not much more fossil fuel to modify it to contemporary purposes. But a lot of developers see a home as a vacant lot waiting to razed, and that to me is a tremendous waste of resources on all levels.”

II: Can you tell me about your book “Green from the Ground Up: A Builder’s Guide to Sustainable, Healthy, and Energy-efficient Construction”?

DJ: “I look at the carbon situation as a huge driver on the planet. I’m talking about climate change.

There are those who have done studies that show that the building industry represents 48 percent of the carbon that’s being generated in the atmosphere. It’s considerably higher than transportation even. The building industry has to take the lead in transforming itself into a much more carbon-friendly industry, and this mainstreaming of green building that I’m talking about is a step in that direction, but it’s merely a step.

What I’m really looking at are zero-energy homes that do not require a variety of fossil fuels to allow them to function to provide comfort for us. That’s the only reason we live in homes is comfort. Otherwise we’d live outside if we could.

The book is literally a step-by-step process from thinking the very first thought about houses as an architect, as a builder and as a homeowner to the building science which we’ve lost touch with.

In other words, when we invented air conditioning we didn’t realize that we were antagonizing nature and requiring a ton of fossil fuels per year per house or more.

The building science is: how water moves, how air moves and how the building actually functions because it does function as a system.

So the book is predicated on that assumption that the house is a system and we need to understand the system if we’re going to impact it.

To answer your question, it might, in the long run, be efficient to tear down and build a very energy-efficient solar energy home.

The book goes step-by-step through every sequence of construction from foundations, framing roofing, windows, electrics, plumbing, all of that step-by-step. What do you do. What are the considerations. What are the components that each stage or sub-contractor represents.

In the overall system that’s being constructed and the endnotes of the book literally are a synopsis of the book saying if you do all of these things it will get you to a zero-energy home. That is the target of opportunity in our industry today: getting ourselves into increasingly close to zero-energy homes.”

II: How do you make green technology and building techniques accessible for everyone? Has green become an economic wedge where those with the means are able to build sustainably and the rest of us are stuck in moldy, drafty, inefficient dwellings?

DJ: “There are two answers to that question. One, there’s an awful lot of green affordable housing being built today and so it’s not elitist in that regard at all.

The industry, from the city standpoint or the affordable housing developers standpoint or the builders themselves, are working on both sides: the upper crust of green building in 6,000-square-foot McMansions and to the affordable housing multi-family communities that are being developed.

I think there’s a lot of activity in the affordable housing arena, so I don’t think there’s necessarily a divide per se.

Having said that, where I perceive the divide is, for example, there are primarily Spanish-speaking Hispanic workers all over the country and no blueprints are ever written in Spanish. No green guidelines that I know of are in Spanish, and what we need to be doing right now is retrofitting 123 million homes in this country.

We can’t outsource those jobs, and what we need to do is train the economically challenged folks in this country to do this kind of energy retrofit (and that’s where Van Jones and I are cohorts in crime).

What’s the best way to get nonviolent prisoners back to work? What’s the best way to get high school dropouts back to work? What’s the best way to do economic redevelopment in city centers?

Money spent on energy goes right back to Saudi Arabia or Houston or someplace. It’s not staying in the community. And if we can create a job ecosystem that improves the quality of life in the inner cities and rural areas where jobs are disappearing as well then we start to create a new economy.

What we need in this country is a new economic paradigm that brings everyone along in this green transition, this sustainable transition, that we’re in the middle of whether people acknowledge it or not.

It’s happening, and it’s irreversible, and we want everyone to benefit from that.”