Saw an article today saying "Brown is the new Green" - the argument being that green has been corporatized so deeply that it no longer represents the true social and ecological justice movement. Greenwashing, plain and simple, is in full effect.
The author suggested the color of the earth itself as a color that would be uninteresting to corporate marketing, but would symbolize global unity and our origins from the soil.
In our straw bale building community, we have often joked about being the "brown" building guild - simply because we didn't see DOW chemical rigid foam (although we do use this product below grade) as an ecological product, even if it was colored green and being sold and promoted as an energy saving, green building product. LEED and the USGBC have made incredible inroads into mainstream building culture with their rating systems - and the G in USGBC has been adopted by culture at large it seems here in the USA.
Also, solar, geothermal, air sealing, heat recovery ventilation, and other high tech aspects of high performance building are, in my opinion truly environmental approaches, and not all natural buildings use these technologies appropriately, as there is still in my view, a rift between what i call "conventional green building" i.e. LEED, and natural building, or "brown" building.
Here in boulder we have the 7000 sf foam insulated green mcmansions, with 10kW of PV, 50K in geothermal or solar hot water, and 100k in high performance windows - which in my mind is akin to the Escalade Hybrid. While these buildings use the latest in green technology, and provide efficient, "net zero" energy living, healthy indoor air, and durable finishes and structure, they might employ workers below the living wage, use a ton of petroleum, isolate the owners from the community and vice versa, and have embodied energy in the materials of the building that are off the charts.
Conversely, the eco-hippie straw bale shacks in the mountains might require lots of driving to get to the off-grid, structure that might have indoor air quality problems, or still use propane or wood burning rather than an HRV and solar thermal. They might have recycled windows instead of buying new high performance ones that cause the whole system to perform poorly.
There are levels of deeper "green" or "brown" depending on which color you see as most fitting, but both need to be integrated. One of my favorite projects is the S-house in Austria, which combines low embodied energy, community building, straw bale with earthen plasters (accessible to lots of people in the world, vs. DOW XPS foam insulation) with HRV, super air tight passive house standards.
See s-house.at
passive homes in Germany
www.fuentesdesign.com
www.fuentesdesign.com