Payton Hill

Clark, Jessica
1/25/2014
Writing and Research
Final Paper
Green/Sustainable Housing: The story of a Snowball Living in Hell

In this paper I shall explain a few of the problem plaguing the world at the moment, and one
integrative way that we could help to solve the problems. I shall also discuss the problems
facing the solution. This paper shall take a focus on sustainable living and the ideological gaint
that the movement faces.
The world is having a climate crisis, according to the UN Climate change is not a far-off
problem. It is happening now and is having very real consequences on peoples lives. Climate
change is disrupting national economies, costing us dearly today and even more tomorrow.
What's weird is that we have been told this for the past 40 years and we have done little to
change our destructive behaviour. I grew up in a beautiful open place with a very small human
impact, at the end of my street starts one of the largest national forests in the USA. I developed
a huge appreciation for the environment and couldnt understand at all why people would be
doing things to harm it. The ideas of economic gains and losses related to environmental
changes had yet to poison my mind. It just didnt make sense. In the past few years I have been
taking a deeper look at the problems and have been trying to become aware of what can be
done. The amount of ways we could stop harming the environment goes on and on, so I will try
and keep my paper focused on green/sustainable housing which I believe can be one of the
best ways to face down several of the issues facing the globe now and in the next few decades.
Issues such as scarcity of water, electricity, and food, as well as over population and crowded
cities. There are many organizations trying to spread these ideas through the modern world,

however it would seem that a great ideological shift is needed before this movement has any
chance of gaining ground on a global level. The environment is not right. As is, these ideas
stand the same chances of surviving as a snowball does in hell. Without changing the
ideological climate of the world first, the ideas are doomed to fail.
I would like to start by telling you about an idea I had before coming to LIU Global and why I
was thinking about it. Born in 1995 to a pair of open minded people in the northwest of the USA,
I have always had a strong connection with nature and with our environment. Growing up in the
time were in, I have been bombarded by news casts saying the end is nigh for mother earth.
Ever since I was a little kid all Ive only heard 3 things about the environment, that; A) its being
destroyed, B) were the problem, and C) that it will not be habitable soon. I have also grown up
hearing that there will be food shortages, water shortages, and drastic climate change in my
lifetime. As the saying goes we are the products of our environment with that in mind, I would
like to explain to you an idea. I had been dreaming up a house that generated its own electricity,
natural gas, water, food, and was able to manage the indoor climate with little to no energy
costs. You might say that it sounds perfect for a post-apocalyptic world, where you can no
longer depend on society to sustain you and your family. However this house that I imagined
was made with the greater population of our modern world in mind, with the goal to free them
from dependence on what I perceive as a broken societal system, and give them the ability to
be self sustainable and survive in a changing global climate. Naturally the first thing I did was
take to Google and Amazon, reading all that I could find on the related topics. I began to find
many terms associated with the house; there is passive building which comprises a set of
design principles used to attain a quantifiable and rigorous level of energy efficiency within a
specific quantifiable comfort level (PHA), Off-the-grid homes which are autonomous; they do
not rely on municipal water supply, sewer, natural gas, electrical power grid, or similar utility
services(Wiki), and homesteading which applies to anyone who values sustainability

and self-sufficiency and strives for it. This incorporates growing one's own food(Ware). I
should make it clear that my idea of a House Integrated with Modern Basic Needs, lets call it a
HIMBN, would be also follow the practice of sustainable building, which is building using
recyclable materials that have low environmental impact and can be replaced and recycled with
ease. It would be the ultimate house for the independent ecological minded being, but since it
would use already made recycled material in many instances it would also be very cheap!

As I researched and read on about the aforementioned building and living methods, it became
apparent to me that my idea was not nearly as original as I had thought, and that there are
organizations trying to spread this style of low impact sustainable living to the world. Which
begged the question: Why had I never heard of any of them? It became apparent to me that the
idea was quite well developed and that it just hadnt gained any ground. This was hard for me to
understand, as I couldnt imagine a more at peace with our environment way to live. So what are
the challenges to this idea? What exactly is stopping it from being implemented into every
house on the continent?. Well for one, there is the size. The idea of the HIMBN is to live in
nothing more than what you need and not to have to heat a dozen rooms that you rarely use. In
the western world the size of your house and its grandeur is often taken as a symbol of your
power and where you stand in the socio-economic class scale, and there are many people who
hold that dear to them. Therefore it isnt appealing to live in a house that is small as many would
see it as downgrading instead of upgrading, and fear what others would think about them if they
made the change. This should be coupled with the idea that if you have a house that is giving
you cheap energy water and food, people might percieve that as a sign that you are unable to
aquire it the normal and more expensive way, once again creating damage to your class image.
And on a final note, while I don't think that the ideas have gained enough attention yet, it would
be understandable if the industries that have something to lose from the implementation of
these practices (such as the food, water, electricity, and large housing industries) would be

against the widespread acceptance of them and use their economic power to halt the
momentum of the movement. The materials and technology already exist, it would seem that
the main challenge for my HIMBN would be shifting the paradigm of a culture's ideology, and
that's no easy task.

An ideology, is commonly defined as a system of ideas and ideals, especially one that forms the
basis of economic or political theory and policy. Winfried Nth defines ideology as a hidden
system of meaning in public messages requiring critical analysis. Which would suggest that the
importance of a big house that is very wasteful as a sign of economic power is endowed upon
us by the media, as that is the largest distributer of mass messages. Think to any movie and
look at the houses that the cool people live in, they are almost always large beautiful white
mansions. Everyone vies for a status of power, ideologies are the scoring guides to see how
you stack up and what status you get, ideology can be presented as a camera obscura,
(where) men and their circumstances appear upside-down (and the) ruling ideas are nothing
less than the ideal expression of the prevailing material relations...and thus an expression of
those very relations which make that class the ruling one (Karl Marx). For example in western
society, a semiotic of our ideology is your car, you want a nice car because by our rules, it
should say more about you than just that you prefer that type of car. The same applies to
houses and most of the rules that govern how your house fits into our ideology goes against
what the HIMBN stands for. So to change the ideology we need to change the semiotics of it.
You cant look at it as a battle to get the poor to rebel against the rich and famous, but instead
one must get the rich and famous to start publicly using the concepts so that they will start to be
seen as a semiotic of power and high status. What needs to happen is a manipulation of the
masses utilizing the semiotics of fame power, to glorify things that dont seem to hold those
connotations. However it cannot be done openly, manipulation needs to be subtle and slow for it
to work on a mass scale. Ideological connotations are hidden and want to remain

concealed to become inaccessible to criticism. The ideological connotations hidden in

the mass media aim at making social structures appear natural and inevitable in order
to conceal their arbitrariness and conventionality (Nth).
So how would one start to apply these concepts to the changing of the ideology is involved with
the semiotics of a house? The use of celebrities is always a good way to spread an idea. Due to
their massive amount of followers on social media, a message from a celebrity can reach the
ears of millions more than non famous people. Not only do their ideas spread faster due to their
fans, but people who hold them in high regards will often hold their views in high regards as
well. However they can't just be sending out ads on their social media accounts, but messages
that would make it look like they actually care or that they thought about the idea on their own.
Even better would be to convince people who are in the eye of the media that its an important
idea and cultivate an actual passion in them. Large movie producers have an even larger impact
on the public opinion. For instance before the USA entered world war II President Roosevelt
had been elected on the president of not going into the war. But bankers who stood to gain from
the USA in the war started to finance many movies that glorified war and when the Japanese
attacked, Americas youth was ready to go and fight. The same thing happened before 9/11. If
movies were sponsored that glorified the simple life and environmental consciousness then
people would start to want it in their lives. Everybody wants to live in a movie. Of course this
would bring its own problems as the people who finance movies would stand to gain nothing
from an environmentally minded populous. The best spread idea I can think of on social media
was the Kony 2012 campaign that went viral overnight. This was done by spending years and
years getting a base of people to follow them from younger tech savy demographics that could
follow them and stay updated on social media. "Each campaign lasts three months or so, with
both online and offline activities in concert, In the Frontline Tour, schools have their own pages
and schools compete across the country in fundraising activities." (Scott Chisholm) Once they

had millions of people with them, they release a polished video that their followers saw, shared,
and spread. Through this process of developing a base group of people from which to catapult
your idea to the masses a small amount of people can get mainstream within a decade. It
should be made that a change of ideology is not a fast thing. As a great woman once explained
to me, even the theory of relativity took almost half a century to catch on.

In conclusion, there a several different ways that people could alter their behaviour to better
protect our environment and promise that future generations could live comfortably. However
none of these movements are gaining significant momentum with the masses. What is needed
is an ideological shift, a change of paradigm. This can be done through the manipulation of the
masses and the semiotics of power and status. The rich and famous should be used to portray
the way of living as a cool thing to do and not just a weird hippy lifestyle. Social media also has
the power to focus the opinion of the masses on a problem, and could eventually be used to
change minds. Large industries can not be used to further the movement as many of them
would stand to lose something from a society that consumes less and is more environmentally
conscious. The movements must make what they are doing hip and cool instead of only
focusing on the demographics that are looking for such a lifestyle. This process will not happen
overnight, and if it is to be implemented it will most likely take a few decades before any real
change is enacted. We can only hope that the environmental situation will allow for that long of
a process of change.

Bibliography:

"The Principles." : Passive House Institute U.S. Passive House Alliance. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.phius.org/what-is-passive-building-/the-principles>.

"Off-the-grid." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Feb. 2014. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-grid>.

Ware, Lauren. "What Is "homesteading"?" About. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.

<http://smallfarm.about.com/od/faqs/f/qahomesteading.htm>.

"UN Climate Summit - UN Climate Summit 2014." UN News Center. UN. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.
<http://www.un.org/climatechange/summit/>.

Nth, Winfried. "Semiotics of Ideology." Semiotica: 11-21. Print.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers,
1974), 47, 64.