The Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability

ORIGINAL GREEN BOOK REVIEW

The Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability is a simple book.

And in a world of over-designed buildings, highways, lifestyles, etc., simple better start sounding a lot more like a compliment and a lot less like a put-down.
That statement goes hand-in-hand with the philosophy shared in Stephen A. Mouzon's Original Green (The Guild Foundation Press. $29.95.)

Original Green succeeds in simplicity with large type, clear writing, easy to grasp concepts and hundreds of hauntingly beautiful photographs.

It's the kind of book you want to dog ear -- so you remember what page stated something so simply about the bad feelings you've been having about the commute our in-town neighbors bought into when they traded a modest old house in the city for a slapped up production built house 30 miles from where they work.

Original Green takes nerd-speak (let's be honest, even the urbanists among us must confess that it's more fun to talk about food, beverage and travel than building types, housing patterns and sustainability theories) and turns it into something as easy to comprehend as a breezy story in the best of onboard airline magazines.

Speaking of flight, Original Green is so compactly-presented and tightly written that one could easily crack it open, take a nap, then finish the entire 280 pages before the end of a three-hour flight from Miami to New York.

That Mouzon, an architect, urbanist, author and photographer, can tackle items of such gravity with words that don't intimidate is a great tribute to his skills as a storyteller.

So, what did we dog ear?

A page with a map of Florida's projected growth (projections made before our home state became the poster child for foreclosures, job loss and every other consequence of sprawl and unmanaged growth) shows the not-that-long-ago pastoral Sunshine State turned into one giant City covering most of peninsula save for the Everglades, Lake Okeechobee and a stretch of the Panhandle.

Worse yet, these are not compact cities with transit and walkability, these are endless sprawvilles that will make the worst of Los Angeles County look as compact as Cambridge Mass.

We got a kick out of Mouzon's musings on blind growth for the sake of growth. He makes the analogy that human beings reach their mature body height growth by age 20, but continue to grow "wiser, more talented, more athletic, more cultured," etc.

The obvious hint is our urban growth patterns need to do the same.

We love the book's depiction of Classical Architecture branching out into sound vernacular forms in Charleston, Nantucket, Santa Fe, New Orleans, Bermuda and the Cotswolds. We cheer the scolding over crazy houses that have nothing to do with the local vernacular and all to soon may be too expensive to maintain, depending on peak energy and other shrinking resources.

We love the colorful picture of Antigua, Guatemala and the point it proves that the brightly-colored courtyard houses of La Antigua are not the product of Disneyesque tourism campaigns, but rather a wholesome and lasting example of" Spanish colonial architecture adapted to the climate and conditions (earthquakes, available materials, etc.) of Central America." Point well-made.

We also appreciate Mouzon's warnings about the Greenwashing of America : when every corporation with an advertising firm in New York and a lobbyist in Washington goes to great lengths to convince you that its product -- "cleaning supplies to cars to toilet paper" to coal and corn chips -- is the greenest.

Mouzon's carefully arranged chapters and subtopics teach us how to invest in real sustainability, not the fake version of it sold by the Madison Avenue brainwashing and Jack Abramoff influence peddling types.

Our only criticism, and we have already voiced this in person from mainland Miami to our sandbar cousin Mouzon out on Miami Beach, is that a book on sustainability must specifically address the issues of wheelchair access, visitability, aging in place and universal design.

We at Casa Wright are huge advocates of universal design and wish architects (who fully embrace stringent hurricane and other difficult codes and address them creatively) would stop fighting the Americans with Disabilities Act and start realizing that a big part of a urban sustainability has to do with everyone from child in stroller to professional using a wheelchair being able to conduct daily lives without encountering barriers in the built environment.

Full disclosure complete and stepping down from our soap box, we can now wholeheartedly recommend The Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability to anyone who gives a damn about our the future of where we live.

www.theoriginalgreen.org

Wright is the author of 5,000 published articles on urban life, architecture, public policy, planning and design. He is active in working to make sure universal design, which provides barrier-free access to people with disabilities, is incorporated to the essential and rapidly-evolving practice of sustainability.