In September 2015, we sat on a pile of gravel, announcing the build of our forever house—a certified Passive House—in McMinnville, Oregon.  If you’ve been following our story you know nothing is forever.  We did the house.  We lived in it 4 years.  Then our Brooklyn kids moved to Bend and a grandson was born.  Our son, Joel and his wife Laura invited us to move closer to them in Bend and then came the Plague.  We had to consult our Portland daughter Erin, who said she was surprised we hadn’t moved already.  So we sold our first forever home and took our leave to the high desert of Central Oregon, under the careful watch of some snow-clad, sleeping volcanoes.   Kind’ve a no-brainer, right?  We’re pretty sure this is where we’re supposed to be!

If the decision to move was easy, choosing whether to do another Passive House, wasn’t much harder.  When we retired and went Net Zero in McMinnville, it was pretty simple. With the planet on fire, we needed to respond in kind!  In our white privilege, we had the resources.  In our 4 years there, we toured hundreds of people through our first Passive House to give them a glimpse of another way to live.  The truth is, if we can’t learn to live low-emission lives in much smaller homes and make policies and building codes to match, we’re screwed! 

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As we moved across the Cascade Mountains, the climate emergency just got worse.  And, now we live in a region where chambers of commerce boast of 300 sun days a year and it makes no sense why every single south and west-facing roof doesn’t have solar.  It makes no sense why heat pump water heaters, ductless heat pumps and EVs aren’t the standard in every home. It makes no sense how we can still build homes of 4,000 ft2 and more, with a clear conscience.  So it also makes no sense for us to live in anything but a Passive House again. We will build in a new neighborhood and tour another ton of our neighbors through a living alternative. Our privilege must do some good.  Maybe it’s a Johnny Appleseed kind of thing, scattering the seeds of net zero across the land.  Anyway, HERE WE GO AGAIN:  Passive House II!

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To start, we assembled the best Design Team no money can buy—Passive Pitney LLC! Over several months they put together the building blocks and submitted a plan to SolAire Homebuilders of Bend.  SolAire said it was flawless!  We checked with the Engineer-In-Chief who assured us we had all the equipment we needed for the job.  We were set!

SolAire Homebuilders has been great.  Owner Mike O’Neil (moneil@solairehomebuilders.com) and operations staff Kate and Kendra have never built a certified Passive House before, but they know green building and were eager to learn.  In actuality, we are building the same house as Passive I, with improvements.  For instance, Debbie requested an extra foot be added to the south side, so she won’t have to shuffle sideways between the bed and the wall anymore to get up in the morning!  At the Ground-breaking, we assembled the SolAire team with Jackson and his family, a few friends, our local United Methodist priest and Juan, the excavator man to execute a proper baptism.  We circled up on the ground of our future living room to consider our calling.  We acknowledged we aren’t the first humans to steward this place and won’t be the last…and that, indeed, we don’t really own the place. We are but strangers and guests, privileged to be caretakers for a speck in time…in partnership with the Great Mysterious.

We shared our dreams:

            —To build a certified Passive House that will give back more than it takes.

            —To generate enough electricity to power our home and charge the EV.

            —To use gray water for irrigation, creating a landscape where water is cherished.

            —To live in a home of a size (1,040 ft2) that meets our needs and fits the neighborhood.

            —To give tours to share what we’ve learned and demonstrate what’s possible!

            —To advocate for codes of building and equity, so all people can partake in Net Zero!

Rev. Jen led us in a blessing, that our home be established and persevere in love, justice and peace.  Amen.  Then we faux-smashed a bottle of sparkling spirits on the excavator scoop. We anointed the ground with a sprinkling of cider and raised our glasses to the azure sky. 

Friends of Our Net Zero life, we are indeed building Passive 2.  Over the next several months, we will share the process, show how Passive 1 & 2 differ and have some conversation about why this matters in 2022.  We will share endless ideas to help you take steps toward Net Zero, even if you’ll never build a place with 11 inch walls.   We will also try to keep you up-to-date on how to advocate for local, state, federal and international policies to keep humankind from going down the crapper and taking the whole living family with us.  Never in the history of our shining Planet has there been a time like this one, crying out for America to transform our greed into something more just and less suicidal.  So please feel free to share the blog with others who need it.

Sadly, to clear the way for our house, we had to remove one old apricot tree from the vicinity

of Debbie’s side of the bed and a small juniper from the living room.  The apricot is taking a shot at survival in the neighbor’s garden, but we had to chainsaw the juniper.  As I counted the rings on the fresh-cut rounds, smelling the desert fragrance only juniper can bring, I discovered that our son Joel and this young tree shared a birthday! 

The tree stood in the middle of that lot 43 years.  Our grandson’s time started three rings in.  Someone has suggested our personal legacy of influence spans the lifetimes of the oldest and youngest family members we have personally known.  My Grampa Cody was born in 1889 and 3 1/2 year old Jackson, if vigilant and extremely lucky, could make it past 2100—a tiny eon of at least 211 years!  Amazing huh?  Think about it.  Yes, our little time in this life is but one milli-click in the tick-tock of a very long engagement, but 211 years could stretch our hope.  As I counted Juniper rings, I had to wonder what our generation has taken from this holy present here and what we have given back.  Our aim is to have built two homes that could persevere at least 211 revolutions.

Wallace Stegner, in the writings of his lifetime, called the American West to account.  He famously said:

Angry as one may be at what careless people have done and still do to a noble habitat, it is hard to be pessimistic about the West.  This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.  W. Stegner

Our dream is that we can be a small part of this “native home of hope.”  Maybe our build can be a tiny, but significant harbinger for a society to match our scenery.  Only time and the breadth of our courage will tell.  We are trying to do everything we can not to insult the ancient imperatives of our Northern Paiute, Wasco and Warm Springs tribal neighbors and their ancestors who’ve lived, loved, suffered cruel oppressions and persevered here for generations.   As our Ukrainian brothers and sisters die at the hands of unprovoked evil;  as their own homes are leveled and they flee with their families from the land they love, we know it is only by the luck of the draw we were born where we were born and we stand ready to help however we can.   May the way we Americans choose to live and build be less and less a curse on the Planet and more and more a blessing.