AUGUST 2011, posted by Susan

I sit in a tipi as children chant my daughter’s nature camp name, “Sugar Maple, Sugar Maple”. She stands to receive a blue marble that looks like the Earth, a token of her week at Flying Deer Nature Center. I have just come from a meeting on the cost of building our new house and, for a moment, I wish for a simple plan of poles and canvas. I ask my son, who is spinning a stick against wood in hope of igniting fire, if he would like to live in a tipi. “Maybe not in winter,” he replies.

The kind of house we want to build will cut heating costs by 90 percent. It’s a Passive House, and winter in upstate New York makes this way of building both cozy and cost-effective. It will have thick walls, a very thick roof, triple-pane window and some technology to capture heat and keep the air clean. If we are going to build new, we might as well make the most of the investment.

Saying goodbye to the campers, we drive back to the “For Rent” house, as Sugar Maple calls it, where we will rent while we build. “We found someone to build our new house,” my husband tells the children. “It’s the kind that doesn’t use much energy,” I add. Fresh from the lessons of nature camp, our 8-year-old son says, “That should make the Earth smile.”