Other People's Dreams

It wasn't until fifteen years ago that I had any dreams of my own about settlement. I lived in cheap rentals and was proud that I could pack everything I cared about into the back of my pickup truck. Every summer I did just that and went on the road. Mostly I ended up "out west" where the rivers were wild and my writer friends took me in as a wandering poet.

Why was I on the road so much back then? I craved experience, and I was searching out ideas that didn't live comfortably in the South. I'm a nature poet and an outdoor enthusiast, and back then the people whose work and thinking I admired were out west-Barry Lopez, Rick Bass, Terry Tempest Williams. The wide open spaces of Wyoming, Montana, and Utah seemed to grow ideas about nature and culture in a way the South could not.

I held onto my freedom of travel in order to commune with these mentors and their work up close. The ideas that interested me were wilderness, species diversity, environmental justice. Often these ideas were worked out in places where whole counties were public, not private, land.

I didn't own land or a house back home and I didn't want to. Owning was not only accepting the American dream, it was locking into it. Why did I need to worship at the altar of private property? As an American citizen I already owned national parks, monuments, forests, and seashores. My taxes paid for the interstates and back roads I drove to get out west. Wasn't that enough of a stake in the dream of settlement?

But things change. I'm now deeply settled-married, committed to a job, a house, land, and community. I haven't driven out west in a decade. It would take me ten trips in my pickup to haul everything I care about away.

When I did settle we wanted life to be conscious. There was no satisfaction to be found in buying a house out of existing stock. We wanted the house we built to be as close as we could come to a direct projection of the values we hold, so we had it designed to be sustainable and sit down lightly on the land. We have a carbon footprint, but it's a size or two smaller than what's normal here.

Last week another lot in our small subdivision was cleared. When the loggers and the bulldozer finished the site preparation, there were still a few oaks left standing, but all the top soil had been scraped away. What was forest when we moved in is now a building site.

I'm happy for our new neighbors, though I'm sad for the woods they've cleared. Soon the concrete truck will pour the slab and the framing will begin on a conventional subdivision house. Some other family is building a dream just like we did five years ago.

Every time someone else breaks ground in our neighborhood it's hard for me not to project our dreams outward onto their dreams. Our dream would be for all home builders to make green building decisions, to site their houses according to the path of the sun, to frame with 2X6s rather than 2X4, to recycle their building scraps, to use a metal roof. Instead I sit back and grapple with other people's dreams, which in this region are still mostly based on what is conventional and what's cheap.

More people are dreaming green in the Upcountry of South Carolina. The idea of sustainable construction on a large scale is becoming a reality. There are LEED certified buildings in Greenville and Spartanburg.

I'm impatient though. I want to see the world turn sustainable. I want my neighborhood's carbon footprint to shrink a little in my lifetime. But I've learned that good neighbors know what advice to keep to themselves and what to share, so as much as I want to quiz these new homebuilders about how green they are, I don't. I keep my questions about how they will build to myself. Our dream house is not yet their dream house.

"The future is someone's fiction." That's what an engineer said during a teleconference I attended two weeks ago about world sustainability. What he meant was that we create the future every day with the choices we make.