Perhaps I have mentioned to you the Pelican Brewery [1]. It’s not wind-powered [2], it doesn’t serve organic beer [2]. I don’t even know if it donates a cent to any green-minded charities [3]. But it does serve the absolute finest beer – the Kiwanda Cream Ale – and it’s where I’m writing to you now, from Pacific City, Oregon. Oddly, even though we’re an hour away from one of America’s great capitals of green building, Portland [4], there is no recycling. This has pained me greatly the past few days that we’ve been here. That, and the lack of a compost pile [4] – hey, it’s a rental house, what did I expect? – has doubled or tripled the amount of landfill-bound garbage we normally produce. Kind of gross.

Another thing I’ve seen on the road up here – or from the road, rather – are giant patches of clear-cut, former forest acres now turned to meadow. I don’t know if that wood’s going to make paper or lumber or both. (Not surprisingly, there are no roadside signs announcing “Your Oregon Forests: Now a hundred thousand copies of The Kite Runner [5]!”) And I’m sure there’s some sort of replanting program – can’t totally burn the hand that feeds you, right? I’m sure it’s all fairly well-managed and somewhat intelligently run. At least from a human perspective; the squirrels and spotted owls [6] probably think it sucks.

While we’re up here – and so far from my green studio project [6] and its challenges – I’ve begun trying to plan how exactly I’ll go about building the studio. Mostly the whens and the hows; I think we’ve got the with-whats mostly squared away: The foundation will be recycled-foam-and-concrete blocks [7]; the walls will be straw bale [8]; the roof will be asphalt shingles [9] – when he moved out, the former owner [9] of our house left a number of bundles of brand new shingles stashed around the property; whatever we can’t cover with those we’ll put corrugated or standing-seam metal over.

A little aside: Are asphalt shingles green? This is one of those situation-specific, not-lack-and-white questions I think must enter a lot of green building decisions. They’re made with asphalt, obviously, A nonrenewable, petroleum-derived, and they’ve been shipped from God knows where. (On the highway drive up here I saw a number of trucks hauling various construction materials, including one with asphalt shingles. An interesting moral moment, to sneer at wasteful truck-based shipping of non-green building supplies while on a road trip, the cargo box and two bikes atop our Outback turning our mpg to “guzzle”.) Asphalt shingles are durable; I think ours have a 25-year warranty. Slate shingles [10] last forever; but that slate’s been mined, chipped from pits in the earth. We can’t reuse the cedar shakes [10] we’ve got on there now; Boulder city code won’t permit shakes after 2014 – though I wonder if I could saw off their nailed edges, plane down any scabby areas and repurpose them in another building. I once found some lovely terracotta roofing tiles in the Spanish style [11] stacked outside a coffee shop in Burlington, Colorado – those would have been lovely and durable. But the answer in this case is obvious: I already have the asphalt shingles, whatever toxic energy was used to make them has already been used, and if I don’t use them someone else will.

I’ve been reading Building Green [12], which I’m always mentioning, by Clarke Snell and Tim Callahan. There’s a little section about how back in the day, everybody knew how to build a home. Being primarily concerned with shelter (and eating food, of course, and probably mating), building a home, however temporary, was something you had to do – like breathing or digesting wooly mammoth meat. And, being a fairly primitive society, nobody back then had trucks or asphalt shingles – you built with what you had, with whatever sticks and stones and dry brush and clay soil the area offered up. (Totally green, man.) I like this idea. Not necessarily the primitiveness of it (though wooly mammoth sounds delicious), but the more generalized notion of taking what you’ve got where you are and making it work, of not trucking down Oregon boards for your Colorado shack, or West Virginia asphalt, or – the horror! – slate tiles chipped and shipped from China. At the very least, it gives you something to point to when friends come over: “Those shingles were just lying around the driveway.”