We didn’t really mean to take a tour of North America’s Great Logging Sites, but our vacation road trip seems to be following that route. Right now we’re in Bella Coola [1], a 2,000-person coastal community at the tail end of a very long road to nowhere – a thirteen-hour-drive from Vancouver, and about 3,000 miles from Boulder. My rebuilt-green studio project [1] seems quite far away.

British Columbia, like Oregon [1] and much of the Pacific Northwest, is one of the big logging centers of North America – probably the big center. The trees here are large, old, and mighty: 300-foot-tall spruce, Douglas fir, Western red cedar. (I should have brought some of my old cedar shingles [1] up with me: “Mom, is that you?”) Once they’re felled, most of those trees get turned into one kind of building material or another.

My new green-building guru, Clarke Snell [2], likes to point out that wood itself isn’t bad – in fact, it’s great: structurally strong, durable, renewable, easily machined, one of the best building materials around. (“If someone discovered wood today,” he writes in Building Green [3], “ it would be heralded as the greenest of green building materials.”) The trouble with wood isn’t with wood, it’s with us. We overbuild and overuse wood to the point of absolute unsustainability. Forget about the environmental impacts – loss of habitat, increased erosion, the over-silting of rivers. In places like Bella Coola, this means the salmon can’t breathe which means the bears can’t eat which means the nitrogen contained in the dead salmon can’t get pooped out onto the forest floor, where it won’t feed the new generations of trees – we simply don’t have enough wood for the thousands of 5,000-square-foot “dream homes” being spat daily upon the earth.

But you fell a fir and de-limb it and mill it down and truck it down to Colorado, where a wannabe builder like me buys a 12-foot beam but only uses 10, tossing the other two feet into the landfill. As I’ve said before, you shouldn’t feel guilty for stuff like that – let me modify: you shouldn’t only feel guilty – you should feel stupid. But that’s what brown building [3] looks like. Sitting up here at the foot of those fir-strewn mountains, I don't want to be stupid.