The House We Live In: A Series on Building the Sustainable Home in Tucson, Arizona
I have a lot of questions.
What will federal tax credits for sustainable technologies look like?
How will immigration policy (or even anticipation of it) change the labor market in the construction industry?
Will the demand for solar panels change?
Is this project still an important place for me to spend my energy and money, in the context of other issues that have become more pressing?
Are there certain companies and suppliers I might want to avoid for political reasons?
Are the political changes now and to come going to work lasting changes in the stock market that affect the financing of my project?
I don’t have answers, and I don’t think I’m going to get them soon. (Even if there were predictions, haven’t we all lost a little faith in what we can know in advance?) My goals are the same but the context is different. I do know that I love the design we have and I’m still working toward this without any major changes. I just have to live with the increased uncertainty here, in my building realm, as one of the places we are all facing it in different ways. It’s another level to run all these ideas through. And ultimately, I think, I hope, that what I’m doing will remain an important choice, tied not to a period of four years, or decades of change, but to the millennia of life on this evolving planet and the human role in it.
Amy Knight is the fiction editor for Terrain.org. In this weekly series, she chronicles the process of designing and building an eco-friendly house in Tucson, Arizona. The series will explore both how it’s done and what it means, from the perspective of someone who wants to do the right thing but knows almost nothing about sustainable building. Look for new posts every Monday. You can email Amy at amy@terrain.org or leave a comment here. Visit her website, or follow her on twitter @amypknight.
