Let's get a little more abstract for a moment. This past weekend I went to a green building seminar down at the local U. Now, I don't want to sound all high-hat, but this is the third or fourth green building shindig I've been to, and I feel like the CD's stuck on repeat: it's all about efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. We've got finite resources on this planet with which to build office parks and bachelor pads, finite resources with which to heat them and cool them and play Barry White albums in them, and we – specifically, we Americans – are overusing those resources. It's not just that we've got to use less, it's that we've got to use what we've got – air, oil, water, natural gas, wood, mud, iron, aluminum, the sun – better. The environment isn't just a pretty postcard for hippie backpackers to gawk at, it's the source of all the materials that make our lives possible – the biological infrastructure of our way of life.

But we can't all just drop the iPods and move back into caves. (For starters, all the monkeys would then steal our iPods. And then when the batteries ran out on all the iPods, the monkeys would come looking for us. Angry monkeys.) The idea, on its most practical level, is to make the bachelor pads we already have run more efficiently. Stuff like replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact florescent bulbs, which use 65 percent less electricity than regular bulbs. More often than not, electricity comes from coal-fired power plants. Less electricity used, less coal burned. Replacing half the bulbs in my house with CFLs would cut our electric load by 20 percent per year. That's like unplugging the fridge for 12 months straight.

Homes use up about 20% of America's energy. Yeah, there are industrial centers and power plants and all that, but homes suck down a lot of power. And they're only getting suckier: The average new home in 1950 was a thousand square feet. In 1970 it was fifteen hundred. Last year it was almost twenty-five hundred. That's fifteen hundred more square feet that need to be heated with natural gas and cooled with coal-fired electricity and lit with electricity and painted and stained with volatile organic compounds and framed with forests full of wood. And it's not just environmentally more expensive: Whatever you build, you're going to pay for initially, and then you pay for it over and over as you pay taxes on it, clean it, maintain it, repair it, heat it and cool it. (David Eisenberg said that, by the way.)

On that note, our house is average: about 2500 square feet. But we've got two separate apartments latched on to the main house, where we and the dogs live. And here's the other thing: All that square footage didn't just arrive one day in 2006; it started life as a thousand square feet in 1940, and was slowly built up to where it is today.

And that's what my problem with the green building movement is. During this weekend's green building course, out of 24 hours of talking, only one hour was dedicated to green remodeling. Given that we are, after all, dealing with finite resources, shouldn't the first principle of building green be to work with what you've got? Building a brand new house out of Forest Stewardship Council certified wood still uses 80 percent more wood than adding on to an existing structure, right? Plumbing that new house with miles of copper pipes and plastic drains is still bleeding out resources – copper comes from mines, plastic comes from petroleum – that we're already running low on, right? And what about that giant and woefully overused resource known as land? Is it better to build a supergreen off-the-grid masterpiece in the Rockies, or to infill dying urban areas with just-as-green retrofits and remodels?

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Incidentally, I was talking to my friend Dave this morning; he recently finished building his supergreen house, which I'll be profiling later this week. (Don't worry – it's a remodel.) He told me that he could find no one in Boulder who could serve as a single-source green consultant for his remodel: it was more or less up to him to piece his place together. The solar PV guys knew their stuff, the solar hot water guys knew theirs, and the guys selling low-VOC paint knew low-VOC paint. But there was no single person or company that combined all that knowledge cross-platform – no one that knew PV and solar thermal and paint and lighting and insulation and where to get it all and what the building codes are that hold it all together. I don't know if I misheard him or if I just misunderstood, but if he's right, I know what my next career's gonna be.

Speaking of new careers, one of us Limeys is getting himself certified as a Master Composter: Jeremy Lehrer. As a fellow-traveling worm-herder, I encourage you to check out his progress over at The Compost Heap.