A CENTRALLY LOCATED WOOD STOVE and an open floor plan work together to heat this well insulated home. Tending a stove is not as convenient as turning up the thermostat, so homeowners have to be willing to do the extra work. On the right site, a well managed woodlot could provide a perpetual source of fuel that costs no more than the labor to cut and stack it.

Wood is a renewable fuel and, assuming that new trees grow up to replace those cut for firewood, it is carbon-neutral, meaning that it doesn't have a net contribution to global warming.

About three weeks ago I posted here about a product that decreases heat loss, decreases installation time, provides a termite shield, prevents damage, is cost-competitive, and is partly made with PVC. We ended up listing this product in GreenSpec, and to our members' credit, we got some pushback.

In December 2007 I posted about a video called The Story of Stuff.

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world.

This is the second post about strawbale building today. The other is Building Science for Strawbale Buildings. Regular readers may recall that post back in June about the straw-bale construction briefing organized by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) that was held in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington DC.

Over at buildingscience.com, the online home of Building Science Corporation (where you can benefit from the big-brained research and synthesis of Joe Lstiburek, John Straube, and others), there are tons of great articles like Can Highly Glazed Building Façades Be Green?,

Last night in President Obama's address to congress he mentioned Greensburg, Kansas as an example of leadership in green energy:

I think about Greensburg, Kansas, a town that was completely destroyed by a tornado, but is being rebuilt by its residents as a global example of how clean energy can power an entire community - how it can bring jobs and businesses to a place where piles of bricks and rubble once lay. "The tragedy was terrible," said one of the men who helped them rebuild.

The Jøtul F 100 Nordic QT wood burning stove.

In the 27 years that I've owned my house in West Dummerston, Vermont, I've always used wood heat to some extent. But my commitment to it has ebbed and flowed. For about the first 15 years, I heated the house almost exclusively with wood. Built in 1785, the house had electric heat when I bought it, but with my work focused on energy efficiency and alternative energy sources, I couldn't bring myself to use electricity for heating, because so much energy is wasted during power generation.

4240 Architecture is a national design firm dedicated to creating architectural, planning, and interior solutions that integrate social, technological, economic, environmental, and aesthetic concerns. The firm recently moved its Denver office from its Lower Downtown (LoDo) location to a former steel-pipe foundry in the River North (RiNo) district. The firm is the first professional-services company to relocate to this emerging neighborhood. Read the full 12-page case study

This major renovation converted a retail lumberyard into an office and retail facility.