Building With Whole Trees

Building With Whole Trees

A man named Roald Gundersen builds houses from whole trees. Besides being beautiful - just check out the slide show - his houses are smart engineering, since "a whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree." Keeping trees whole also reduces the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere in several ways: the wood sequesters carbon, and energy is not consumed to cut down the tree and process it into lumber, or to produce the steel that may have replaced it. Construction costs are low - Gundersen's first home cost him under twenty grand in materials and outside labor. The downside to this method, though, is that it takes a long time to build a single house. The process is labor-intensive and demands special skill, and it's a very organic process; thus, typical suburban cookie-cutter homes couldn't be cranked out this way. However, a house from whole trees would be, I imagine, a dream cabin in the woods.

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Counting Calories and Carbon

Swedes are now adding a new metric to their food labels, alongside nutrition facts: CO2 emissions from the production of food. The hope is that people will tend to buy products with lower carbon footprints. This information has certainly complicated consumer decision-making, as Ulf Bohman, head of the Nutrition Department at the Swedish National Food Administration, articulated: "For consumers, it’s hard. You are getting environmental advice that you have to coordinate with, 'How can I eat healthier?'" Some people report feeling guilty purchasing food with higher associated carbon emissions. Such a metric also causes less visible consequences - farmers have been pressured to adopt low-emissions techniques, which may force them to grow only certain crops. It'll be curious to see whether the metric becomes a permanent fixture that has a lasting impact, or whether it loses efficacy over time.