Your Ecological House Part 1: Understanding Your Home Ecosystem

Your Ecological House is your guide to creating your “home ecosystem,” an integrated habitat that conserves and produces energy, reduces waste and produces food and other goods. Written by ecological design and construction expert Philip S. Wenz, Your Ecological House is a selection of articles from his nationally syndicated newspaper column by the same name.

But the book is more than just a collection of articles. The articles have been organized into sections covering topics that will help you understand your home ecosystem (Part 1), and then design and create it (Part 2). Offering unique advice on how to find practical, cost-effective solutions to real problems, the book helps you become your own designer, or work effectively with professional green designers and builders.

Each section has its own Introduction that gives you an overview of the topics explored in its articles. Also, each original newspaper article has been expanded, annotated and cross referenced to related articles and to the book's extensive, annotated Resource section and Glossary.

Part 1, Understanding Your Home Ecosystem, (71,300 words) explains: 1) the home ecosystem concept, 2) conserving energy, 3) harvesting sunlight, 4) conserving and reusing water and, 5) Integrating your yard and garden into your home ecosystem.

Part 2, Creating Your Ecological House, will be published in Spring, 2017. Its sections address: 1) Designing Your Ecological House, 2) green building materials 3) green building components, 4) green heating and cooling, 5) maintaining Your Ecological House and, 6) How to be an Earth Steward.

Author Philip S. Wenz spent 35 years designing, building, teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the founder and former Director of the Ecological Design Program at the San Francisco Institute of Architecture, and a long-standing instructor at Berkeley’s Owner Builder Center, where he taught courses in residential construction and remodeling to home owners. He is the author of the book Adding to A House: Planning, Design and Construction (Taunton Press, 1995). Wenz currently lives with his wife in Monmouth, Oregon, where he writes his Your Ecological House newspaper column and works on his home ecosystem.