LIVING EASY ON THE LAND

The environmental movement is coming home.

Twenty years ago, when the first Earth Day celebration brought environmental issues to the attention of ordinary Americans, there was a perception that concern for the environment required moving to the backwoods and living in a geodesic dome.

Now, the stereotype of environmentalists living in rustic cabins with unsightly compost piles and macrame wall hangings is fading as more people demonstrate that houses can be adapted to respect the environment while having aesthetically pleasing architecture and decor. There may be a compost pile in the back yard, but it can be hidden behind a latticework fence; and the plants, now being praised for their ability to cleanse indoor air, can hang from the ceiling in a striking modern atrium.

Three Washington-area families with very different lifestyles have found ways to make their own homes friendly to the environment. One has a remodeled Mount Pleasant row house; one, an architect-designed passive solar house overlooking the Potomac River just minutes from Georgetown; and the third, an owner-built house in rural Charles County with conservation features that are as environmentally sound today as they were in the 1970s when the house was conceived.

The most important feature of all three houses is the use of energy from the sun to reduce consumption of oil, gas and electricity. These sources of energy deplete fossil fuels, which are nonrenewable resources, and their use pollutes the air with carbon dioxide, the main substance thought to cause the greenhouse effect and global warming.

The three houses also are well insulated to keep in warm air in the winter and prevent overheating in the summer, thus keeping down the use of energy to heat or cool the house.

And because the world's supply of clean water is also limited, all the houses have water-conserving features.

These environmentally friendly measures keep down the families' bills for heating, cooling and water. Once the initial expense of installing a passive solar system is covered, for example, the almost limitless energy from the sun is free.

The three families try in other ways to safeguard the environment -- growing their own vegetables, recycling, composting, and buying products that do not contribute to overcrowded landfills or otherwise pollute the Earth.

User-Friendly Retrofit

Kathleen Courrier and Kevin Finneran, who live in a Mount Pleasant brick row house with their two children -- Anna, 3, and Eamon, 1 -- have little spare time to go out of their way to help the environment. But they have found many ways to incorporate energy-saving and other conservation measures into their daily lives -- with the added benefit of keeping the family budget manageable.

The sun's energy plays a large part in heating the house, thanks to a passive solar retrofit designed 10 years ago by Courrier's brother Mark, an engineering student. A passive solar system uses characteristics of the house itself -- rather than machinery -- to harness and use the sun's energy.

Taking advantage of the fact that the house, like many in Washington, faces due north, Mark Courrier extended the south-facing back of the house about eight feet. On the first floor the kitchen was expanded and floor-to-ceiling double-paned windows and a glass door were installed. A second-story porch was turned into a greenhouse with slanted glass walls for maximum solar gain. Quarry tile floors over concrete and interior brick walls provide what is called a thermal mass, storing heat during the day and releasing it at night.

In winter, a sensor in the ceiling of the greenhouse turns on a fan when the temperature rises above 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and the fan pumps the warm air through ducts to the north side of the house.

The solar heat is supplemented by a gas furnace, but the gas bill for the 2,500-square-foot house -- including heating water and cooking -- averages under $45 a month, Finneran says.

But what to do with all that solar heat during a Washington summer? Courrier and Finneran say they use their window air conditioners only a half-dozen times each summer. An awning is put up to shade the greenhouse from April to October, the greenhouse windows are opened, the automatic fan is turned off and the door to the rest of the house is shut.

Downstairs, Mark Courrier built a trellis for morning glories to grow on to shade the kitchen in the summer.

The attic door is left open and an exhaust fan helps pull hot air out of the house. Ceiling fans circulate the air in most rooms. In addition, the house is so well insulated that it does not heat up during the day.

Kathleen Courrier, director of publications for the World Resources Institute, helped write "The Greenhouse Trap," a new book about global warming. The project made her acutely aware of the damage to the environment caused by burning fossil fuels.

In addition to using solar power to heat their house, she and Finneran, senior editor of the National Academy of Sciences' quarterly publication Issues in Science and Technology, conserve energy in a variety of ways such as taking buses to work and shopping on foot at neighborhood stores.

They have begun using the new compact fluorescent light bulbs, which, although much more expensive than incandescent bulbs, last at least 10 times longer and use much less electricity. Courrier says research indicates that one such bulb, over its lifetime, "avoids putting a half-ton of carbon dioxide into the air."

A plastic milk delivery carton on the back porch is used to store glass bottles and aluminum cans that Courrier takes to a collection "igloo" at the corner of 13th Street and Arkansas Avenue NW when she is on her way to a grocery store nearby. (The white, green and yellow "igloos" are sponsored by the Glass Packaging Institute and First Rising Mount Zion Baptist Church at 10 churches and several other sites in the city.)

An added benefit of living in a solar house is the sunny atmosphere, Courrier says. "In the middle of winter the rooms on the south side of the house are full of sunlight. The effect on your mood is amazing. It has changed the whole feeling of the house."

A drawback is the bleaching effect the sunlight has on some fabrics, and especially on books, both bindings and paper, she says.

"After the first year we had to move all the cookbooks from the south side of the kitchen to the north," says Courrier. She says they do not put valuable artworks in the greenhouse, and they change fabric-covered accessories such as pillows when necessary.

Finneran and Courrier say environment-protecting measures need not be expensive or time-consuming. They chuckle when they speak of friends in San Francisco who ordered special cabinets from Germany to store recyclable trash.

"There are many ways to waste money and resources in the name of saving resources," Finneran says. "But all you really need are milk cartons on the back porch."

Upscale Energy Efficiency Raj Barr-Kumar, president of the D.C. Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, began his architecture studies in his native Ceylon, now called Sri Lanka, where both air conditioning equipment and glass were imported and therefore very expensive.

To avoid using expensive materials, he says, "I learned to look for prevailing winds" and "to see where the sun was rising and setting," designing buildings to take advantage of the climate rather than to shut it out.

When he bought a lot just west of Georgetown, facing the Potomac River and the C & O Canal, he realized there was a "happy coincidence": If he built a house with a view of the river it would be facing due south, the perfect direction for passive solar heating.

Barr-Kumar took on the challenge of designing a beautiful house in tune with the upscale neighborhood that also would be energy-efficient and minimize the waste of natural resources.

The result is a striking building clearly visible from the Virginia side of the river with its repeated motif of a peaked roof -- "a child's idea of a house," in the architect's words.

The south side has large double-paned windows, including a living room bay on the ground level, to collect heat. Marble and ceramic tiles backed by concrete store the sun's heat. The main living areas -- living room and bedrooms -- are on the south side of the house.

On the north, there are fewer windows and the spaces are what Barr-Kumar calls buffer zones, to absorb the cold from north winds. A garage, a stairwell, closets and bathrooms are on the north.

All of the windows in the house can be opened, Barr-Kumar says, because Washington's climate is so temperate that no artificial heating or cooling is needed during six months of the year.

When the house must be heated or cooled, a three-story atrium plays a key role, along with heat pumps serving different zones of the house depending on the season and the amount of energy from the sun that is available.

In winter, a heat pump complements the sun's heat in the south-facing living room. The warmed air moves up the atrium, heating the second- and third-story bedrooms. The master bedroom on the third floor is open to the atrium.

In summer, a different heat pump cools the air in the upper level; the air then drops through the atrium to the lower floors and is cycled back up to the heat pump where it is freshly cooled and drops again.

With its windows, balconies and decks, including a penthouse and roof deck, the house is very open to the outdoors. Barr-Kumar cultivates tropical plants, including a bougainvillea vine over the master bedroom window, to revive memories of childhood in Ceylon. In the atrium, which receives winter sunlight through windows high on the east wall, palm trees grow beside the glass-covered fireplace with its three-story red tubular chimney.

Plants also help keep the house cool in summer. There are retractable trellises on the deck outside the master bedroom that can be pulled out in summer to provide a green screen of vegetation.

Evergreens on the north side of the house help shield it from north winds.

The south-facing windows conserve energy in another way: Electric lights need never be turned on during the day. Barr-Kumar says he also calculated the spans of the house so that he could use wood beams, since wood is a renewable resource and the manufacture of steel "takes a lot of energy." The stucco walls and the roof are well insulated.

The house has water-conserving appliances, including toilets with water-saving tanks. The bathrooms also have polished brass fixtures, demonstrating, perhaps, that a house can be both luxurious and environmentally friendly.

Many houses designed to use solar energy for heating have shutters or shades on the south windows to keep heat in during the night. Barr-Kumar says he decided not to do this because "it was more important to me to wake up to sunshine every morning." He called the decision "one of those trade-offs" between what members of the family can live with and what is good for the environment.

Designing and building houses to use and respect the environment is "pure common sense," Barr-Kumar says.

"Learning to use what nature gives you is so obvious that not to do it is kind of dumb."

Bourgeois Life in the Boondocks

Tom Super, a senior policy analyst at the Council for Environmental Quality and self-described "child of the '60s," spent seven years designing and building his environmental dream house in southern Charles County, 50 miles from his office facing Lafayette Park.

In 1977, Super, a freelance consultant on energy issues who had been looking for a way to build a house and establish a self-sufficient lifestyle, found the perfect site -- 10 acres on Nanjemoy Creek in what he calls "the deepest boondocks."

Buying the land depleted most of his savings, so Super, then 34, hired a construction company to put up just a three-story shell -- walls, roof and floors -- on stilts.

"I had an electric service line put in, ran an extension cord, brought out a little refrigerator, sleeping bag, a TV and my tools" and went to work, he says.

Since he was starting from scratch, Super was able to site the house favorably for maximum collection of solar energy. The longest side of the house faces south and has many windows; the north side has only one. He had the contractor build the walls six inches thick for maximum insulation.

Super lived in a group house in Washington during the week, but spent all his weekends and vacations working on his rural retreat. About halfway through the job he met a local carpenter, Norman Palmer, then 24, who moved into the house and stayed for five years. Working with Super, Palmer built the kitchen and a large sauna, enclosed the lower level and installed a greenhouse as well as doing much of the finish carpentry.

The house and the water supply are heated primarily by passive solar energy, supplemented by a wood stove. Interior brick walls and ceramic tile floors provide thermal mass to store heat during the day and slowly release it at night.

The bottom level of the house is enclosed in concrete and its south side is a large greenhouse, with the floor four feet below ground level (and therefore protected from extreme temperatures). A thermal chimney carries air heated by the sun from the greenhouse to the upper stories.

Sunlight coming through the south-facing windows and skylights on the second and third floors both heats the house and provides enough light for reading from sunrise to sunset, Super says. Electric lights are needed only after the sun goes down. Thermal shutters on pulleys can be used to seal the double-paned windows at night to prevent heat from escaping.

"I have never lived in a warmer house," Super says. "Once I was gone for three days when it was 30 below with the wind chill. I drove down after the Superbowl and the temperature inside was 42 degrees."

A wood-burning stove in the living room helps to heat the house in the winter, and there is a thermal-siphoning water heating system with coils that carry water through the stove's chimney into a preheating tank above the water heater. Super also conserved energy by constructing the kitchen and bathroom back to back around the water heater so no hot water pipe runs more than 10 feet and water in the pipes remains warm.

Conserving water was another important consideration in designing the house. Super installed what is called a "gray-water system" to recycle some of the house's waste water. All of the water except that from the kitchen sink and the toilet is piped through two swimming pool filters into tanks in the greenhouse. This water is then used to irrigate the plants in the greenhouse and the garden outside. In addition, rainwater from the roof drains into the "gray-water" holding tank in the garden.

Inside, walls made of local pine, tulip poplar and cedar give the house a cozy feel. The southern part of the living and dining area is two stories high with a stained glass skylight. The wood stove is the focus of the living room, sitting on a stone hearth built by Super. The large bathroom in the middle of the house has the cedar wood sauna behind the shower stall.

Upstairs are two bedrooms with interior windows looking down on the living room; the top floor is an attic.

Super calls his feelings about the house "a love affair." And it took marriage to break up the affair. He moved back to Washington in 1983 when he married Kathy Plowman Super, who is now deputy director of presidential scheduling and appointments at the White House. They and their 5 1/2-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, live in Great Falls in a house that has been remodeled to conserve energy.

But Super's greatest feeling of accomplishment is connected to the house in the boondocks.

"I've heard that energy conservation means you have to live in a cave, but I know that's nuts," says Super. "I built an all-electric house with appliances and a sauna bath. I wanted to show that you can have a comfortable bourgeois yuppie life and save energy too."

Earth Day has brought a flood of books and other publications describing what individuals can do to help the environment. All but two are published on recycled paper:

"The Global Ecology Handbook: What You Can Do About the Environmental Crisis," Global Tomorrow Coalition. Beacon Press, 414 pp., $16.95. Detailed update on the state of the environment worldwide. Each chapter includes practical suggestions.

"Save Our Planet: 750 Everyday Ways You Can Help Clean Up the Earth," Diane MacEachern. Dell, 210 pp., $9.95. What to do at home, while shopping, in the garden and even on vacations.

"The Green Consumer," John Elkington, Julia Hailes and Joel Makower. Penguin, 342 pp., $8.95. Detailed account of products that do and do not damage the environment and information on how to obtain the environmentally sound ones.

"Resource-Efficient Housing Guide," Robert Sardinsky and Jon Klusmire. Rocky Mountain Institute, 126 pp., $15, or $10 each for 10 or more. A valuable compilation of books, periodicals and organizations that provide information about every aspect of building and maintaining a "resource-efficient" home. Because it was published in Old Snowmass, Colo., "a little town in the mountains," the publisher says, recycled paper was not readily available when this book was printed. A new edition is in the works.

"EarthRight," Patricia Hynes. Prima Publishing, 236 pp., $12.95. Written by a former official of the Massachusetts Port Authority and the Environmental Protection Agency, this book describes practical responses individuals can make to the dangers of pesticides, solid waste, toxins in water and global warming.

"The Greenhouse Trap: What We're Doing to the Atmosphere and How We Can Slow Global Warming," Francesca Lyman. Beacon Press, 183 pp., $9.95. A clear explanation of the process of global warming with a chapter on what individuals can do to slow it.

"How to Make the World a Better Place: A Guide to Doing Good," Jeffrey Hollender. William Morrow & Co., 303 pp., $22.95. The chairman of the mail-order company Seventh Generation discusses things you can do to support not only the environment, but peace, human rights and the fight against hunger.

"Shopping for a Better World: A Quick and Easy Guide to Socially Responsible Supermarket Shopping," Council on Economic Priorities, $5.95, or five for $18. Pocket-sized guide rates hundreds of companies according to their concern for the environment, treatment of employees, animal testing, military contracts and investment in South Africa.

"Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth," Earth Works Group. Earth Works Press, 96 pp. $4.95. Practical measures to abate the greenhouse effect, toxic waste, acid rain and the vanishing of wildlife.

"One Hundred and Ten Things You Can Do for a Healthy Environment," Seventh Generation, $2. Pamphlet listing tips from "Buy products in bulk or with the least amount of packaging" to "Start a neighborhood tree planting project."

"How Green Is My Home? (Household Tips for Saving the Planet)," Michael Belliveau. 83 pp., published by Mother Jones magazine. Environmental audit of Washington Post reporter Cynthia Gorney's house in Oakland, Calif.; contains many explanations and guidelines. Send $3.50 plus $1.50 for postage and handling to: Home Audit, Mother Jones, 1663 Mission St., San Francisco, Calif. 94103.

"Clearer, Cleaner, Safer, Greener: A Blueprint for Detoxifying Your Environment," Gary Null. Villard Books, 294 pp., $18.95. The author, a radio talk show host, covers indoor and outdoor air pollution, toxics and reported dangers of electromagnetic fields. The publisher says recycled paper is not of high enough quality to print the book, but is considering using it in the future.

Other resources:

Conservation and Renewable Energy Inquiry and Referral Service. Free fact sheets, brochures and referrals on energy conservation. 1-800-523-2929.

National Appropriate Technology Assistance Service. Advice by telephone and mail about specific energy-conservation projects. 1-800-428-2525.

Whether the goal is building, remodeling or just staying put, homeowners can help the environment in four areas: conserving energy, saving water, reducing waste and curbing the use of toxic substances that can damage the environment.

Here are suggestions for what to do in each area for each stage. Some apply to all home dwellers.

Building a New Home

Energy: Design and site the house to make maximum use of the sun.

Water: Install water-conserving toilets and appliances.

Waste: Design the house with space to store recyclables.

Toxics: Learn which chemicals are used in treating construction lumber. Choose the least toxic building materials.

Remodeling

Energy: Beef up insulation and improve weatherization around windows and doors.

Water: Install water-conserving shower heads and low-flow faucet aerators.

Waste: Recycle as much construction debris as possible (wood scraps, old fixtures, scrap metal).

Toxics: Limit the use of solvents when stripping and painting. Dispose of safely whatever you remove from the house.

Staying Put

Energy: Get an energy audit from the local utility and make a plan to implement recommendations as as your budget allows. (Pepco will mail you a do-it-yourself survey or send an expert to the house without charge; call 872-4630. Virginia residents should call Virginia Power for a list of contractors who will do an audit; the utility will reimburse up to $50 for this service.)

Water: Check plumbing for leaks and have them repaired.

Waste: Shop with an eye to minimizing waste. Buy things that are not heavily packaged in plastic and polystyrene foam, and look for recycled and biodegradable products.

Toxics: Limit your purchases of such toxics as pesticides, and look for substitutes that do not damage the environment. Do not pour toxic substances down the drain or put them in the trash. (Some communities sponsor hazardous waste collection days.) This is copy for a lively information graphic on the "environmentally friendly" house, showing a house with the various features that make it more compatible with the environment, as identified in the copy blocks below.

The house should be generic and reasonably realistic, but the style should NOT be like an engineer's technical specs. The point is to identify in a lively and immediate way WHAT you can do and WHERE in anybody's standard house.

Main Blurb: By tuning up in four key areas -- energy, water, waste and the landscape -- any household can make itself more compatible with its environment, conserve natural resources and probably save money. In an ideal world, here's what an "environmentally friendly" house would have: WINDOWS

Maximum number of windows face south to collect heat from the sun; they are made of thermal glass to prevent loss of heated or cooled air. Storm windows or plastic sheets also conserve energy.HEATING/COOLING

Greenhouse helps to heat house. Furnace and air-conditioning system are tuned up frequently. HOT WATER

Solar water heater replaces conventional tank. ELECTRICITY

Photovoltaic cells can convert solar energy to electricity. Compact fluorescent lights last longer and use less energy. INSULATION

Insulation in walls and attics reduces energy consumption. Weatherstripping and caulking prevents loss of heated and cooled air. APPLIANCES

New energy-efficient appliances cut energy consumption substantially, as well as costs. Water-conserving dish and clothes washers are available. Clothes line is a "solar clothes dryer." WATER

Low-flow shower heads and faucets cut water use. Water-conserving toilets, or toilets with "dams" reduce amount of water used to flush. TRASH AND GARBAGE

Compost pile converts yard waste and kitchen scraps to fertilizer. Cabinets, racks or boxes separate trash for recycling. YARD

Deciduous trees on south provide shade for cooling in the summer. Evergreens on the north protect house from cold winds. GARDEN

Natural fertilizers and integrated pest management replaces toxic pesticides and herbicides. Using plants native to the area helps conserve water, soil.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.