Sustainability is a practice, a set of actions repeated overtime creating a habit or habits executed with the goal of preserving our environment, more specifically the preservation of a set of environmental conditions. It transcends aesthetics and is informed by each body and each environment or climate, creating a diverse collection of movements and actions. These intentional movements are shaped by how we want our habitats to look but more importantly how we need them to function and what we can physically complete. Collectively, sustainability is guided by our collective desire to avoid a negative outcome like an unlivable planet. We agree to a collective set of habits we want enacted and will enforce, like recycling, or chemical efficiency measures, like removing lead from gasoline or scrubbers on coal plants or increased mass transit. We allocate our money, time, and bodies to achieve the immediate outcome of reduced waste surrounding and permeating our environment as well as reducing the creation of acids that dissolve limestone buildings. Some of these agreements become invisible and reduce individual forethought, while some of them force the development of habits via individual daily action. In the Imperial Core, we reprioritize and shift our inputs to define our habits of sustainability to focus on comfort or convenience over an uncomfortable physical ability to idealize a sustainable aesthetic devoid of habits that actually work towards to the goal of sustainability. In lieu of an aligned approach to sustainability in the Core, we become dependent on forced and exploitative habits of workers in the Periphery and Semi-Periphery countries. The focus on signaling sustainability through a visual aesthetic of performative habits comes at the detriment of environmental preservation and spatial usability. A recent experience I had in a sustainably minded community in Putney, VT brought to light the differences in my every day habits compared to how I had to live in this new space. My performance of sustainability here felt foreign and at times annoying and inefficient. I noticed my habits were at odd with those of this new community. Each of us performs sustainability in a myriad of ways depending on our exterior and interior environment, the specific habits were taught, and technological tools we have at our disposal; not to forget the previously mentioned dynamic parameters of ability, comfort, and inherent idealization. The technology and architecture of 129 Great Meadows Ridge was different and similar to other homes I’ve lived in dramatically different climates. Here I was afforded access and relied on technologies I had not previously used, which relied on both my labor and the labor of unknown workers in the Periphery and Semi-Periphery countries like the DRC, Argentina, and Chile, to maintain the home with a marketed minimal cost to the Environment. The technology, architecture, and climatic conditions required me to develop new habits during time there. Yet, my baseline approach was still different that the residents of this eco community.

Figure 1. Putney in the context of Vermont and New Hampshire.

Figure 2. The home and community I lived in.

The home and community of focus for this paper surrounds Great Meadows Ridge in Putney, Vermont. The 2,000-person town itself is majority white of upper middle-class residents. The main draw for the town is the Putney School, an independent boarding and day school for grades nine through twelve. There is overall minimal development in the 27 square mile town of Putney making the town and community rural. 129 Great Meadows Ridge shared similar features as the other homes surrounding it: large undeveloped lots with single family homes utilizing solar panels and early generation Tesla PowerWalls, as many of the community members were early adopters of this technology for their home energy saving systems. This specific house overlooked the Connecticut River, creating bucolic and serene scene. Overall, this single-family residence was incredibly well insulated to minimize heat loss but it prevented the transfer of heat across the floors. The specific architecture and technology of 129 Great Meadows is floor dependent. The ground floor utilized a radiant floor heating and houses the Tesla PowerWall; it also home to a guest apartment. On this floor is a door that leads outside and under the deck to the semi-covered firewood storage area for the residence.

Figure 3. Ground Floor. The main floor houses the main living area: the kitchen, dining room, living room, and a full bath exist on this floor. In the living room is a fireplace and a wood stove.

Figure 4. Main Floor and fireplace with wood stove The top floor houses three bedrooms and another full bath. The floors on this floor are all cork which temperature stays consistent regardless of air temperature. The home is entirely electric and utilizes no natural gas directly. While still connected to the electrical grid, the home also utilizes solar panels to reduce, or rather shift, energy use more locally to being produced on site.

Figure 5. Top floor Another shift was the reliance on a wood fire stove for heating as the home lacked central heat, even though many energy efficiency upgrades were previously made on the home. This shift creates a new habit and relationship and awareness of one’s specific thermal needs. It required knowledge of knowing how to properly and safely start a fire and the commitment to tend it. The act of tending a fire in and of itself is a habit, it is something that needs to be maintained and remembered throughout the day. One has to commit to memory to keep adding to it over time, to adjust the airflow, to check on it, to check in with oneself, to calculate how many logs one uses during each day and compare that to the existing stock to know when to get more wood. This becomes a daily routine in addition to the habit of creating a fire each morning to set the thermal comfort of the home and preserve the physical architecture of home and other living being in the home. While the fire could burn all night this required getting up periodically throughout the night to add logs to the fire. Only at one point did I do this because there was a blizzard and it was colder than it had been and maintenance of the home required it. As described by Lamark, the development of these habits starts from childhood and are formally taught, observed, or synthesized overtime via classrooms, family and friends, reading, or experiences. However, I had never intentionally built a fire before my stay here. I had to teach myself and recall what I had seen other people do. The knowledge of building a fire is something that was inherited from previous generations all the way back to the first fire. After gaining this knowledge, it transformed into a habit, to the point that I could easily start a fire by about the fifth day from memory with little to no issues. This procedure expanded as I developed the habit of tending: descending the stairs to collect wood each morning, ascending with the quartered logs, adding them to the bin, opening the stove, adjusting the air intake, adding the logs and moving them around to fit just right to continue to burn, closing the door, watching the fire, and adding the extra logs to the bin. At night I would do a similar routine to start a fire in the morning upon waking or to tend the fire during the night. Eventually this too became habitual.

Figure 6. The fire I built from memory.

This habit highlights and forces the user to be aware and fully responsible for their thermal comfort. The user notices their direct environmental impact of extraction as the reliance on a minimally processed raw material that directly correlates to a specific number of logs, or trees, in order to produce a certain level of warmth vital to sustain life forces the user to keep track of the quantity of logs needed. An awareness of your environmental impact is visible each day as most people who use wood stoves use locally harvested wood, typically cleared from their land. If the trees are cleared from the land, over time one notices their removal and absence, especially if no trees are planted to replace them. Fallen trees are also often a source of fire wood and they can be a great way to utilize wood that would decay. However, there are more efficient and impactful ways of utilizing these trees; as wood stoves are not efficient at heating a space without proper knowledge and design. The heat generated from this technology did not heat the entire home but it was useful for cooking as you can cook directly on the top or inside. The insulation of the home prevented the heat from rising from the radiant flooring on the ground level and from the middle where the stove was placed. The heat from the wood stove did not even reach the other side the main floor. Forcing the user to stay near the stove, which makes it easier to watch and tend the fire, but limiting if you want to work on anything except reading a book, handcrafts, or sleeping. This technology restricted and influenced every other habit I had during my stay so like early humans my life began to revolve entirely around fire. I began to feel stuck in time instead tethered to the past while envisioning a new present or future. Each act from the past has brought us to this very moment with regard to the climate. Using trees for fuel is not the most energy efficient or sustainable method even if trees are a renewable resource. Instead of embracing new possibilities we create unnecessary scarcities and resource limitations, allowing social and physical power to concentrate in the hands of a few. A dichotomy of use vs non-use shapes and dictates our environment and understanding of space and power, and our relationship with each other and the environment. Trees and landscaping become a type of currency.

Figure 7. Cooking lunch on the stove

The specific habits I developed in Vermont differed from my typical habits for addressing thermal comfort, as I typically have less involvement in controlling the temperature. However, with less control, I was warmer and often too warm. Heat flowed freely from my steam radiator or as a kid from the fireplace at my childhood home. The openness of a fireplaces allows for greater heat dissipation throughout a space. Containing the fire makes the heat dissipate slowly, a lot of it ends up being stored in the stone body of the oven itself. Instead of trying to add heat, in my typical habits I worked towards removing heat by opening a window. I would adjust the height of the window, opening the top or bottom pane, to release excess heat from my space. In either scenario thermal comfort was not achieved, the former setting of the wood stove is more concerning as it proports the idea that green technology is inefficient and ineffective, especially when it is installed incorrectly in order to simply check a box.

Improper installation furthers the idealization and fetishization of green/sustainable living as an aesthetic instead of a set of habits informed by science and research and crafted to fit the physical capabilities of the bodies needed to execute the habit and maintain a space. The placement of the wood fire stove was peculiar as it was placed in front of the existing fireplace and its exhaust ran through the existing chimney. In theory the wood stove works by allowing heat to flow from all sides of the stove whereas most American fireplaces lose heat through the chimney as the heat rises and warms the walls of the chimney. Typically, in these designs one wall of the chimney is on the exterior which increase the loss of heat but also warms upper floors in a building. However, the placement of this stove just two feet away from the exterior wall at the entrance of the fireplace did little to reduce the loss of heat to exterior or increase the flow of heat around all four sides of the stove. A more effective placement that would reduce the need and reliance on additional heating sources would have been to place the stove more centrally so that heat can radiate throughout the entire room and from all sides of the stove without losing heat to the exterior. Instead, it generated heat that warmed only warmed the room locally, and requiring proximity to the stove to stay warm forcing residents to decide thermal comfort or the routine of their daily life. Additionally, one’s day begins to be punctuated by the routine of bringing in additional firewood once the heat starts to disappear. In extreme conditions, like a power outage during a blizzard, this technology provides additional benefits as one can actually cook on a wood stove, minimizing the reliance on the solar panels, generators, and home batteries.

Many the habits comprising sustainability in the Imperial Core in practice focus on shifting extraction and labor. One of the best examples of this is the general production and storage of energy. The homes in this community utilized solar panels to shift their energy production from powerplants to onsite. They also installed Tesla PowerWalls, a home backup battery used with onsite energy production like with solar panels, to minimize the disruption of the flow of energy to their domiciles. These substitutions cause a shift on who is forced to perform more intensive habits, exploited miners in Chile, Argentina, and the DRC primarily are forced to work in unsafe and unethical conditions extract the necessary minerals for car and home batteries. Oil, gas, and coal workers more locally stateside who produce the fuel many use for their home. When repeated over time the movements begin to make the mover look and feel robotic. As the movements go from requiring thought to second-nature and the stiffness of novelty dies and one begins to run on autopilot and no longer thinking about the impact of our actions. This is when habits can become dangerous or beneficial. The routine provides ease and familiarity and observing the routine, especially a habit executed with ease, obfuscates the intensity of the assumed labor involved. The physical distancing further increases the ease of consumption by disconnecting users from sources and labor thereby effectively hiding visual discomfort of extensive labor. Furthermore, underlying this shift is an important question of which landscapes, environments, and climates are worth preserving and which can be sacrificed for the preservation of others. Their value exists only through their use, while the non-use or minimal use of other spaces is subconsciously valued more and protected more through forced habits executed somewhere else. It ignores the fact that all these landscapes are connected through global climate and damage to one eventually lead to the destruction of the other because the whole system is out of balance.

This shift does not address the underlying need to shift users’ energy use habits, a component of sustainability. This became transparent during the blizzard when everyone lost power and their batteries became depleted as residents did not conserve energy as there was an expectation that power would be restored soon. Again, illuminating an underlying expectation that there is no urgency or need to think about one’s habits because the habits exist independent of environment. Something will always fix our inconveniences, somehow. This was not the case as power was not restored for days. After speaking with other residents about this situation I learned that this happens pretty much every time there is a blizzard or power outage. People have not learned to change their daily habits to extend the amount of conserved energy in their PowerWall. They would rather there be nothing at all rather than cut back a little. Forcing the question if shifting if our communal power and energy sources can even be considered a climate positive move, a component of sustainability, or more of a band-aid as it does not address the underlying habit of overconsumption and disconnection to our collective health and wellbeing.

Habits are overcoming resistance; they are meant to be varying degrees of difficult because it is a new act towards a goal, we are not currently at but we wish to achieve. Simple swaps and vital resources, like solar panels and backup home batteries, should both make us feel better as we are actively reducing our carbon output, but also begin to push us towards new developing new habits instead of enabling the status quo by creating an idea of sustainability that makes us look and feel good with minimal change to our understanding and questioning of how we interact with the world. We have to move past the aesthetic and performance of sustainability through habits of how we think something functions to actually interrogate the impact of our action on our health proximally and distally (in a physical and temporal sense). In theory, a wood fire stove is a great example removing the barriers to understanding our direct energy use. During my stay I used at least 12-14 trees during my stay to just stay warm (about a tree day), which is equal to or more than would be used to build a 12-person dining set (which as a furniture designer and builder is a very useful form of measurement but also spatially allows one to see how much wood I burned to stay warm). In reality, these transitional tools do not shock/wakeup users to their habits until it is too late if even at that point. Returning to the question of if these measures can actually be considered a habit of sustainability if they do not challenge the existing habits? The onus returns to the individual to be aware and reflective of their habits in determining if this is sustainability. People are not using their environments to understand how their practices and beliefs impact their habitats in a long-term view, because there is an expectation that something external will save them instead of them saving themselves. Presenting a worrying mirror of the disconnects and complicities in issues seen at the global scale. Our climate informs and impacts our bodies and comfort which directs how we use and interact with our environments. In the face of extreme environmental uncertainty from the climate crisis it is vital to be prepared for a myriad of drastic climatic changes as anything can happen in unprecedented time. Numerous reports and studies provide warnings of immediate changes and habits that need to be developed, adopted, and committed to memory if we want to ensure preservation of the habitability of our planet—a goal that can only be achieved through sustainability.

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