Search - Building Green on DVD

Opened My Eyes to Why New Homes Make You Sick...

W. Waddell | Colorado Springs, CO | 05/01/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"My wife and I loved this video and it was the defining information that showed us we can build our new home healthy and cost effective at the same time.

Even if you are not building a new home... there are lots of great tips and ideas to make your current home more healthy and better in tune with the planet.

It covered everything in short segments that made it easy to understand and it did a pretty good job of showing the work, the time involved as well as costs comparisons with traditional building processes.

Our only real complaint was that it spent too much time reviewing and repeating things that had already been covered. I suppose that's needed in a series that was originally aired weekly, but the time could have much better been spent on the electrical and plumbing aspects that were only breezed over.

If you know little to nothing about green building and it's possibilities... this is a perfect place to get the basics in a well organized start to finish process.

Wes and Kathy
[...]"

More "inspirational" than "technical", but a good place to s

Clamdigger | Pahoa, Hawai'i USA | 02/01/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I happened to catch a bit of this film on PBS and then went online to track down the rest of it. It is well worth watching.

Now I happen to be a technologist by trade - computers, mostly, including those embedded in everyday items we all use - and something of a "futurist" in outlook. I haven't (yet) bought into the MMGW frenzy - too many cult-like aspects for my taste, and too many suspiciously overblown, still-arguable theories being promoted as gospel by primarily political interests - but I nevertheless have a great interest in "sustainable" resource management, building and engineering of all kinds... and this film played to me quite well.

The film is not a "greener than thou" sermon on how we humans are somehow obligated to roll back everything that's happened since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution or, at the very least, deny anyone still in the developing world a future similar to the lifestyles now enjoyed in the USA, Western Europe and Japan. It is most certainly NOT a Luddite rant against "concrete and steel"... or the energy use and engineering which created the developed world's present health, comfort, mobility and abundance.

What the film IS is a survey of alternative technologies and engineering - some rather "retro", though rediscovered, appropriate and implemented in creative ways - which could reduce, or even reverse, man's negative impacts on his environment. It looks at "wiser use" of our scientific and technical abilities, and a hopeful sort of "conservation without deprivation"... and it claims that a Green future does not necessarily entail returning to a pre-industrial life.

If you hate technology, if you think humans should be coerced into returning to some Age in the distant past, or just die out completely... well, you won't like this film. But if you, like this writer, see technology as neither inherently good nor bad, but merely our species' defining way of adapting and thriving wherever we settle... well, the eco-friendly examples and demonstration projects highlighted here are pretty inspirational.

Now we just need to figure out how to scale up the production and availability of our better technologies so that more humans can afford to "go Green"."