BRATTLEBORO — With every hurricane, tropical storm, and superstorm, thousands of lives are disrupted, harmed, or ended. Property is destroyed. Roads and bridges wash away. Sometimes the most vulnerable people suffer the worst - and never bounce back.
Might there be a better way to plan houses, communities, and entire cities to withstand climate-related devastation?
Alex Wilson, founder of Resilient Design Institute (RDI), thinks there is.
The non-profit's mission is to create “solutions that enable buildings and communities to survive and thrive in the face of climate change, natural disasters and other disruptions.”
The organization defines resilient design as “the intentional design of buildings, landscapes, communities, and regions in order to respond to natural and manmade disasters and disturbances - as well as long-term changes resulting from climate change - including sea level rise, increased frequency of heat waves, and regional drought.”
RDI delivers information and promotes awareness about resilient design - in the forms of case studies, operating principles, and strategies - via a blog, and through its consulting work.
Wilson is also the founder of Building Green, Inc., which offers sustainable design and construction strategies, primarily to those in the building industries.
A few years ago, he stepped back from his day-to-day responsibilities, sold most of his shares of the company, and now works only one day per week at Building Green so he can focus on RDI.
An early 'environmental radical'
As a Pennsylvania teenager in the late 1960s, Wilson said, “I wanted to make the world a better place,” and he saw his relationship to the natural world as the best venue to achieve that goal.
“Before the environmental movement took off - back then, it was called 'conservation' - I read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and I became an environmental radical,” said Wilson.
“I was fighting this, fighting that,” Wilson said.
Before he graduated high school, Wilson helped a legislator draft a successful state bill banning DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), the insecticide Carson cited in her book as dangerous to the environment and its wildlife. Later, DDT was banned in the United States and worldwide.
Wilson studied environmental biology at Ithaca College. As part of his studies, in the early and mid-1970s, he worked with other students on renewable energy projects.
“I got excited by it. I found something I could be for, rather than against,” said Wilson.
A year after graduating from Ithaca, he joined a friend in Santa Fe, N.M. for a job with the New Mexico Solar Energy Association.
“We'd teach people around the state about passive solar with hands-on projects,” said Wilson. “We were working in a lot of really poor communities - some of the poorest counties in the country - with mostly Native American and Hispanic people, in mostly barter economies.”
Many of the projects Wilson helped the residents with were solar greenhouses that attached to their homes. “They were cheaply built, and enabled subsistence farmers to plant their chili peppers early. They also provided heat to the houses,” he said.
A path toward publishing
In 1980, Wilson was hired to run the New England Solar Energy Association, a chapter of the American Solar Energy Association (ASEA), with headquarters in Brattleboro. He was 25 years old. Wilson admitted he was intimidated. “I was inexperienced at running organizations. I didn't know about grant writing and budgeting, but they told me, 'Half of our funding is federal, so don't worry about it,'” he said.
“One month after I started, [Ronald] Reagan was elected,” said Wilson.
Within a week of the inauguration, the new administration eliminated 90 percent of ASEA's funding.
“We usually got $100,000. We only got $10,000,” said Wilson, who added, “it forced me to shift the focus of the organization away from just solar.”
Wilson changed the name to the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) and began organizing the Building Energy Conference.
Both the association and the conference still exist, Wilson noted.
“We really changed the model. We were no longer dependent on grant funding,” he said, because the organization began consulting with others, teaching them how to design and build energy-efficient buildings, and improve indoor air quality.
While at NESEA, Wilson began writing columns, and enjoyed it. He left the organization and became a freelance writer, focusing on renewable energy and energy efficiency, and his target audience was mostly those in the building trades.
Wilson parlayed that writing into a newsletter, Environmental Building News, which helped him earn a steadier income.
That was the beginning of Building Green.
Wilson - with Nadav Malin, who is now Building Green's president, and other staff - expanded the newsletter into a publishing and product data force, all the while accepting no advertising.
The company eventually went all-digital, with Environmental Building News now published electronically in PDF format and building product reviews and guidance delivered on the company's website behind a paywall.
The company currently employs about 14 people.
In addition, “[t]hroughout Building Green's history, we've always had consulting work, including with federal agencies like Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Energy,” said Wilson.
“It helped subsidize our publishing habit,” he said, which was sometimes necessary because of the company's “no ads” policy. “The consulting kind of took over.”
An idea takes hold
In the last decade, Wilson found himself more involved in working on aspects of resilient design. He wrote editorials and guides, and organized design charrettes to problem-solve resiliency in the building trades, a practice he started mostly in response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
During the storm, “I saw CNN coverage of people evacuating to the Superdome [in New Orleans], which was not designed for people to live in,” he said. “Then, we saw that many of the pre-1940s homes maintained a reasonably decent livability” for its residents, “even with months of no power,” said Wilson.
“The vernacular architecture, which is designed for that specific environment, has tall ceilings and windows, and wrap-around porches, which helped keep the house cool before air-conditioning became popular in the 1940s,” he said.
After the advent of widespread air-conditioning, the industry started building “cookie-cutter houses for anywhere, from Boston to the South, and we lost this regional vernacular of a comfortable housing climate,” he said.
“How can we articulate this idea that we can design buildings to keep people safe even if they lose power? I got excited about that,” said Wilson.
In his career, first with NESEA and then with Building Green, “I was frustrated we weren't changing the design of houses more quickly,” Wilson admitted.
The pillars of the “green” building movement, Wilson noted, were about “making houses sustainable and safer with energy-efficient design elements: south-facing windows to capture light and heat, natural ventilation, more insulation, shading the house from summer sun.”
During an eight-month sabbatical in 2011, Wilson thought about his long-range plans, which included the planet's long-range plans. He returned to Building Green, which was going through its own planning process.
“Could resilience be a focus?” Wilson asked himself.
Instead, he said, he decided to launch a spin-off nonprofit - RDI - to advance the message of resilient design.
'Resilience was the word of the year'
“These are practical strategies that make buildings more resilient,” said Wilson, who added, “It's not just about one building. We have to think about the whole community.”
“What if there's a loss of gasoline? We have to design walkable and bike-able communities that are denser, and have mixed-use buildings. This will make a community more resilient,” he said.
“I wasn't sure how much anyone would be interested,” said Wilson.
But Wilson established RDI in 2012, during a time when resiliency - especially after a disaster - was a popular topic. This was right after Tropical Storm Irene, when “there were whole towns that were isolated for a week,” he noted.
“Then, six months later, Superstorm Sandy hit and resilience was the word of the year,” Wilson said.
Since then, RDI has worked on a number of projects, some of which are still in the works. Some are in Washington, D.C. and New York City. Others are local.
RDI worked with students at the Conway School of Landscape Design, and Chris Campany at the Windham Regional Commission, on a project addressing persistent flooding on Flat and Frost streets in Brattleboro.
“We're doing prototypes for a housing design for homeless people in Bellows Falls, Swanzey, and Keene,” said Wilson. These projects were inspired by a visit to Austin, Texas, that Wilson took earlier this year with Jerelyn Wilson, his wife and the majority-owner of Building Green.
While there, they visited a master-planned community near Austin that features tiny houses, cottages, RVs, and community buildings. It was primarily designed to house people who were formerly homeless.
The home the Wilsons share is itself a model of resilience. Designed to look like an older farmhouse but with modern features, the home has triple-glazed windows, 1-foot-thick walls, heat pumps with a wood-stove backup, water from a nearby spring, and electricity from solar panels mounted on the property's barn.
“Even if we had a month-long power outage, we'd be okay,” said Wilson, who noted the home “is a model of resilient design.”
“I wanted to be my own guinea pig on a lot of these principles,” Wilson said, and noted that resilience, as a term, “is more positive than survival.”