Being green has its price

As KERMIT the Frog once made famous in song, "it's not that easy being green." This is the lesson learned from James Glave's humorous, ecology-minded "Almost Green: How I Saved 1/6th of a Billionth of the Planet" -- though it's worth noting that the difficulties Glave encounters striving for greenness are completely different from the ones Kermit sings about as he laments his coloring's tendency to make him blend in with ordinary things.

Glave writes about embracing a more ecologically friendly lifestyle and how that transition came to pass within his family. The premise is straightforward: Glave and his wife purchased a house a few years ago on Bowen Island (median home price: $719,000) off the coast of Vancouver, Canada. Actually, they bought the lot on which the house was to be built but couldn't afford to construct a house with the state-of-the-art, ecologically aware appliances and designs they wanted. The costs were simply too high and using the same builder who was developing the other lots in the area was more affordable. This choice, though, ate at Glave, so he decided to build his own 280-square-foot "Eco Shed" in his front yard to serve as both a writing studio and occasional guest quarters -- and to give him the opportunity to jettison the disappointment he'd encountered in not being able to build an entire "green" house.

Part of this desire for greenness can be traced to Glave's disdain of what he'd witnessed as a journalist (he's a former senior editor at Outside and has written for numerous other magazines) covering the changing face of environmentalism, from the hardscrabble save-the-owls variety to the newer, pop-culture-driven kind. Hollywood starlets have given once-dorky hybrids much-needed appeal, Glave writes, and he wants to peel back eco-chic's veneer. "To be honest, a part of me secretly wanted to take it down a notch." As he sees it, "eco-chic wasn't about changing the world; it was about changing your furniture."

Glave takes readers on a peripatetic journey from envisioning the Eco Shed to building it, with detours into such questions as how much space does a family really need, what is the magnetism of having one's own patch of "private green" that attracts suburban Americans so and just how hard is it to unload that gas-guzzling SUV in favor of a smaller, more ecologically attuned family car?