This was also the topic of a discussion I had on Radio National with Geraldine Doogue 

The AV Jennings advertisement from the Sydney Morning Herald's special feature on the MBA's "Excellence in Housing Awards" shows two photos of houses. The house on the left is a beautiful weatherboard cottage dating from the 1890s, with all the original features, decorated barges, chimney, french doors and verandah still completely intact. All it needs a scrape and a paint to bring it up to perfect condition. The house on the right is a brand spanking new neo-modernist two storey McMansion. The caption under the photos asks, "Why Move? Demolish and rebuild with the experts. Isn't it time you moved up to AV Jennings?"

Type "Renovate or Detonate" into Google and the first place you arrive at is the Stegbar building products website. This has a list of all the things that Stegbar provided for the brand new house that was built on the ruins of the old house detonated on Channel 9's Renovation Rescue. Further Google searches take you to the Backyard Blitz website and examples of suburban backyards being bulldozed for pools, fountains and decks together with a list of building and garden products and their suppliers.

George, Johnny and the suicide bombers would no doubt feel relaxed and comfortable with the use of the words Detonate and Blitz and Demolish. They seem quite appropriate for this bellicose time. They are also appropriate to the environmental destruction that is wreaked when you demolish a cottage or do-over a backyard.

Whether the demolition of a house is caused by a guided missile, a bomb wrapped round a suicide's waste or by Warwick the Wrecker; the result is the same - a total waste of precious resources. Not just the materials themselves but also the embodied energy contained within each piece of wood, pane of glass, roof tile and brick. This embodied energy is the energy already expended in the manufacture, transport, storage etc of some thing. In a house this would include, for example,

•the mining of metals, sand, lime, stone and clay for bricks, concrete, aluminium and steel

•the cutting down of trees for the timber

•the processing of the raw materials into the various building products

•the transport of those products to and from all the different locations

•the construction energy used in putting everything together

•the energy expended in the transport and storage of the left over waste material

When a house is demolished the block on which it stood is returned to ground zero and all the energy expended to make its components has to start again. As well, there are all the additional environmental costs associated with the demolition itself and the transport and storage of the demolished materials.

When we detonate and rebuild inevitably the community loses out. Instead of a small cottage, with a leafy front garden, a Frangipani beside the front steps and a twin-strip concrete driveway down the side to the garage in the back, we get a McMansion. The new 2-storey McMansion has 5 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, a home entertainment room, a 3 car garage, cement rendered brick veneer walls, a black concrete tile roof and no eaves. It takes up almost the whole block. The old front garden is no longer visible behind the new high brick fence as is the glimpse of greenery you used to get down the side passage. The new house casts shadows over its neighbours and locks itself off from the street with its privacy wall and locked metal gates. A security camera monitors the entrance and the movement-activated spotlights come on as you walk past at night. Pity the poor boy, who tries to retrieve his football from over the fence.

Even the owners of the new McMansion lose out. Imagine having 6 bathrooms to keep clean and stocked with loo paper, soap and hand towels. Imagine the cost of running the air conditioning to overcome the heat build-up caused by lack of eaves and cross ventilation. There is also the on-going problem of what to do with all that space, when there are only two of you living there.

Then there is the less tangible loss of the old house as a memory bank. The old house told a story about the people who lived in it, about how it was built and who built it, and it tells a story about the suburb and how it developed. These connections back into the past are essential for maintaining our sense of place and community.

Last Christmas a complete stranger dropped in unannounced at our family's beach house on the Central Coast. He was a man in his 60s, who introduced himself as Colin. His grandfather, it turned out, had bought the house in the 1940s and had lived there for 20 odd years. Colin walked up the old concrete path and immediately recognised it as the same path his grandfather had mixed and laid over a couple of days when he was holidaying there as a boy. We hadn't pulled up the old concrete and replaced it with nice new brick pavers, we'd just patched it, so the path was still able to tell the story of a few hot summer days from 50 years ago.

Patching the old concrete path

Our planet cannot support our continuing wanton destruction of resources and habitats and the disastrous impact of the green house gasses we generate in the process. It is clear that we have already passed the point of sustaining our consumption of these finite resources.

In the Knock-down-rebuild stakes the only real winners are the builders and the manufacturers and suppliers of building materials and equipment. It's far easier to make a profit on a new house on a green-field site, so you can see why they sponsor and advertise their products on the TV lifestyle shows.

We desperately need a different way of looking at things so we can start to turn the great ship MV Greedy Consumption around before it runs aground on the Eco-Disaster rocks. We need to find a way to cut across our obsession with the new and the bright and shiny and a way to cherish what we already have and to treat that with care and respect.

We could borrow from the Japanese concept of wabi sabi. Sabi is described as patina, elegance induced by time alone. An English translation of Wabi is difficult, "rustic simplicity", "naturalness tinged with restraint" "quiet solitude" or "simple quietude" do not quite meet the mark. Wabi is the rejection of everything pretentious and gaudy, it consists in seeking the simplest expressions, those that are closest to nature. The idea of understatement is implicit in wabi. Historically in Japan wabi was a reaction against the dazzling Chinese aesthetic, which was very elaborate and painted.

In a recent article Elizabeth Farrelly described wabi-sabi as "a concept from 16th century Japanese aesthetics, peripherally associated with Zen Buddhism, that celebrates the humble, the worn, the ambiguous, the shadowy and the derelict." She went on to say, "It's the next big thing in misappropriation after feng shui." Let's hope so!

While we are about appropriating things eastern, we might also do well to consider the Buddhist idea of interconnectedness. The Vietnamese Zen Teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, explains this by holding up a piece of paper and asking the question, "can you see a cloud in this piece of paper?" He asks us to consider all the things that came together to make the paper and all the things required to bringt it to this place. Think of the cloud that brought the rain, that watered the earth, that grew the tree and fed the woodsman who cut the tree, that gave the wood, that fed the mill, that made the mulch - the full list is endless.

If eastern philosophy isn't your bag then maybe you could take the same lesson of wabi-sabi from the message on the old Kiwi boot polish tin - "well worn, but worn well". Or you could learn about interconnectedness from the old nursery rhyme,

This is the farmer sowing the corn,
That kept the cock that crowed in the morn,
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.

If we make time to remember the infinite connections between every little thing, we might begin to have a better understanding of the consequences of our actions. We might stop for a moment before we pull down something old and battered or throw out some still-useful thing. We might give the old kitchen cupboards a lick of paint and make them do for another day or two instead of mining the earth for a new granite bench top.

Tony Coote