Mr. Green Jeans : Stuck With Perplexing Environmental Problems? Call Ecological Designer Jim Bell for Help
It was almost 15 years ago while he was building custom houses that Jim Bell began to be converted.
“I think all my life I’ve tried to see below the surface of things,” he says. “The houses I was building looked nice, but they were energy hogs and they used too much water. I was becoming more aware of where the raw materials were coming from and what kind of ecological assaults were taking place. Even a material as simple as plywood was unhealthy, because of the glues.
“I just got tired of building things that were stupid.”
So Bell--who had played varsity basketball at Cal State Long Beach, received a degree in environmental design from San Diego State and become a journeyman carpenter--changed his life.
“I wanted to make a living in a way I could feel morally good about and a way that would potentially make the world better,” he says.
Bell, 47, today is a self-described “ecological designer” with an environmental focus that emphasizes problem-solving.
He looks at house plans and asks questions like: Why is all the shower water going into the sewage system? Where can the rain runoff be collected and stored? How can solar heating be used? Where’s the recycling system for table scraps? How can the landscape system produce edible food?
These are uncommon considerations for builders or buyers in today’s housing market. But Bell maintains it’s only a matter of time before priorities start shifting.
“Most of the things we are doing are destroying the ecology, and at some point we have to pay the piper,” he says. “It’s better for the economy to do things ecologically right than to do things wrong and try to clean up afterward. We have a lot of ways to solve environmental problems right now and I want all developers to be considering them and using them.”
His concern is not limited to houses. “What I really want to do is redesign cities,” he says, in his calm, no-nonsense manner. “We need to move away from ecologically damaging systems to sustainable systems in all aspects of our environment.”
He argues that this is possible, particularly in California, which he sees as a global leader in trying new ideas: “If just one California city would make a change over to ecologically sustainable systems, it would have a major impact.”
Bell’s mission is to nudge that process along. “He’s been ahead of his time for years,” says longtime acquaintance Dave Burnight, director of San Diego State’s campus ministry house. “Jim isn’t flashy or charismatic. He doesn’t look like any kind of prophet, but he gets things done. We contracted with him for consultant work for a new center because we want it to be a demonstration in itself of what we believe in: energy efficiency, solar usage and a place that invites community.”
Bell is not only a consultant. With a background of environmental research, he has become a builder, planner, publisher, teacher and speaker, and, working with private groups and public agencies, has designed everything from solar systems to edible landscapes.
His projects are big and small. He won a Water Conservation Award from the City of San Diego for a 21-unit apartment project using flow-restricters on shower heads and faucets and one-gallon flush toilets, as well as drought-resistant landscaping. He is now working on a large-scale experimental system that recycles water for irrigation and nutrients for fertilizer in Tijuana.
Back-Yard Solar Oven
For friends Mike and Pat McCoy of Imperial Beach, he built a back-yard solar oven. “Jim does a lot of practical things like that for his friends,” Pat McCoy says. “He’s been in the vanguard of planning solutions to some of these problems we are just starting to worry about. He made us see a long time ago that you can’t keep throwing pollutants into the air and let landfills overflow.”
In 1978, Bell founded the Ecological Life Systems Institute, a nonprofit group that he runs on a $10,000 budget from a converted garage office at his home near Balboa Park. He pays himself “as little as possible” and relies heavily on volunteers.
“You have to take Jim seriously,” says Mary Clark, biology professor at San Diego State University, where Bell is guest lecturer in a Global Future course.
“He has a lot of sound ideas and documentation about how San Diego could live within its own environmental income in a sustainable way. Some of the things might not work 100% but would certainly be a grand improvement on what we are now doing, so they are worth hearing and demonstrating. And he has done all this virtually on his own, without any big grants.”
Bell, a towering redhead who has maintained the trimness of his time in collegiate athletics, seems to be in a dozen places at once. He spends several days a week at the Ocean Beach Peoples’ Food Cooperative, specializing in organically grown produce.
The cooperative, of which he is board president, is an example of a trend whose time has come, he says, noting the recent public frenzy over pesticides: “It doesn’t require any great leap of intellectual power to realize many of these ideas are common sense.”
He senses there are networks of entrepreneurs poised on the periphery of today’s market, ready to introduce biodegradable plastics, nontoxic paints and glues, whole lines of organically grown produce and dozens of other nontoxic items.
“I get all kinds of different catalogues with new products,” he says. “It’s just a matter of getting the free-enterprise system to work with us. I think people have been ready to listen for a long time.”
San Diego businessman Rick Cabados sought an environmental-minded consultant to design a mountain retreat and discovered Bell by word of mouth: “We wanted an ecologically planned community, an ashram, something that would be a model, and I just sort of sent the message out around town that I needed a consultant. All kinds of different people mentioned Jim Bell, and he has worked with us from the start. I knew what I wanted, but just needed the guidance and resource information and Jim was very helpful.”
Cabados’ stucco-and-stone complex will have 6-inch walls, dual-glazed glass and solar heating. “We drilled our own well and have a generating system using propane, so it is clean,” he says. “Jim sat down with the contractors and worked it all out--he has done construction, so he could help with that end too. He is totally dedicated. He may be making a living at it now but this is out of love.”
Bell, who has lived in everything from a tent to a glorified camper (his current house is a conventional frame model), doesn’t think he is making any sacrifices.
“I get up every morning and do something I like to do,” he says. “I want to live life from a real perspective. Some people would say I am unselfish, but I think I am selfish. I get tremendous public support.”
Another friend notes of him “that he is not a gloom-and-doom prophet,” a personal assessment with which Bell agrees. He accentuates the positive. “My message,” he says, “is that we have an infinity of opportunities, so many ways to solve these problems.”
He tries to spread his message by giving about 60 lectures a year, showing audiences how urban regions can be designed to provide for human wants and needs in ecologically sustainable ways. His audiences this month alone range from the Bonita Organic Garden Club to the group Beyond War.
Over the weekend, he brought his slide show to Los Angeles to the Cooperative Resources and Services Project, whose members also are involved in designing co-housing and shared housing projects. He was invited, said project director Lois Arkin, because he’s “one of only a handful of people in the country incorporating practical ecological design into all aspects of the built environment.”
Bell is undaunted by the scope of his undertaking. “It is all very practical,” he says. “The unique thing I do is focus on solutions to ecological problems. I show how an urban region can be redesigned to do everything it does now: provide employment; provide transportation (and) recreation opportunities; ensure plenty of energy, water and a secure food supply; but to accomplish all those things in ways that work with the natural system of our planet.
“Everything I talk about is based on known technology,” he adds. “I show people that the problem is not a lack of technology but a lack of consciousness--a matter of not knowing what we have available.”
An obvious priority is for more efficient energy use. He shows audience slides of available technologies--Japanese vans getting 80 miles per gallon, a Canadian housing project where foot-thick insulation reduces heating bills to a minimum, a refrigerator with the motor and compressor on top instead of underneath, cutting its energy use by almost 80%.
A typical packet of material from his Ecological Life Systems includes: articles on biodegradable products now available; an extensive reading list on organic gardening; a proposal for the San Diego region’s future water supply; and a draft of his plan for a Peace Ecology University where technologies would be demonstrated, nontoxic products would be sold and environmental groups nationwide could coordinate their efforts.
He doesn’t think that is overly ambitious, and, despite his one-man office, he doesn’t feel lonely. “I’m on the board of directors of five different organizations, all working one way or another toward the same thing. We are just building for the future.
“My dream is that someone like me will be hired by Los Angeles or San Diego to put together a design team, remodeling and development plan for the whole urban region, to take us into the 21st Century.”
