Georgie has been steadily promoting the concept of our moving to western Mass., for a less expensive, potentially less hectic existence that would also put us in the same neighborhood with Doug, her attractive-in-every-way brother, and his family.

I see the potential advantages, and Doug, Val, and the girls are right at the top of the list, but one of the other attractions for me was the opportunity to build our own house, which would incorporate every possible (read: affordable) efficient/renewable strategy.

In a night and two days at Building Energy, that dream died, without even a direct assault. In fact, I think I understood the irresponsibility of it after the Tuesday night session, but yesterday, Paul Eldrenkamp, a well-respected high-end home renovation specialist from Newton whom I interviewed for the PowerHouse Enterprises story, uttered a single line that encapsulates the problem: "Ninety percent of the homes now standing will still be here in 40-50 years."

To build anew when plenty of homes — for which trees were felled, and land was disrupted, and chemicals were formulated and applied, etc. — are still standing is a questionable strategy, even if the home we build is wicked environmentally responsible.

(No, I don't think the same goes for Priuses, for even though every new car results from the same sort of resource-martialing, 90 percent of today's cars will NOT be around decades into the future, nor should they be.)

But to take a long-term structure and make it eco-friendlier is a much better strategy — not only making something good, but removing something bad. So now, in Amherst or wherever, we'll be looking for a beater that needs work anyway, with the right orientation to the sun, and we'll seek to make it supertight, with rain- and gray-water catchments, some solar mass, who knows what else. Hey, for now, anyway, it's still just a dream.