Mostly the Southwest remains sparsely settled. Despite all the growth in our cities, those vast, nearly empty spaces between them invite the natural world to infiltrate our thinking. Maybe that’s why green building has moved from fringe fad to institutionalized convention across the United States, and here in particular. One of the early hotbeds of solar home building, New Mexico has a long tradition of environmentally oriented housing: it’s not such a leap from building with adobe—itself a low-embodied-energy, renewable, nontoxic material—to Build Green NM’s Green Home Building Guidelines. The ethos underpinning them is to build while minimizing the impact of residential construction on the environment and the climate—and build to last.

You’ll see how this philosophy results in terrific houses in our “Green comes home for good” section (page 83). It features new construction by Builders West and Sun Mountain Construction and an almost 20-year-old solar home originally designed and recently updated by architect Bruce Davis. Elsewhere, you’ll see how green-building principles can be applied to renovation at the Mang residence in our Green Home column. You’ll also see the Build Green NM logo on many of the new residences in our coverage of the Custom Builders Council Home Tour, organized by the Custom Builders Council of the Home Builders Association of Central New Mexico (page 119).

As more buyers buy green, more builders will build it. Whet your appetite on these pages, then think about how increasing energy efficiency, cutting carbon dioxide emissions, incorporating sustainable materials, and creating homes of reasonable size might apply to your place.

One aspect of green, as Vishu Magee points out in his column Style with Substance (page 60), is doing nothing at all—maybe that’s the whispered message of all that open space around us. In this climate, in this geography, with this light, most of us like to be outside whenever we can, in motion or at rest. Our “Outside influence” feature (page 71) shows how a few homeowners have transformed their exterior spaces into havens for entertaining, recreation, and contemplation. I don’t know about you, but every once in a while I need a little space, whether it’s out in the open desert or my backyard. Wherever that might be, green is the state of mind that colors my view of the place.