The variety of televisions on the market today is mind-boggling. There are different types, an enormous range in screen size, and nuances in picture quality and resolution to satisfy the most persnickety movie buff or the sports nut who wants to watch instant replay with minimal blurring. And there’s a price to fit almost every homeowner’s budget.

New golf course communities now incorporate environmentally sensitive planning in the selection of turfgrasses, the amount and frequency of fertilizer and pesticides applications, the establishment of mini-ecosystems and mini-wetlands, and the collection of storm water runoff from adjoining houses. The best also have freeways wide enough to keep golf balls out of the homeowners’ yards.

When the lifetime costs of homeownership are calculated, it’s more sensible to build a house with costlier materials that raise the sale price but reduce operating and replacement costs. Dollars should not be the only cost that is weighed. When the environmental cost of materials such as PVC are calculated, many homeowners might opt for more environmentally benign alternatives.

Worldwide, buildings are the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. In the U.S. half of these building-related emissions come from houses. They can be eliminated entirely from new construction with existing design strategies and energy-saving materials and construction techniques. But before home builders will implement any of these things, they want assurances that home buyers are willing to pay the added cost.

"Use common sense to make sense."  It sounds like Ben Franklin, but the speaker is green-building consultant David Johnston, who often uses this aphorism as a shorthand way of explaining sustainable green-building principles and practices. Although these have been embraced by more and more home builders, there is still much confusion among the public as to what makes a house green.

The annual volume of hardwood cut and trashed by homeowners and municipalities equals about two-thirds the volume cut by commercial loggers. Much of this urban timber is unusable, but with concerted effort, it can be recycled into flooring and furniture. A pilot project in Southeast Michigan is recycling some of the thousands of ash trees that have been removed to prevent the spread of the emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle.

With the help of tradespeople, you can recycle the trees cut to build your new house into flooring or furniture. First, you’ll need a sawyer to cut the trees into rough-cut boards. Then you’ll need the services of a kiln owner who can dry your wood. The boards will need additional millwork and then the last person in this labor chain can turn the boards into flooring.

Many aspects of home building are hard to explain in words, but easily conveyed in pictures. Ted Owens’ DVD “Building With Awareness,” hits the high points of straw-bale construction.  Sometimes you have to use words, but David Johnston’s “Green Building,” a DVD of a lecture series, allows a viewer to replay the same section as many times as needed to get the professor’s point, an impossibility in the classroom.

With sustainable, green home building, aesthetics count — but energy efficiency and the environmental impact of construction are equally important. Energy efficiencies are achieved with both high- and low-tech approaches. Free solar energy is tapped to the max for heating and cooling, though in most places conventional heating and cooling will also be required. Electricity can be produced with photovoltaic panels on the roof.

When you plant a sapling in your backyard that was germinated from the seed of an historic tree, you have a personal connection to history. The saplings from more than 600 such trees are available through the Historic Tree Nursery in Jacksonville, Florida. Some of them are important because they are more than 1,000 years old but most were planted by a famous person or “witnessed” an important event

Most homeowners assume that greenhouse gas-producing emissions come from cars and industry. But in the U.S., the largest source of these emissions is buildings, and half of these are houses. The emissions are produced when fossil fuels are burned to produce the energy that powers our heating, cooling and 21st century lifestyle. When a household’s energy use is reduced, the greenhouse gas emissions attributed to it are also reduced.