Profile: James Glave

One of the trials recounted in James Glave’s nonfiction debut, Almost Green (Greystone Books, $22), concerns a struggle to sell his family’s black Lexus SUV, an oversized vehicle handed down by his well-meaning and global-warming-denying father-in-law. So there was perhaps no more fitting manner for the Straight to pull up for a meeting with the author than to scrape the side of, yes, a black Lexus SUV, in an embarrassingly misjudged attempt at parallel parking.

Thankfully, the gas-guzzler in question did not belong to Glave, who had been shuttled to a Kitsilano coffee shop in, appropriately, his publicist’s Prius. So after the Straight finished exchanging insurance information with an irate denizen of the neighbourhood, Glave settled into a discussion about his transformation from skeptical journalist to born-again green crusader.

That awakening is documented with self-deprecating, painfully honest detail in his book, the narrative crux of which concerns his poorly planned efforts at building a 280-square-foot “eco-shed” in the backyard of the home on Bowen Island he shares with his wife and two young children.

“I think the idea of the book was more about the concept of the making of an ”˜evolutionary’,” he began. “I was really interested in the idea that we’re in this in-between moment where we know what’s best for us, but we’re not quite ready to do it”¦.The building just became one of the projects that would help me research this and provide a nice narrative arc for figuring it out. Really, the Almost Green thing is how we’re adolescents right now: we’re in this post-puberty phase as a civilization.”

Having never before marched for a cause, Glave, rejecting the label activist in favour of “cul-de-sactivist”—his own term for a small-scale domestic warrior—confided he first approached the green movement as a cynical writer.

“There was a time when eco-chic was just starting to really hit the mainstream media—Cameron Diaz was showing up with a hybrid, and everything was bamboo,” he recalled. “I noticed what we used to call environmentalism had undergone this radical makeover, where it was chic and it was all about sexiness, and it wasn’t about living in trees and shitting in plastic buckets anymore”¦.As a journalist, I wanted to reverse-engineer this ecochic trend, because I wanted to take it down a notch or two. I wanted to make the case or establish the case that this was just about shopping.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the copy desk: Glave got religion. “I realized the underpinnings were, in fact, pretty frickin’ important and huge. I very gradually started to lose some of that cynicism and see it as, okay, I’m not about eco-chic necessarily, but there is a real thing happening here.”

Without the financial means for building a LEED-certified house, Glave, with the reluctant approval of his long-suffering wife, decided to do the next best thing and build the greenest studio possible on their little slice of island heaven.

Budgeted at $50,000, the shed ended up clocking in at $90,000 and taking many months longer than originally planned, with every misstep captured for posterity in Glave’s writings.

“You’re right inside my bank accounts in this book, and it’s kind of like, I feel really naked,” he admitted. “But at the same time, I felt like that was the only way to write about this, to just be absolutely as devastatingly transparent and honest as I can be.”¦I think that we haven’t been getting that message from anybody yet. It’s more, ”˜It’s all good! The greener life is awesome!’ We’re fed this PR job”¦.There’s a fear in the green movement to admit that it’s hard and a challenge. Because once you do that, in theory, you dissuade people from starting. And my philosophy is you get more people onboard when you say it’s going to be hard.”

Despite the sizable debt and marital stress it stirred up, Glave’s eco-shed isn’t all a tale of woe. The sustainable-to-the-hilt structure has been featured on GQ’s style blog, and is set to appear in Oprah’s O at Home magazine in September. It also currently rents out at $175 a night, and boasts its very own Web site (www.eco-shed.ca/).

And the hand-me-down Lexus SUV? Without giving anything away, Glave’s family did manage to put that demon to rest. But as for the one now sporting a significant blemish on its otherwise pristine exterior, well, let’s just say that story is between ICBC and a certain Toyota driver, who plans on taking the greener route and cycling as much as possible from now on.