It’s zero degrees here in Boulder today. But the sun is brilliant, and the foothills are majestic, all covered in snow. I’m dealing with an Inauguration Week hangover, vacillating between hope about our country’s fresh start and despair over rotten economic news that just keeps on coming. 

I really want to take Carol Venolia’s advice, from her “Design for Life” column in the current issue, and spend the rest of the winter in hibernation. But that’s impossible, so I’m looking on the bright side. And the good news is, there’s plenty of good news out there right now. My email inbox has been full of it. 

1. President Obama’s stimulus plan includes tens of billions of dollars to green up our electricity, putting 460,000 Americans to work on energy projects and doubling the amount of alternative energy produced over the next three years. The plan includes funds to "weatherize" 2 million homes by improving insulation and leaky windows. Needless to say, we love this idea!

2. We’re trading in our status as a hyper-consumer culture and becoming a yard sale nation. James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, about the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change and other "converging catastrophes of the 21st century," wrote last week on Alternet: “Say goodbye to the ‘consumer society.’ We're done with that. No more fast money and no more credit. The next stop is ‘yard-sale nation,’ in which all the plastic crapola accumulated over the past fifty years is sorted out for residual value and, if still working, sold for a fraction of its original sticker price. This includes everything from Humvees to Hello Kitty charm bracelets.” As advocates of reuse and salvage, we’re smiling about this one.

3. Homebuyers want green homes. At the International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas last week, the National Association of Home Builders revealed survey results showing that 92 percent of respondents would rather have an energy-efficient home with lower utility bills versus a cheaper home without them. And homeowners said they would spend an average of $6,000 more on a home that would save them $1,000 annually on energy costs. Hey, we’re down with that.

4. Homebuyers want smaller homes. In the July-September quarter of 2008, the average size of a house under construction fell 7.3 percent, to 2,438 square feet from 2,629 square feet in the previous quarter, according to the NAHB. Ninety percent of builders told the NAHB that they’re building smaller homes.

5. “Many think 2009 will go down as the year green goes mainstream and homebuyers become much more savvy about the need for eco-friendly options,” columnist Michele Lerner wrote earlier this month in the Residential Real Estate Examiner.

2009 looks to be our year. And that ought to keep us all warm for a while.

This first week back after the holidays is always a little rough for me. 

It’s our final production week; we’re sending the March/April gardening issue off to the printer. It’s nice, if bizarre, to be looking at layouts full of lush, bountiful gardens on a bleak January day. That’s one of the old-school things I love about printed magazines, that need to work almost half a year ahead of the calendar in order to make up for the long, cumbersome mechanical printing process. It seems so quaint, in this age of Twitter. 

Next up is our tenth-anniversary issue. Gearing up for that one’s been making me feel nostalgic (and old). Ten’s a lot of years. I was such an innocent kid back in 1999, when I called up Pliny Fisk at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin and made him laugh out loud with how little I knew about green building. (I confused Lake Flato], a green architecture firm, with Lake Travis, a real lake west of Austin.) A couple more trips to Austin (and other green hot spots), and I knew a little more than I knew before—but, lucky for me, that was more than most. Green building was still pretty grass roots, an open network of information exchange, in 1999.  

I think we made some mighty fine magazines back in those days. We featured a lot of funky, one-of-a-kind natural houses (the kind I’m particularly partial to), but we erred in not offering enough for regular folks (like me) who may not ever build that way. We adjusted our formula, readjusted again a few years later, and readjusted again. (That’s another beautiful thing about magazines…we get to do that. And now that we have tools such as online surveys, we’re constantly microadjusting, which is pretty cool.) 

Back in 1999, I’d get some quizzical (even suspicious) looks from people when I told them about Natural Home. (I didn’t really look like a hippie. I was a suburban mother of two.) Those have died out these days, as most everyone has at least a toe in the green thing (even if it’s just a pair of bamboo socks). 

But as we stand here at the brink of 2009, I’m not completely convinced that green has hit “mainstream” status. The U.S. Green Building Council reports that only 2 to 10 percent of American homes could be considered green.  We have a ways to go, but our cache is only building. It’s cool to be hitting this 10-year milestone just as our incoming president dangles forth possibility in the use of words like “renewable energy” and “green jobs.” 

We’ve posted some of the houses we most love from the past decade at www.naturalhomemagazine.com/tenth-anniversary. Soon, we'll have a survey ready for you, and we hope you’ll stop by to vote for your favorites (or write them in, if you don’t find them there).  I believe these homes, which have paved the way for the exciting decade to come, will continue to provide inspiration and fodder for our housing dreams—well into this next millennium.