When Marty Hsieh bought his house, built on slopeland, it had the feeling of a cave-closed, damp, chilly, and dark. The lower two floors, both concrete, face the slope to the rear, are walled in by houses on either side, and though having exposed facades onto a small alleyway, have no outside entrances. The third floor is not quite so claustrophobic-it opens out onto a narrow concrete walkway on one side and has a door leading out on to a wooden porch in the rear-but its "front" wall is likewise right up against the slope and its other side wall abuts the building next door. Being directly in contact with the soil, these three stories were so damp when it rained that water would trickle down the inside walls. The fourth floor, meanwhile, was an almost completely sealed corrugated steel structure added on at the top that was suffocating in summer and chilling in winter, and, given its depth of 16 meters, it received very little natural light.

The former owner had run a restaurant here, with customers coming and going via the entrance to the fourth floor, which opens out directly onto an access road. (The fourth floor facade facing onto this road is actually the "front" of the house, although it is the only floor exposed on that side, while the "back" of the house, facing away from the slope with all four stories exposed, faces onto the small alley mentioned above.) To deal with the heat and stuffiness inside this toaster-oven-like metallic shell, powerful air conditioners ran day and night. The third floor housed the kitchen, making the concrete walkway just outside a home to puddles of discarded cooking oil, a rancid smell, and rats.

Hsieh spent two years and NT$3 million renovating the place. Besides painting the exterior walls and rooftop white to reduce absorption of sunlight, there are now numerous gadgets inside that are designed to save resources in five ways: through air flow, natural lighting, rain recycling, heat insulation, and dehumidifying. Hsieh also installed solar power panels worth NT$1 million on one corner of the roof, making his a genuine "fully-powered green building."

Hsieh says that because the house was in such poor condition, all the contractors he hired advised him to tear it down and start from scratch. (That would have cost him about NT$7.5 million.) But he insisted on investing his time and money in the existing framework, and kept destruction to a minimum.

"Breaking up the house would have used up energy and created waste materials! In Taiwan, the substitution rate for structures is too high at 3%." He wonders, "Why is it that we smash up concrete walls when they are 'still in the prime of life,' and then replace them with other structures also using materials built to last for 100 years? We're just making life a lot harder for the planet."

Marty Hsieh not only has made a visual aid to explain to people how he has gone about using solar power himself, he also teaches at the Meigang Community College in Changhua, doing everything he can to promote energy-saving lifestyles.

Already 45 when he started, Hsieh learned by trial and error, doing his own designs, blueprints, and models, asking questions of a structural engineer whenever he had doubts. When there was no choice but to incorporate new building materials, his principle was to use commonly available, recyclable materials like lumber, discarded wood, and steel plate. The polished quartz tiles on his floor were bought as leftovers direct from factories and pieced together higgledy-piggledy; Hsieh doesn't mind that the colors don't exactly match. He wanted to prove that a green building doesn't need to be a yuppie toy with everything at the technological cutting edge, and that "green homes for the common man" are in fact much more do-able and deserve a lot more attention than they now get.

For example, one of Hsieh's simple but important tricks is to use the incline of the corrugated steel roof to collect dew and rainwater. Because the catchment area is 127 square meters, for every -millimeter of rainfall Hsieh gets 127 liters of water. With a single rainstorm of 50 millimeters, he can collect over 6000 liters of aqua, enough to take care of all the secondary needs (like watering plants and mopping the floor) of a family of five for a full year-with plenty to spare!

Meanwhile, his heat-pump-based dehumidifying system, which cost about NT$80-100,000 to install, can absorb moisture and heat energy out of the air, making the interior comfortable and cool. The absorbed heat energy can then be used to warm up water for showers, meaning that Hsieh gets the functions of three devices-dehumidifier, air conditioner, and water heater-with a single expenditure of energy. As if that weren't cool enough, the heat pump requires only one-third the electricity of a standard residential water heater, but it is nearly four times as efficient. He has gotten quite a number of advantages from this one measure alone.

Hsieh has also built an air circulation tower, encircled in glass and protruding 1.5 meters through the roof. When the sun is shining, heated air inside the house escapes upward through the louvered top of the tower. This in turn creates negative pressure at the bottom, which causes the air to circulate. Even if all the doors and windows are closed, the house doesn't feel stuffy.

On the roof Hsieh has installed 24 solar panels, each one 98.9 x 165.5 centimeters. Of them, 12 are in a so-called "golden belt," beyond the reach of shade cast from any direction where they get sun all year round, regardless of the angle of the rays. They are tied into the Taiwan Power Company's electricity network, and the energy is sold directly to Taipower. The panels can produce 4,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, reducing carbon emissions by 2.5 tons and earning Hsieh NT$32,000 to boot.

The renovated house as it stands today is not only warm in winter and cool in summer, it costs only NT$12,000 per year for water and electricity. It has become a landmark in its district, and indeed a virtual legend, becoming a must-see destination for environmentalists and even drawing praise from President Ma Ying-jeou.

Marty Hsieh not only has made a visual aid to explain to people how he has gone about using solar power himself, he also teaches at the Meigang Community College in Changhua, doing everything he can to promote energy-saving lifestyles.

Hsieh's vision was inspired 25 years ago, when he served as a volunteer at the newly opened National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung. It was then that it first struck him how mankind, though on the planet for only a tiny fraction of the earth's 4.6 billion years, has nonetheless done incredible damage. When he also thought about the fact that the human population on earth has tripled in the last century (from about 2 billion in 1910 to over 6 billion today), he couldn't help but wonder whether Homo sapiens is not an evolutionary dead end.

Originally, Hsieh thought about opening a primary school to teach about environmental matters in an unorthodox way. Unhappily, that would have required a lot more money than he had, so he settled for a kindergarten. In a period when the fad for pre-school English classes had yet to reach Changhua, he wanted to give kids a broad-minded outlook, so he went to the US in person to hire a professional teacher of English, thereby becoming a pioneer in the county.

Of course it wasn't long before his competitors followed suit, while at the same time they hung big banners outside their schools proclaiming how this or that student from their kindergarten had tested into the class for gifted children in first grade of elementary school, a trend that Hsieh-who has always insisted that "class rank isn't everything"-refused to follow. Discovering that his pedagogic ideals had become an obstacle to the success of his business, five years ago he resigned, leaving the kindergarten into which he had invested 16 years of his life.

Thinking back on his long career in education, Hsieh recalls seeing many families struck by misfortunes like extramarital affairs, divorce, accidental death, unemployment, and debt, and many cases of parents so absorbed in their careers or businesses that they neglected their kids. He became deeply convinced that the pressures of modern society are simply exhausting people both physically and mentally.

Hoping to get people re-centered, he tried to think up a lifestyle which could achieve sustainable balance and get reconnected with the land. He aspired to build a "low-energy educational village," planning to recruit five or 10 full-time stay-at-home parents with 30 or so kids to grow up surrounded by the tranquility of nature. The children could have peers with whom they could interact and mature, and the adults could help each other as well, and they would share in common the tasks of education, production, and reducing energy use.

To this end he spent three years, visiting tens of remote primary schools that were going to close for lack of students, until he finally found the Baileng Primary School in Taichung. Not only did it meet all his criteria, Taipower was willing to rent him 1.8 hectares that had dormitories already built on it. But just when there was light at the end of the tunnel, Hsieh discovered that the rental contract prohibited "any alterations to the buildings," and the plan had to be put on the back burner.

Despite having met frustration in his plan for an "educational village," he could still embark independently on a low-energy lifestyle. His renovation of the old house is the first step toward realizing his ideals. Now he is looking toward making a profession out of educating people about low-carbon lifestyles and energy-saving housing. Once he has gotten the ball rolling, this "environmental fanatic" will almost certainly come up with even grander visions!

Marty Hsieh not only has made a visual aid to explain to people how he has gone about using solar power himself, he also teaches at the Meigang Community College in Changhua, doing everything he can to promote energy-saving lifestyles.

Marty Hsieh not only has made a visual aid to explain to people how he has gone about using solar power himself, he also teaches at the Meigang Community College in Changhua, doing everything he can to promote energy-saving lifestyles.

This blue-colored structure, which strikes the visitor as soon as he or she enters the main door on the foaurth floor of Marty Hsieh's home, is a nine-meter-tall air circulation tower.

Marty Hsieh not only has made a visual aid to explain to people how he has gone about using solar power himself, he also teaches at the Meigang Community College in Changhua, doing everything he can to promote energy-saving lifestyles.

Marty Hsieh not only has made a visual aid to explain to people how he has gone about using solar power himself, he also teaches at the Meigang Community College in Changhua, doing everything he can to promote energy-saving lifestyles.

Marty Hsieh not only has made a visual aid to explain to people how he has gone about using solar power himself, he also teaches at the Meigang Community College in Changhua, doing everything he can to promote energy-saving lifestyles.