Wisconsin Public Television University Place Presents  Buddy Huffaker, "Aldo Leopold Legacy Center"  November 11, 2010 UP519    cc >> Welcome to University Place. I'm Norman Gilliland. Because Aldo Leopold was the founder of modern environmental ethics, we'd expect a building named in his honor to have minimal impact on its surroundings, and the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center in Baraboo is a building that has gone even beyond that. It's a net zero energy use building that takes all of its energy right there on site and uses it very, very efficiently in ultra modern ways. We're going to find out how it's done from the executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, Buddy Huffaker. Welcome to University Place. >> Buddy Huffaker: Welcome, pleased to be here. >> So the concept for this building came from where? >> It really originated from the Leopold family that created the Leopold Foundation, and I think as they saw their father's legacy continue to grow, recognized that really their father's idea of this land ethic was as relevant today as when it was first written in the 1940s. And so because people would show up from all over the world on their doorstep, they began to realize that a center that could accommodate this increasing interest in traffic, could both help improve the experience for visitors, but also kind of demonstrate what Leopold's ideas might look in the 21st century. >> So in a way it was a good thing that they waited for the 21st century to build this because so much has been learned about the use of energy, the efficient use of energy, even in the last 10 years. 

>> Well, I think you're right. The Leopold family has always been kind of writing and pushing the modern wave of the environmental movement and conservation. But certainly this moment in time kind of presented us both with the theories and the technology to really, I think, demonstrate how sustainable architecture and design can really achieve the kind of goals that people are talking about in terms of addressing climate change, limited resources and so forth. >> So even in this distinctly four-season climate that we have in Wisconsin, this is a building that uses really minimal energy, in fact it is a zero sum result. >> The goal is to be net zero. And in our first two years of operation we haven't quite got there but we're at about 90%. >> That's incredible. >> Which is pretty admirable. Of course we set the stake out pretty far so we're learning some things. Our performance gets better each year. 

So it's still our goal and attention at some point in time to produce all the energy we need to run that building within the course of a year. And without getting too complicated, that's just energy. Also on the carbon side, because of how we managed the forest where most of the building blocks in the building came from, we're actually sequestering that carbon. So our energy performance is so good and then we've improved the health of the forest so much that from an overall carbon perspective, we're actually sequestering more carbon than we're consuming over the course of a year. >> And by sequestering you mean it's not being released into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. >> Exactly. So if you have a traditional building that's drawing its energy from a local power plant that, say, burns coal, all of the energy that it needs to run itself comes from coal that is a fossil energy and is being extracted somewhere else and is consumed, and all of that carbon dioxide is going into the atmosphere. >> So you're taking it from the ground and putting into the atmosphere, whereas with this Legacy Center it's nothing added. >> We're collecting the sun's energy, that's part of it, but then also any shortfall that we have, the trees that are left in our forest are actually growing and so that carbon is sequestered right there on our site. >> Well, let's have a look at the early concept of the place and get a sense of how it might have changed. 

Here's an image I gather from the design phase of the Leopold Center. >> This is just after we moved in. And so you can see it's kind of a small campus-like facility. You can see the black on the roof. That's our power plant, if you will, the solar panels. And you can see how we're kind of open to the sun so that we can take full advantage of the sun's energy. >> And what do you do then in the winter? Or all the cloudy days that tend to come with the winter? >> Right. Again, it's designed so that in the summertime, kind of in peak solar production, we're generating excess energy, and then in the wintertime when we're short, the balance over the course of the year evens itself out. >> So you actually can store it with solar cells? >> Well, interestingly enough we chose not to store the energy on site which would require batteries or some other technology. We're connected to the electrical grid just like any other home or commercial building. 

So on any given day we're either selling power to the power plant or buying power from the power plant. So in that way-- Batteries are still expensive, a little bit messy, and somewhat inefficient. So this way, again we're trying to demonstrate in all aspects of the building what's available to at least in any new construction project so it doesn't have to be this radical, kind of off the grid type thinking. >> Keep it on the grid. >> Just keep it on the grid, use the infrastructure that exists, but add some dimensions that increase the energy efficiency and then the productivity. >> So there are times when actually some household in Baraboo is using energy that has been sold by the Legacy Center. >> That's correct. >> And what does this illustrate here when we have kind of this broad, closer look at the center. >> Well here again you see the solar panel system, you can also see kind of up by the chimney in front of it to the right is a solar hot water system. So that's another type of renewable energy production system where we heat all the water that we use in the building through that system. 

And then it also shows with the chimney itself that we do harvest dead fall wood and we do burn about two cords of wood over the course of the year to help further temper the space. So it kind of shows you all the different forms of energy that we're using right there. >> So you can enumerate this from solar and from wood and what other sources? >> So there would be two forms of solar. One is what it called photovoltaic or kind of the traditional solar panel that actually converts the sunlight into electricity as we kind of know it. Then there is solar hot water which takes a collector and warms that up and then liquid flows through there and so it's a kind of water transfer. So that would be for taking showers or washing dishes and those kinds of things. And then wood would be the third form. >> And so is the idea that this center is setting an example for homeowners who might be able to do the same kind of thing on a maybe slightly smaller scale? >> Yeah, I think the facility all told in kind of usable space is about 10,000 square feet, the total square footage is about 13,000 square feet, and the way it was designed there are technologies that work for a residential scale and there are technologies that work for a commercial scale. So it kind of goes back and forth and we can help use that as an example to all aspects of the building community to think kind of anew about how and what can be done in terms of green building. >> Let's look at Aldo Leopold himself for a minute. 

There he is looking very relaxed but watchful at the same time. What was the state of energy conservation during his life? He died in 1948, right before A Sand County Almanac became such a big success. >> Correct. Well, of course, Leopold himself is our inspiration and was one of really the first early voices to question and challenge how humanity was going to relate to the natural world, and that, in fact, most of our wealth comes from the natural world in some way, shape or form. And his big concept was the land ethic where people are part of the biological community not apart from the biological community. And so it was really his challenge that he wrote actually as part of an address to the Engineering Department here on campus at the University of Wisconsin Madison that he delivered in 1938 where he wrote, "The oldest task in human history is to live on a piece of land without spoiling it." That's 1938. So energy was not the kind of pressing matter it is now but he was clearly aware that we were not being very cautious with how we utilize precious resources, and so I don't think he would have been surprised that we find ourselves in this quandary at this point. >> And in a minute we'll look at a before and after at woods that have been harvested by people from the Leopold Center. Let's look at the center itself again here and see what kind of insight we can get from this. This obviously is more of a conceptual piece. 

>> Right. This has been one of the really interesting aspects as an ecologist conservationist to be involved with building a building. And early on, as the family and the Leopold Foundation kind of came up with this idea of building a center that would help stimulate interpretation and research into Leopold and his ideas and applications of the land ethic in the 21st century, we begin to ask ourselves where's the bar? What do we have to do in terms of demonstrating what, in fact, a land ethic is? And so beginning with this idea that we could build a building out of trees that he planted, generate all of our energy on site, collect rainwater on site, we began the process of kind of setting the bar for ourselves and seeing how close we could get to achieving the vision that we had set out for ourselves, again that we thought was left to us by Leopold. >> Well that's an interesting dimension that I think most of us wouldn't think about in terms of energy conservation in the design of our home is conserving energy in the actual construction of the home by not importing materials from distant places. >> Yeah, this is a thing that's becoming, I think gaining interest, if you will. There's the certified products and opportunities to buy organic or forest certified products, but the other really important aspect in the dimension is buying locally and trying to keep that loop as tight as possible from an energy perspective, from an ecological perspective and even from an economic perspective. So we were presented with a really unique opportunity in that, of course in the '30s and '40s what inspired Leopold to write his book, A Sand County Almanac, was really his own effort to restore the family farm along the Wisconsin River. >> Right, he had bought that farm, as I understand it, in a very depleted state. >> Yeah it was, from the soil profile down, about 400 feet worth of sand. So not your good agricultural soils. 

And the farmer that had owned the property before him had tried to make a go of it with corn and beans and wheat and oats and just couldn't do it. And so he picked it up for the back taxes and then really set about kind of restoring it to some kind of land health. Planted thousands and thousands of trees. He would plant 3,000 trees a year. A thousand white pine, a thousand red pine and a thousand jack pine. Now, he purchased the farm in the mid-1930s, and you probably remember that at that point the Dust Bowl was upon us. >> Yes indeed, sure. >> And so the first five years, all of the trees that they planted literally died. >> Hot and dry. >> Hot and dry. 

But somehow he inspired the family to come back out that fifth year, plant another 3,000 trees and the climate began to change and their trees began to take hold. So the foundation continues to manage this farm that is really one of the, along with the arboretum here, one of the oldest ecological restoration projects in the country. And we began to recognize that the trees that the family planted actually were not fairing so well because they were too close together. And so by doing a modest thinning we could actually improve the health of the remaining trees. >> That's often true. I remember Nina Leopold Bradley talking about, as a girl or a young woman, the family out there planting these thousands of trees which seemed to have been kind of an adventure, really. As was having five children I suppose. >> Yeah, a built-in workforce. You bring up one of the really kind of fun parts of the story. All five of the Leopold children are prominent ecologists or have been. 

We've lost three of them. But they understand ecology and so Carl Leopold, in particular, who was a plant physiologist and part of the vision for this new facility, we told him that we were thinking about doing a thinning of the trees that he planted in order to both leave the healthier ones and then have the building materials for the new building, he sighed and he said you could also not cut any of them. And here's a plant physiologist who knows a dead tree when he sees one and it just represents, I think, what a wonderful story the family has of this scientific approach to land but also this emotional approach to it. >> It can be hard to separate. For example, if you look at these logs, these are logs planted by the Leopolds then in the '30s. >> That's correct. >> And in a way it's hard not to react negatively and say look those are good sized trees that have all been cut down. But you're saying that the ones remaining are going to be that much bigger and healthier. >> And again as a tribute to their kind of knowledge and understanding, now that they look at the forest everybody agrees that it's healthier. But it's just that initial, I spent all that time planting those. 

>> Well they've gone to a good cause because now they're really, literally, part of the Leopold legacy. >> Right, right. And I think nobody is more proud of the facility than the family and what we were able to achieve, and to take a tree, I always say people often refer to Leopold as quite a visionary, and I say, yeah, to think that 70 years ago he planted this building for us. >> Yeah, very convenient. Now is this next image some of the actual work on site? All of the planing or whatever the process would be of turning trees into lumber was done on site? >> Not all of it. The heavy timbers, we brought a portable sawmill in so that those materials would never have to leave the site. We would save all the energy of taking these big 10 x 12s, 10 x 14s off somewhere else and planing them and then bringing them back. So all that happened on site. For the interior finish material that would be flooring and paneling and ceiling decking, we did have to dry that so that the moisture would come out of it so that it would be stable. So that we took to a family sawmill, Samsel Sawmill up in Hancock, Wisconsin. 

So all of that material lasts, about 160-mile round trip was all it ever made from forest to finish to building material. >> Should I assume that you're not using a lot of particle board in the construction. >> That's correct. We try to use our material as much as possible. Where we weren't able to use ours we would buy certified material or other kind of green certified materials that would be keeping with the spirit of the project. >> Here's another conceptual look, or at least it gives us an idea of design and purpose. >> Well I think what you also begin to realize is that the way we kind of generate building materials relative to the way we design, there's very little feedback looped to that anymore. And so an architect or engineer will design a building and then the contractor gets the part list and goes down to the building supply material and says hey, deliver all this next week. We didn't have that luxury. Our challenge was to give to the architect and the engineer here's what we have, how are you going to design a building that can utilize that. 

>> When was the last time that was done? >> It's probably been decades or maybe a century. That's how all building used to be done. So it was a really interesting experience, I think, from the architect and engineering perspective to really understand what it would take to utilize local materials in a really significant way. >> And here we have another look at some of the materials that went into the building of this Legacy Center. And I like the way it's labeled there: Leopold. >> Well the family, the Samsels, were really terrific. They, in essence, set their operation aside for a year as they processed our 50,000 board feet of material that went through the building process. And so here you see, we saw the trees being taken down with the forester equipment and now you see them in the yard and then as the beginnings of building products. >> So how long was the process from ground breaking to completion so that you could actually move in? >> From ground breaking to completion was about a year but the timber harvest started a year before that. >> To let it dry you mean? >> To let it dry and just make sure we could get the material out of the woods. 

So kind of a two-year window from start to finish. And then really from conception to move-in was just shy of seven years. And of course for an organization like ours, a fair part of it is the fundraising associated with securing the resources to build it. So it was a pretty complex project and process but kind of once we really got started things really came together quickly. >> Well now let's make kind of a leap to Lambeau and figure out what's connection between Lambeau Field, I can't imagine a place that would be much different from the Leopold Legacy Center. >> Well I love to use this graphic because when I say 50,000 board feet, what does that mean to you? Not much to most people. But if you can envision a football field or Lambeau Field covered end zone to end zone, side line to side line, one-inch thick in wood, we had two of those that came off of our property that ended up being used in the building. So it's just a way to give some scale of kind of one of Wisconsin's most beloved sites, Lambeau Field, with one that we hope will be even more beloved, the Leopold shack and farm and the center in the future. >> How many acres are we talking about of timber harvest? >> Well actually all of that came off of a relatively limited amount. Probably about 50 or 60 acres all told. 

>> And you got enough to cover Lambeau twice over? >> Now remember what they call a board foot is kind of one inch thick by 12 inches by 12 inches. So a big timber that's 10 by 14 and 20 feet long, that ends up having quite a fewer board feet in it. And then I think as we'll see in later pictures, all the exterior siding is oak from the site. We have a lot of flooring. We have a lot of ceiling decking. So all of that came off just a portion of our acreage. >> So two Lambeau Field's worth. Still pretty impressive. Now here we have an image of a before and after, and when I looked at this ahead of time I said what's the point here of having, I thought it was almost a stereoscope thing going here except for the different color of the coat of the person in the picture. But you're telling me this is before and after harvesting this stand of woods? >> That's exactly right. 

So it shows you really how sensitive we were to leaving the best trees in the field and how little volume we took out of the woods in order to get this 50,000 board feet or two Lambeau Fields worth. And so we use this picture just to demonstrate that we're not talking about a clear cut here, we're really talking about very selective thinning that leaves that forest healthier when we're done with it. >> So do you categorize or assess or somehow count the amount of material you have after you've cut these trees down or do you do some kind of a board foot estimate while they're still standing? >> A little bit of both. Most of that was calculated when we marked the trees in the field to, again, find, if you were a good tree and I was a bad tree we'd mark me and tell the forester that I'm the one to cut down and to leave you. And as we did that, we would scale the tree and get a sense of how much volume would come off of it. We'd also take what they call diameter at breast height. That's how big around a tree is at breast height on an average individual. So we'd put that in a computer and then our ecologist would scale how tall he thought the tree was and so how long, what they call the butt log, that's the first and most valuable log out of the tree would be, and then the next one, and in the cases where we might get a third one, how big that might be. And so then he used that. He had this master list that would kind of calculate how many members we think we'd have this big and then this big and then this big. 

And that's what he gave the architect and the engineer to use to kind of do the final design. And then we had to come back and around and kind of fact check all of that once they had done their preliminary design and we had begun milling the members to see what we thought would give us a four by 10 in the field by the time we cut the tree down and got it off the mill wasn't quite measuring up. So there was a lot of information that went into the process and kind of checks and balances along the way. >> How much of the tree did you actually use? >> This is kind of an interesting part. We would go up as far as we could and get anything, we'd even take what most people would probably just discard but we would take and still utilize and get some paneling out of it, or something like that. And then Steve Swenson, our ecologist, came up with the idea that we still had some tops and even some major branches here and there that could be utilized. So he worked with the Forest Products Lab here in Madison, the US Forest Service Research and Design Lab, and they were using a new innovative technique to make pulp which did not use chemicals. So we brought the material down to them. So the scraps that we couldn't otherwise use, we brought down here, they turned it into pulp and then it went up to Stevens Point at the paper making lab. They made paper out of it and then we printed A Sand County Almanac on paper made from trees that Leopold had planted. 

>> You can't beat that for efficiency. Now, are these the solar panels? >> That's right. So this is our power plant and early on we calculated how much energy we thought we would be able to produce given the size of the building that we anticipated and the roof area and those kind of things. So then that became our energy budget. And as opposed to more traditional projects, even ones that intend to use solar energy, usually you kind of figure out what all you want your building to do and then you figure how much energy it's going to take. You say holy smokes, that's a lot of energy. Well, let's put a couple solar panels up and maybe the next project will address it. For us, we really used that as a budget that we had to work within. So that began to influence both the architectural design as well as the engineering of the facility. >> So again you're designing it from, if not materials in this case, but energy available. 

>> Exactly, exactly. Again trying to find where the limiting resources are for any such project and using those to guide the process as opposed to just the demand side. We were coming from a little bit the supply side as opposed to the demand side. >> Now is this image here another example of a design of solar use? >> So this begins to show, from an architectural perspective, how we began to address the challenges that we were going to face from an energy perspective. And what you begin to see is that we've isolated functions. And so on the right-hand side you see the workshop which is where we keep our tractor and trucks and chain saws and all of that. We decided that we didn't have to heat and cool that space because it was just housing equipment, and that saved a bunch of energy. Then in the bottom you see what we call the seed hall. This was actually modeled after Nina Leopold's sleeping porch. And we wanted to have a big gathering space where we could fit 100 people or so, but we didn't really convene those people on a regular basis and really not in the wintertime. 

So this basically a glorified three-seasons screened in room that has a wood stove in it and storm windows so we can use it from early spring to late fall and in the wintertime we just shutter it up and it's not an ambient energy drop. And then the last kind of wing on the left was the year-round meeting hall. So we wanted to have one space where we could have groups and meetings all year-round. >> Relatively small. >> Relatively small and since it's off on its own it has its own mechanical system. So at any given day if we're not using it in the wintertime it's a little bit colder than the rest of the building. In the summertime it's a little bit warmer than the rest of the building. And when we're going to use it we just turn the system on and bring it up to temperature. >> Now I gather you don't have issues such as houses can that have been built in the last 10 or 15 years or so where they're so tight, the windows are so air tight and the walls are so air tight that you get mold growing on the walls? >> Yeah, we haven't had that problem. I suppose one of the benefits that we had is we fell in a commercial building category so they have a lot more stringent requirements on air flow and air exchange. 

So we haven't suffered that problem which has been a real problem in the kind of residential construction arena. >> Yeah, I had a fireplace in one of my houses that had been built I think as long ago as the late '70s, and in order to have a fire in the fireplace I actually had to open a window or a door slightly to get it to draw. I thought that was a little paradoxical. >> That's kind of the interesting part is we kind of almost got over-aggressive on some of those regulations. >> So what have we here? >> Well this is just a picture, then, of the workshop or the garage. And you begin to see how the spaces kind of isolate themselves so that we can treat them accordingly. You can also see here from a material perspective, all of that siding is black oak that came off of the property. >> So you're working with, if I remember right from what you said the Leopold's planted back in the '30s, oak and pine? >> Primarily, there's a little bit of cherry that we harvested and then some red maple, but primarily oak and pine were the resources that we had. >> What was Aldo Leopold's guide, let's say, for what trees he would plant there in the first place? >> Yeah that's a great question, Norman. The whole science of ecological restoration was just beginning with Leopold's role in the arboretum. 

And so he didn't have the luxury and kind of information that we have now about what the landscape would have looked like prior to widespread agricultural conversion. So he was really looking at several things. One being what could grow in hot, dry conditions that the region was experiencing. What would mitigate soil erosion, that was the primary kind of conservation concern at the time, mainly from wind. And then finally, what was cheap. >> Sure, you have to think about that too. >> With five children and single income resources weren't excessive in the Leopold family. So he got a lot of his material from the state nursery and that's, in part, why white and red pines and jack pines dominated what he planted. So they met all of those criteria. They grew fast, they would mitigate soil erosion and they were relatively inexpensive, if not free at times, from the state. 

And ecologically, they provided cover for game and those kinds of things. But his understanding and concern and sensitivity to diversity also led him to plant oaks and maples and other kind of wildlife habitat. But the pines really did and still do dominate the landscape. >> Pines like sandy soil anyway, if I remember right. >> Yeah. >> I got a kick out of reading A Sand County Almanac some years ago. It was after I already had a landscaper, on his own suggestion, plant a Norway maple in my front yard. And it wasn't more than a couple years had passed before I had a very lumpy yard with a lot of bare spots under that maple. I read in A Sand County Almanac something to the effect of, well, for some reason people insist on planting Norway maples in their yards even though they know they're going to kill them. And I thought what's with this landscaper that he didn't know this. 

>> Well, a lot of us are still catching up with Leopold and some of the insights and understandings he had. And it continues to fascinate me how insightful he was and really what a rich knowledge of ecology he had, both kind of in urban residential landscapes as well as more wild landscapes. >> Right, that's the kind of thing I didn't expect in Sand County was to talk about actually urban landscapes, as well. It was a bit of a surprise. Here's a look from the inside out of the Leopold Legacy Center. >> Right. So here's the three-season space. And again you can see that the glazing that we have. So lots of the windows and then those are storm windows so they can come off and we have screens. You can see the long timbers in the roof and those are, again, the very trees that Aldo and the family planted in the '30s and '40s. 

And this is kind of very interesting structural engineering approach where, as it turns out, when you make a two by four, you're actually cutting off the strongest part of the tree. >> Really? >> So if you think about it, I hadn't really thought about it, but when you do think about it the tree is really living from the outside in. And the heart wood is basically kind of considered dead. And so it's that living part of the tree that's actually the strongest part, which intuitively makes sense but you just don't think about. So an eight-inch round log is actually stronger than a 10 by 12 dimensional rafter. So again we worked with the Forest Products Lab, and they helped us come up with strategies to utilize these relatively small trees and get great structural strength out of them. And it also kind of then demonstrates from an ecological and economic perspective, if we could utilize our forest resources better, the kind of advantages that everybody would get out of that. >> So what are you using these logs for? For braces, for beams, for support? Or are you actually making log structures on this facility? >> These are trusses that they kind of created. So it's a network of the logs that create a kind of structural skeleton that then the roof just sits on top of. >> What part of the facility is this? >> So this is the meeting hall, the kind of space that we use year-round. 

It's a really beautiful interior and we've had groups from all over the country come and have retreats and think-tank sessions here. So that's the space, again, that has its own mechanical system. So it's kind of connected to the main part of the building, but again we only have to heat and cool it when it's in use. >> I don't see a chimney. >> There is actually a little smokestack on there. We have a wood stove in there, but it's mainly meant to radiate the heat out into the space so there's not a big thermal mass of the chimney like there is in the main part of the building. >> Wood stove? Franklin stove? >> It's similar. I think it's a slightly different brand but same concept. >> Same design. Much more efficient than a fireplace. 

I think with a fireplace something like 90% of the heat is supposed to go straight up the chimney. >> Exactly. >> Franklin was on to something there. >> Another person way ahead of his time. >> What do we have here? >> This just kind of shows then the overview of how the buildings come together. So you see, again, the different spaces. The main building with the solar panels on it is used year-round, and so that has extremely thick walls and thick ceiling for good insulation. And we also, then, ended up using this as a site advantage. So we have gardens and little kind of outdoor spaces that connect to each of these buildings as well so that the inside comes out and the outside comes in. >> Had that kind of flow. 

So that you're never far from your surroundings. >> Exactly. >> So you continue to harvest wood for heating? >> Yeah, but mainly that comes from, in our neck of the woods we have a lot of oak trees that suffer from oak wilt and so just modest harvest. Again, two cords of wood for 10,000 square feet is not much. I use more than that in my own home that's about 2,000 square feet. It was built in 1917. And we don't have the problem with being too tight. You can feel the draft through the home. So we do continue to just kind of harvest dead fall and trees that blow down in wind storms and those kind of things. >> So what kind of trees would have gone into this part of the facility? >> Well here, again, anything that's kind of big and dimensional is a Leopold pine. 

The ceiling decking here is the red maple that came out, and that was really important because in this part of the state and really the eastern half of the United States a lot of our oak woods are transitioning to maple or soft wood. And it's a problem, both economically, because maple, at least at the moment, doesn't have the same kind of market value that oak does. And then ecologically, maples, kind of like your example of Norway maple, they create so much more shade at the ground layer, and that's part of what you were experiencing is it shades out the grass, that it shades out the wildflowers. And maples, as opposed to oaks, aren't as good of wildlife forage. So we were able to demonstrate, again, a use of red maple that most markets aren't taking advantage of. Here you see these doors are cherry, and part of what this is showing is also how we get solar daylight into the building so that we don't have to use as much task lighting. So that's one of the ways we save considerable energy is most days we don't have to have many lights on. All the light is provided by the sun. Also, this corridor shows you how we keep the heat in the wintertime. And so you see during the day the sunlight is penetrating through the windows and so we open up these doors and windows and the heat kind of comes into the occupied space. 

And then at night, when we would lose all that heat through the windows, we close all of these. >> I can't help thinking that the 18th-19th century had some ideas that have fallen by the wayside. Once you get away from the concept that you have to air condition and that you're sticking with the idea of working with light and shade and air flow that's available, you can live comfortably with a pretty simple design. >> You're exactly right. So here's the most novel way that we save energy. When it's nice out, we open the windows. And it sounds like a no-brainer. We still do most of the time in our homes but commercial buildings often have inoperable windows. >> That's right. >> So even if it's 70 degrees outside and you want it to be 70 degrees inside, you have to run either the heating or cooling to get the temperature comfortable. 

Well, in our building we just open up the windows and let that air move through. But that's not high tech, that's old school. >> That's common sense. Is this part of the heating system? >> Yeah, so we heat and cool the building with geothermal systems. And so the main load is delivered through a radiant  floor, and that's driven by 200 geothermal wells that go down, I'm sorry, 20 geothermal wells that go down about 200 feet. >> That amazes me. A relative of mine in Maryland just had this done in his backyard. And I thought, you're going down 200 feet, do you even own that far down? >> Well the state does have a pretty intensive permitting process to make sure you're operating appropriately down there. And then what that does is you just take the ambient energy of the earth and bring that up and deliver it to your floor. In the summertime you're taking the kind of coolness of the earth out, and in the wintertime you're taking the warmth out. 

You're kind of exchanging that. But then the kind of more, and this is becoming more and more commonplace and very efficient because if the ambient energy of the earth is 55 degrees and it's zero outside, you're already a long ways to where you want to get it. But one of the more innovative things we did is how we treat our fresh air because commercial buildings also have requirements just as we talked about to have this air exchange so that you don't get mold, you don't have indoor air quality problems. And so we use a kind of modified geothermal system where we use these concrete pipes under the ground and we bring the air in through this, basically a sewer inlet. The air travels underground at a really low speed. So if it's zero degrees outside, by the time it gets into the building into our air handler to go somewhere in the building, it's 55 degrees. Likewise, in the summertime it gets pretty cool. So it's being done a lot in Europe but a little bit more cutting-edge, I guess if you will, for North America. >> Are you using fans to handle this air? >> It's a very small fan, and that's one of the benefits by making the building so efficient we were able to use a fan about one-fourth the size that we otherwise would have needed to kind of push the air through the building. >> This is another winter differential I suspect here. 

>> One of the things we've learned and part of the reason we're not quite at being net zero from an energy perspective is I think as you find out solar panels are rated a little bit like your car in terms of miles per gallon. >> A little bit of wishful thinking built in. >> Yeah, probably you can get that performance if you drive 55 miles an hour, constantly, no topography, those kind of things. So I think what we estimated we would get based on the manufacturer's information and what we actually got, there's some discrepancy there. So we're learning that. And then the other thing we've suffered kind of the hard way is the last couple of winters we've had extremely high levels of snow fall, and if you remember back to that winter of 2007-2008. >> A hundred inches. >> Yeah. That's a lot of snow to clear off a roof, as we learned. So maybe some of the things we would do differently if we had this to do all over again is maybe have a steeper pitch, but those are the things you learn as you embark on these kind of challenges. 

>> The steepness of the pitch then, of course, affects the shape of what's inside and creates other issues in terms of heating and cooling. >> You're exactly right. And there were two things that we were interested in there. One was kind of the functionality and what it did inside, but also some of it was aesthetic and not getting these kind of contorted pitches. And, again, remember we started this effort planning in 2000-2001. We recognized energy was going to be important, but I'm not even sure we appreciated how important and kind of what would happen over the last kind of five years. And so if we were starting this project now or even right before we moved in, maybe we would have had stand alone solar panel systems or something else like that. But at that time we wanted the aesthetics and the functions to kind of be co-mingled and be elegant, I guess if you will. >> So have other facilities, houses or even commercial institutions, been patterned after the Leopold Center? >> Well we've had people literally come from all over the world to see kind of what we did and how we did it. And so I do think we're having an influence over how high performance buildings are being designed and constructed and operated. 

Of course, this community is really fortunate in that the St. Benedictine Holy Wisdom Monastery has actually exceeded us in green performance by one point. And so this area really can boast that it has the two most sustainable buildings in the world at the moment. So it's been really fascinating to see the interest and the synergies get created, and of course all along our goal was to set the bar high and then hope that many more people jumped over it. >> Well, here's Aldo Leopold kind of thinking about that bar as he looks out over the Wisconsin landscape. You get the sense of Aldo Leopold even here is this visionary. >> Absolutely. I think he challenged us with this concept of a land ethic and reminded us that all of our kind of health and wealth derives from the natural world, and that as such, we really have a responsibility to it and to ourselves to take care of it. And we keep going back to his line from this campus in 1938 that the oldest task in human history is to live on a piece of land without spoiling it. And I think that's the challenge in front of us now and for future generations. >> Well, continued success with that. 

Buddy Huffaker. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for being with me today for University Place. I'm Norman Gilliland and we've been talking about the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center and its extremely efficient use of energy and cutting-edge technology and some plain old common sense. And Buddy Huffaker is the executive director of the Aldo Leopold Foundation. I'm Norman Gilliland, I hope you can join me next time for University Place.