Since 2010 I have been working toward a single idea: that a healthier home and a lighter footprint are the same piece of work.

By the middle of the decade I had walked through a few thousand basements and attics, and I kept noticing that I was answering the same hundred questions. Where does the heat actually go. What is worth doing first. What can safely wait. So I wrote the answers down, and in 2016 they became a book, #HOME: 101 Ways to Improve Your Home Comfort and Energy Efficiency. It is not a manifesto and it is not a sales pitch. It is a plain, ordered list of things a homeowner can actually do, beginning with the ones that cost nothing at all. I still hear from people who keep it near the thermostat, and that is exactly what I hoped for.

A project still begins the way it always has, with a careful look at the whole house. We measure how much air is leaking, we find where the heat is going, and we test what is actually in the air a family breathes. Then we build one plan that treats the envelope, the equipment, and the ventilation as a single system rather than three separate purchases. The same crew that seals your attic tests your air and designs the fresh-air side of the job from the start. We have done this more than five thousand times across New Jersey, and part of the work is helping people take full advantage of the state and utility programs that make it affordable, from Home Performance with ENERGY STAR to the newer clean-heat and decarbonization programs. The air in a home has never been a small thing to me. It is what your family breathes all day, and I have never been able to treat it as secondary.

Carissa and I are raising our family here in New Jersey, in that same 1892 house that started all of it, and the truth is that the question behind my work does not stop at the front door. For years I have kept a journal called Consciousness in Everyday Life, and it comes from the same instinct that drives the company: to know what a thing is really made of, and where it came from. With a wall, that means the insulation and the framing. With clothing, it means the fiber and how it was grown, how it was dyed, and the hands that sewed it, which is part of why fair trade matters to me and why I joined the coalition working on it. With food, it means eating closer to whole, cooking mostly from the garden and the sea, and paying attention to what actually ends up on the table. And every autumn a few of us make wine together, from choosing the grapes to bottling in the spring, where most of the pleasure is in handing those bottles to people we love.

The older I get, the more all of it feels like one subject. The air we breathe, the food we eat, the things we put on our bodies, the way we move and rest and look after ourselves. It is the same question of what we let in, and it adds up over a lifetime. That is the through-line I keep following, and it is where I believe the next chapter of this work is headed: toward homes, and habits, that help the people inside them live longer and healthier lives. If any of this is useful to you, I would be glad to hear about it. Thank you for reading this far.