Some neighbours don’t like this doctor’s blooming plan for net-zero living

Most people have gardens in their backyard. Dr. Nate Charach, a Toronto psychiatrist, has an “edible forest”—with fruit- and nut trees, along with various shrubs and bushes—designed to achieve about decades' worth of growth in a significantly shorter period. “When you combine plants in ways that help them work with each other, you actually get them to advance much quicker,” explained Dr. Charach who earlier in the year launched psychiatry groups to help patients grappling with fear and anxiety around climate change. “I worked with an arborist who is a specialist in this kind of thing and I also studied permaculture, where I learned about guilds of plants that work really well together. As a result, my garden right now is just beautiful—lush, green and flourishing—and I don’t have to water it much.” This forest in the city is one part of a big plan that Dr. Charach and his wife are pushing forward, with the ultimate goal of building a net-zero home. It’s an ambitious undertaking, one that Dr. Charach knows could take years—and a significant financial investment—to accomplish. “We moved to this house in 2016 and I began to think about it then,” he recalled. “We did planning for three to four years then COVID kind of got in the way. So it wasn’t until 2021 that we started to do the terracing and planting.” Read: In the face of doom: How one Toronto clinic is helping patients deal with eco-anxiety To transform their circa-1940s house it into a net-zero home, Dr. Charach and his wife turned to architect Terrell Wong, who specializes “passive houses”—buildings designed to a standard that results in low to zero use of electricity for heating and cooling. Dr. Charach said the design for his future passive house calls for features such as proper insulation, air-tight barriers to prevent energy leakage, orientation that makes the best use of sunlight and solar panels. He’s also working with farmers to design a rainwater catchment system that will divert overflow into the backyard forest. “Our plan is to have water stored, not just for us but also for our community members,” said Dr. Charach. “We look at events like last year in Texas, where people ran out of water for several days, and we try to think of how we can build a home that plans for these possible emergencies.” For Dr. Charach, building a net-zero home also means creating strong societal structures. His design is meant to house several generations, including him and his wife, their children and his wife’s parents. The hope is that years from now, when the kids are grown and have children of their own, that generation will also grow up in this net-zero home. “When we thought about what living in a more sustainable way would actually look like, one of the things we decided was to design a house that would be multigenerational,” said Dr. Charach. “We believe that sustainable living is also about supporting strong connections between families and communities.” Read: How a plant-rich diet can help fight climate change and improve health There have been a number of challenges along the way. While the initial design checked all the boxes on Dr. Charach’s wishlist, the high price tags for many of the components meant he and his wife had to pare down the design to make building the house more affordable. They’ve also had to accept and work with certain realities, like the fact that it makes more sense to tear down a house as old as theirs—with its major mould problem, for one—rather than try to retrofit it. Another big challenge is finding materials that don’t have “embodied carbon”—a term that refers to the energy that goes into making an object. “A house can be net zero when it’s in operation, but if you look at the environmental impact from the materials used to build that house and you see that they used a lot of carbon, then is it really zero net?” asked Dr. Charach. Read: Dangerous fungus is becoming more prevalent. Scientists believe climate change could be to blame There’s also the matter of his neighbours. The people whose house sits on one side of Dr. Charach’s home saw the value of what he was doing and redesigned their backyard to relate to his backyard. “In fact, we’ve taken down the fence between the two yards and essentially doubled the size of that space,” said Dr. Charach. “So yeah, they love it. They think it’s fantastic.” But the neighbour on the other side? “He doesn’t like it,” said Dr. Charach. “He isn’t even willing to listen to the fact that maybe his allergies are from ragweed rather than the goldenrod in our backyard. But anybody who knows anything about plants can tell you goldenrods don’t cause allergies.” That neighbour appears to be the exception rather than the rule. In the summer, said Dr. Charach, the shade that one of his oak trees casts over the sidewalk became a gathering spot for the neighbourhood. His project and passion have also spread beyond the street where he lives. Together with a couple of friends, he recently started a “green community” to share ideas about sustainable living. So far, about 13 families from various Toronto neighbourhoods have joined, and growth continues through word-of-mouth. “There’s a lot of people out there thinking about sustainability and resiliency, and we’re finding each other through our green community,” said Dr. Charach. “If we can share ideas and resources and maybe spread the word to other people, then we could gain momentum and encourage more people to work towards net-zero living.” Read: As the planet warms, scientists worry that cases of infectious diseases could spike

Some neighbours don’t like this doctor’s blooming plan for net-zero living

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