My wife, Mary, and I had long admired and wanted to live in a passive solar house similar to the one built in 1981 by our good friends, David and Harriet Borton. We replicated what they did with better materials and added solar produced electricity.

Our goals were to build a modest cost, high-performance, passive-active solar house that conformed to LEED Platinum standards and ran on site sunshine. We employed systems thinking and holistic design decisions to resolve conflicts that arose from the individual perspectives of architecture, beauty and aesthetics, building standards and codes, economics, energy and resource use, and environmentally appropriate construction.

We understood that design and material decisions rarely have one optimal choice, but rather, a preferred choice within the context of the particular project. Our overriding metric, however, was the lifecycle cost measured environmentally and economically with an inclination toward environmental lifecycle costs.

Our behaviors were, and continue to be, critical in making Trail Magic an energy and climate positive home (energy production exceeds energy use and the operation of the house and landscape result in a net reduction of atmospheric heat-trapping gases). We strive with varying degrees of success to use energy and resources only as required for the task at hand.

The detailed story of our project is given in Trail Magic: Creating a Positive Energy Home (Carl N. McDaniel, Sigel Press, 2012). Trail Magic's relevance and relation to similar houses and landscapes is considered in Durable Communities Emerge from Homes and Landscapes Powered by Sunshine, Carl N. McDaniel, Solutions, January-February 2014, Volume 5, Issue 1, www.thesolutionsjournal.org.