Power couple

Rebekah and Stephen Hren took a 75-year-old house and turned it into a model zero-carbon home. Here’s how.

Diane Daniel | September 2008 issue

"The plan was we would go to Mexico and live on the beach," Stephen says. "We hated high school. It seemed so utterly stupid." (Adds Rebekah: "We both had societal issues.") "We thought 40-hour-a-week jobs were stupid, mortgages were stupid. We definitely wanted to avoid the career thing." His mother reported them missing—the car was registered to her—and the police finally found them in Alabama. "By then the charm had worn off," Stephen notes.

After Rebekah finished high school, they attended the University of Texas at Austin before transferring to Chapel Hill. His degree is in economics and hers is in political science. During and after college, they lived for two years in a yurt until it collapsed under snow.

When they said they next moved to New York City, I thought they were joking. "That was a tack left," admits Stephen.

She worked in marketing at the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers and he was an economist for the state real estate board. "We only made it a year and a half, but we saved like $40,000," Rebekah says. "It was fun but stressful." All along, they were more interested in being self-sufficient than in conserving resources.

That changed after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, when the peak oil movement, which focuses on the point when the maximum rate of petroleum extraction will be reached, grabbed Stephen’s attention. "I realized, Wow, not only are resources limited, but there will be less and less available. It made everything seem like it was built on a house of cards," he says. From there, Stephen started a meetup.com group called NC Powerdown, met a crowd of like-minded people, and launched the quest for a fossil-fuel-free existence. "It seemed like a clear road," he says. "You were either going to withdraw or engage."

The book they wrote is the Hrens way of engaging.

I ask Stephen if he thinks people tend to feel guilty around him and Rebekah. "I don’t know, probably," he laughs. "But I try to not make them feel that way. You don’t want to be too preachy. That’s a fear with the book."

In the evening, the couple work side by side in the kitchen chopping vegetables for a dish Stephen concocts in a pressure cooker. "It’s with rice but it cooks up like risotto," he says. In the pot he adds fresh onions, peas, kale, garlic and parsley, either from their garden or the Durham farmers’ market. He stir-fries squash and onions for a side dish.

Before going to bed I show them the small fan I’d brought to block out the street noise below. "I’ll need to vet it," Rebekah says, not impolitely. I’m amused watching her take a metre to my fan. While apparently it uses more energy than advertised, it passes inspection.

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