The idea of sustainability is both privileged and confused. While best practices - natural ventilation, rational orientation and openings, thermal mass, use of renewables, net zero construction - can be found in traditional architectures, environmental culture in the USA remains both exotic and contested. The comfortable find it superfluous. Others think it’s a foible of the organic Chardonnay-drinking, Tesla-driving, rich. Our national government believes climate change is a hoax. We don’t. And, we see the environmental burden very unevenly shared, with the poor, the elderly, and communities of color disproportionately afflicted. Our project is grassroots: a battered community remakes and sustains itself via the tools of home-grown, green systems, buildings, practices, and habits.