David Zandvliet explores the concept of home as a physical yet abstract place, located as personal and local, but also regional and global. Basing his inquiry around the Greek ‘Oikos’, with three ‘E’ dimensions as ecology of physical resources, economy as financial resource management, and ecumenism as moral, ethical and spiritual resources, a range of perspectives linked to sustainability are given. The author uses vignettes to move between personal experiences and professional interpretations of the human need to dwell in a home. Reflecting on various life roles as an academic, including his current position as the Director of the Institute of Environmental Learning in Vancouver, he takes the reader on a journey of how he built a range of physical houses in four places and the lessons he learned and taught about in the process. As anyone who has been involved in building a house will attest, there are many characters involved and decisions that need to be made in the completion of any one house-building project. Narratives about characters that made him question his own perspectives of ownership and belonging help Zandvliet build a deeper understanding of what an ecology of home might look like by focussing on these and other elements.

The first chapter, ‘Rediscovering home’, explores multiple dimensions of what home means in the 21st century. As an educator he teaches about an ecological framework that is constructed through interactions between the sociosphere, ecosphere, and technosphere in a person’s experience. He emphasises that this book was a means to externalise this exploration, based on his own experiences. ‘Technosphere’ reflects on the learning process of building one’s own house. He deeply considers how access to materials and types of labour has an impact on the design and planning. Those of us who may be familiar with building shows on television can easily identify the quandaries that need to be resolved between aesthetics, sustainability, and cost.

The third chapter, ‘Ecology’, covers how environmental education in the areas Zandvliet has taught are linked to sustainability. He argues for the contextualising of learning into a place, and logically, links this learning into the physical spaces within which people abide. He acknowledges the complexity of trying to integrate the local experience with the abstract ideas about ecology and bigger problems in the world. Moving into the personal experience of ‘growing’ a home, he makes a nod of recognition about the colonised space that is so much part of any land-owning in Canada. This illustrates his dilemma when a First Nations builder comments: ‘You want me to dig this hole and then try to fill it with money?’— in the form of concrete (p. 31). I thought he could have extended this idea at this stage of the book, but it was his personal experience and he commented that the lesson in building pragmatically somehow escaped him in that instance, though he had aimed to build sustainably. He acknowledges this was not to become his ‘home’ as it was too far from work commitments, and this becomes an undercurrent when he describes his search for home throughout the book. This house seemed to be something of a dream that he had wanted to create but it had not been balanced with the reality of his everyday life.

‘Oikos’ as Economy follows, where he questions how big one’s living needs are. How does this relate to the demands of the biosphere? And how does one balance desires with the needs and costs of creating a home? He looks at the issue of ecology and economy as they interrelate, considering how these ideas are linked to sustainable development, especially in a global context. The author provides limited data on housing and poverty in developing societies to try to make a point about housing need. While recognising dilemmas linked to the practice, he suggests that sustainable and ethical non-government organisations acting ‘for benefit’ (i.e., integrating not-for-profit and for-profit activities) can have a strong impact on improving sustainable housing options around the world. I would have liked to see this idea justified more thoroughly with arguments both for and against this suggested model.

By revisiting a place that was once foreign but becomes familiar through repetition over time, the next chapter, ‘Rumah Kedua’ (second home in Indonesian), explores the connection developed through place study programs where his students were immersed in the living junction between economy and social practices in Indonesia. As educators and students from wealthy communities, he suggests we often need to take a step away from the everyday to build new perceptions of how we can learn about a less privileged community and build connections, potentially for improving situations, but also learning that a simple life can be bountiful. Through this repetition over time, these visits became a routine and familiar experience and will resonate with the sojourner who returns to work in the same place. Here his passion for exploring relationship comes through when he describes student experiences and explorations of identity in another country.

The final ‘E’ is explored in the chapter titled ‘Ecumene’, where the reader is asked to consider the depth of the relationship to the natural world as in a philosophical or spiritual dimension. The main question (as for many educators) is to consider how we can provide experiences and open doors to knowledge that will transform the learner. Of course, the values of individuals determine how they may relate to the place they call home, but Zandvliet highlights his motivation in teaching to build relationship with place and model behaviour and values that support what he teaches. His personal search for the best ‘home’ is intrinsically linked to this exploration.

This is followed by a chapter titled ‘Inhabitation’, which I thought would have been better placed earlier in the book. The author reflects on how he inhabits the place he is now connected to, living in his riverside community at the time of writing. Here he does go a little more deeply into the importance of learning from the First Nations people of the area. He gives a broader context to the community built under the guidelines of Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design (LEED), placed on land more recently owned by the military and used for immigrants after World War II. As I reached this part of the book, I also thought he may have expanded this short reading with a little more analysis using theories in environmental studies and materialism in cultural geography (Kirsch, Reference Kirsch2013) as he briefly discusses the inclusion of migrants in this area.

In conclusion, The Ecology of Home emphasises that teaching and research are deeply connected.

A living home is not just the materials that it is constructed with but also the non-human and human environment that surround the location in which it is placed. This consideration comes over strongly throughout the book. Idealistically, he describes how he seeks to set down roots in various communities, but his general narrative reflects the problem of balancing the ideal and the working life of an academic, reliant on employment in the metropolis, away from his building projects. While the ideas meander, there are some very engaging narratives of characters and descriptions of places that make this a worthwhile read. Anyone who has built a house or lived in a home they have a strong connection to would find this book interesting. Also, environmental building designers would find this handy to raise discussions about attachment to place and considerations in design.