Monte Paulsen was explaining to an audience how to build a better home. A pleasant home, efficient and sturdy. A home to safely enclose a family in stormy weather.
Knowing how to do this had become a fascination for Paulsen, then a livelihood, and then a quest, it would not be an exaggeration to say. This day his talk was technical, but Paulsen’s ability to cheerfully share new ideas commanded the room at a late afternoon session of the 2024 Passive House Canada Conference held in June in Victoria.
Leona Humchitt of the Haíɫzaqv Climate Action Team in Bella Bella had spoken first. She explained that her people had been master builders for thousands of years, but the clumsy houses designed and built on their reserve by a colonial government had bloomed black mould, making her people sick in body and spirit. Now her nation wanted to take back control of how their people lived and were sheltered.
Paulsen and his work partner Marcel Studer had embraced that challenge. They started by holding deep consultations with members of the nation, as Paulsen explained, clicking through slides. Those sessions produced a collectively arrived at design that was open plan, with electric heat pumps, big kitchens and lots of exposed hemlock. The walls would be quite thick and filled with cellulose insulation, a Passive House method of construction making houses so snug they use minimal energy.
Lumber for the homes would be harvested and milled by Haíɫzaqv on their lands. In Vancouver, various non-wood structural parts and appliances would be packed into containers holding everything needed for a complete house. The kits would be shipped to Bella Bella, where they’d be cracked open and assembled by Haíɫzaqv carpenters. The goal, explained Paulsen, was to “train a cohort of master builders” while finishing one house by the end of the year, then a dozen, and eventually develop an export business with the Haíɫzaqv.
Paulsen beamed as Leona Humchitt called it “a blessing” and “a mark of reconciliation when we can collaborate with other people who care about supporting where we need to go in terms of creating healthier homes for my people.”
After the presentation, he merged into his community — the designers, engineers and others who belonged to the green building sector he had played a key role in growing. Later, he joined some of them for dinner, where he was lauded and loved. It had been a long day, and when dinner was over, most in the group went to bed. Paulsen instead wandered into the city, winding up at Centennial Square, at that late hour a desolate pocket of downtown frequented by the homeless.
At one in the morning someone found Paulsen on a bench, slumped over and unresponsive, and called for help. At Royal Jubilee Hospital the staff did their best to revive him from what proved to be a fentanyl overdose, but he remained unconscious and died. He was 61.
Paulsen’s death places him within a larger story about the toxic drug epidemic that has claimed more than 14,000 lives in British Columbia since a state of emergency was declared by the provincial government.
His lifetime of work, however, threads into different, crucial stories of our time. First as a journalist and then as a green building professional, Paulsen pursued ways to defeat racism, colonization and our housing and climate crises.
Within those stories, Paulsen is the hero whose arc rises, winning over his audiences with each new feat. If that were all, writing his elegy would be straightforward, a slide show of public achievements. It’s the way he died, and the years of hidden twists and turns that pointed to that end, the self-inflicted setbacks and times he caused pain to those closest to him, that makes this remembrance of Monte Paulsen hard.
I wanted to try because we were once friends and colleagues. Paulsen had a brilliant seven-year turn as a reporter for The Tyee. During that time, I came to admire him greatly and to worry for him, his then-partner Karen and their young sons Seamus and Galen. He shared with me the smallest of glimpses into his interior life. They were enough to see that he loved his family very much and that he had a weakness for crack cocaine.
When Monte was 12 and his sister Kristen was seven, his father, a business machine repairman in California’s Bay Area, was offered a job in Alaska in the emerging field of computer sales. The family settled in an Anchorage neighbourhood called Turnagain that included Earthquake Park, a peaceful spot on a promontory overlooking Cook Inlet. It was named that because, in 1964, a massive earthquake off the coast caused 75 houses to tumble down the bluff as the ground beneath gave way. Years later, as kids, Monte and Kristen would wander the scene of the landslide still studded with bits and pieces of the lost homes. Kristen remembers her mother rolling her eyes as they’d come through the front door with a muddy old cabinet or some other treasure.
“It was not a particularly happy home,” Kristen recalled. She says young Monte was a bundle of energy whose argumentativeness heightened tensions in the family.
He found an outlet as a teenager doing freelance photography for the local newspapers. “There were funny pictures of him as a high school kid at hockey games and rodeos, jumping into the arena to take photos and running away just in time to not get hurt,” recalled Kristen. “He was always chasing pictures.”
Monte fashioned a darkroom in the basement. His go-for-it attitude paid off with plenty of jobs. “They don’t call it the last frontier for nothing,” said Kristen. “In Alaska, if you are going to try something, you are on your own. Figure it out.”
The college he chose to attend, St. John’s in Annapolis, Maryland, offered rigorous study of the great books. Paulsen didn’t last long there, returning to Alaska to work briefly at the Juneau Empire newspaper. His next try at higher education stuck — the journalism program at Ohio University. After graduating, he helped start up an alternative weekly in Portland, Maine, called the Casco Bay Weekly, where he served as publisher and lead reporter. The adventure suited him well. He liked sailing the coast and he liked writing exposés on racist skinheads, slumlords and garbage incineration.
Next stop was investigative reporter at the Detroit Metro Times weekly, having been recruited by founder Ron Williams. Paulsen’s reputation was growing. He made an impression at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference by wearing a T-shirt saying: “Who benefits? Who pays? What’s my deadline? Can I have more time?”
Soon he caught the eye of Doug Pardue, an editor at the State, the leading newspaper in South Carolina, based in the state capital, Columbia. Pardue was tasked with creating a new investigative unit. The brass “wanted a writer who could wake up the news staff’s often tired and stodgy storytelling,” said Pardue, so he opted to hire outside. “Monte seemed the perfect fit,” Pardue decided, convinced by top names in U.S. investigative journalism. They described Paulsen’s writing as “pictural, vibrant and smooth, even on highly technical subjects.”
Another talented reporter at the paper, Jeff Miller, holds a memory of the outsider arriving in the newsroom and charming a skeptical crew. “Monte looks like an unmade bed. He’s a big personality. He laughs big. And he’s smart.”
The two became close friends and roommates. They worked side by side on some stories, skied together and, at Paulsen’s urging, visited some of Columbia’s seedier establishments.
“He did go over the edge,” Miller recalled, choosing not to elaborate. “I knew Monte had done more things than I had ever done. He told me he’d done injectable drugs before.” Drinking seemed to be more of a problem for Paulsen than drug use. “But at that time in my life I wasn’t going to steer anyone to rehab.”
Did Paulsen have an addictive personality? Miller thinks probably yes, “whatever that is. He didn’t have any fear. Monte was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll try anything once.’”
And yet he seemed to manage OK. “We know people who can hold liquor and those who can’t. Monte was smart enough, worked hard enough, was entrepreneurial enough to succeed at a lot of things. But at the end of the day, he didn’t say, ‘That was good enough.’ He went out on the town and celebrated.”
There were many achievements to savour. One was an investigation led by Paulsen into who was burning Black churches. As Purdue recounted: “His coverage began in June 1995 when Ku Klux Klan members torched two Black churches in neighbouring rural counties. One of those counties, Clarendon, also is home to the school busing lawsuit that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools.
“Other newspaper reporters at the State soon joined Monte and the I-team to document dozens of church fires across the state. More than half of those fires were at Black churches and 40 per cent of the fires were arson, many fuelled by hatred.”
Paulsen’s data-based method for tracking the fires was adopted by the State Law Enforcement Division, South Carolina’s top police agency, Pardue said. “As Monte’s work continued, news coverage of hatred-sparked church torchings spread across the nation, leading to creation of a National Church Arson Task Force and the federal Church Arson Prevention Act.”
Paulsen’s old boss from the Detroit Metro Times, Ron Williams, reached out with an offer to serve as national correspondent for the chain of alternative weeklies he was putting together. The new business, called Dragonfly Media, aimed to combine sharp reporting with New Age content charting paths to personal wellness. Paulsen accepted the job.
In Washington, D.C., he lived on his sailboat and hobnobbed with the town’s political journalists. Paulsen once told me he became friendly with David Carr, editor of Washington City Paper. Carr, who would go on to a storied career as the New York Times media reporter until his death from lung cancer in 2015, was at the time a recovering addict. By his own account, he’d “dropped off the face of the Earth in 1987” when he started smoking cocaine. That harrowing time of his life Carr chronicled in his acclaimed memoir The Night of the Gun.
“Regardless of what happened to me, I rarely stopped typing,” he wrote. “Perhaps I was worried I would disappear altogether if I did.”
Carr, unlike Paulsen, typed a public account of his struggles, even as he refused to declare them over. “I could be drunk tomorrow or shooting dope even as you read this,” he wrote, “but the chances of that are low as long as I make a daily decision to embrace who I really am and then be satisfied with that at the end of the day.”
Could Paulsen? At the close of the 1990s, he landed a big book contract that seemed a triumph but proved a trap. The subject matter, a record-breaking descent into one of the world’s deepest caverns by two explorers, filled Paulsen’s bank account with a big cash advance and his mind with a heavy deadline. Jeff Miller visited Washington to find his friend was living in a garret above a bar where he often drank. The project ground slowly. The money seemed to evaporate. The eventual book received strong reviews but sales were disappointing.
Paulsen’s response was to keep heeding what Miller calls “the rush of the story.” He chased it along the Mexico-U.S. border, and in Nigeria while covering a violent conflict pitting oil companies against ethnic minorities. When Paulsen years later excitedly told me a story of hiding in a Nigerian hut in mortal fear of roaming soldiers, I found myself wondering if he might suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and urged him to seek therapy.
Paulsen chose a fated time to make his first visit to Vancouver. On a trip for Dragonfly to scout the purchase of a holistic health magazine called Shared Vision, he arrived just before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Flights were grounded, delaying his return to Washington. The first time he told me this story, he said the beauty and relative calm of Vancouver beckoned a fresh start.
Later, in another telling, he said that while stuck in Vancouver he spent some nights in Downtown Eastside SROs doing drugs. There’s nothing to say both accounts aren’t congruent. He decided to move to Vancouver.
Shortly after, at a Christmas party, he met Karen, a bright environmental lawyer with a feisty streak. She found him “very fun, smart, interesting. A compelling dreamer.” They fell in love and together bought a rundown house on the east side of the city. Karen was pregnant with their first son when the sale went through.
“The day the house closed we organized a party. Did you miss your chance to bash down the Berlin Wall? Come bash down our walls so we can make a beautiful home,” recalled Karen. The house had to be taken down to the studs, after which Paulsen deftly rebuilt it, mostly on his own. “He was a perfectionist,” said Karen. “He put a lot of love into that house.”
Interviewed about Dragonfly, Paulsen said the venture marked a new personal chapter. “When many of us started alternative weeklies, we spent three or four nights a week out listening to music and drinking beer. I loved this part of my life. I’m very rarely out that late anymore. I probably spend more of those hours in meditation, yoga. I’ve changed. I see things more interconnected than I used to.”
It was about that time, not long after the launch of The Tyee in late 2003, that Paulsen contacted me. He was serving as books editor for the Dragonfly chain. Would we like to cross-publish some of his reviews?
In seeking communion, Paulsen led with his resumé. The investigative work. The new media entrepreneurialism. His boyish face and high-pitched laugh made him seem young for his claims, but he expressed enthusiasm for The Tyee’s quixotic mission. I certainly appreciated his encouragement.
So when he began pitching ambitious news reporting for The Tyee and seemed barely concerned about the rate of pay, I gave him a shot. His first for us was a series of on-the-ground reports from Tahltan territory on a split in the nation over resource extraction. Then he helped break the biggest story of the 2005 provincial election, a BC Liberal donations scandal.
Paulsen next began chipping away at the homeless problem in the city, and his reports quickly caught attention. Using data-crunching methods he'd honed on the Black churches series in South Carolina, he counted all units available in Vancouver to house the poor and showed that gentrification was eroding their numbers.
I admired his approach for its practicality and effectiveness. Paulsen spent few words trying to win people’s sympathy for the suffering of the city’s unhoused. Instead, he presented it as a structural problem that could be solved by doing the math and investing the dollars — money saved in the long run because of reductions in costs to health and justice systems.
I believe his reporting is a key reason homelessness became a top issue in the civic election of 2008. A mayoral debate, co-hosted by The Tyee and the now defunct 24 Hours newspaper, held in St. Andrew’s Wesley United Church, drew a standing-room-only crowd. Paulsen was on the panel of journalists firing questions at the candidates. He packed the house again in October 2009 when he gave a talk at the Museum of Vancouver on the subject “Ending Homelessness.”
“He was a comet,” said fellow civic affairs reporter Frances Bula to Karen when they bumped into each other on the street shortly after his death.
He was a comet in the way he demonstrated you can make a difference by tenaciously focusing on solving problems rather than simply wringing them for drama.
He was a comet, also, in the sense that a comet glows while trailing a tail of spent self.
By then he’d confided in me that he sometimes smoked crack and it was creating problems in his life. We agreed that he’d no longer make the Downtown Eastside a place to hunt stories. He spent some months in a live-in drug treatment facility and came home determined to stay clean, recalled Karen. When their house needed a new roof, it was clear he’d worked his magic on his fellow rehab residents. Six showed up to help frame and shingle. Karen made chili. She remembers it as a festive event, tinged with hope.
In the spring of 2009 Monte rolled out a 12-part series he’d pitched to me in a memo that proved typically prescient. “Housing affordability is a crisis,” he wrote. “The price of an average home is more than the average two-income family can afford. The rent for an average apartment is more than the average working person can afford.
“I propose adopting two theses: First, let’s acknowledge that as a community, we have the resources to provide a home for everyone. Second, let’s identify creative methods through which we could define and deliver those homes.”
The series was a finalist for a Webster Award, B.C.’s top journalism prize. Paulsen named his project “A Home for All.”
Paulsen next focused on positive developments in green building. We wangled foundation grants to finance his reporting. Many of his solutions stories were cutting-edge. Some, for example, can be credited for changes in regulations to encourage building with used shipping containers.
He took some time away to write a splendid piece for Canadian Geographic on the state of Canada’s rail system, for which he rode trains across the country. The article won a silver Canadian National Magazine Award and was included in an anthology of the year’s best essays. It was easy to assume Paulsen had regained his groove.
But back at The Tyee, in the spring of 2011, he began to disappear for unannounced periods and stopped delivering pieces for which he’d been paid. We had a sit-down. I remember noting his eyes were drained of their usual mischievousness. They were sallow, intense. He was heavily using again, he said. I sadly concluded that his risk-taking posed too much risk to the Tyee enterprise. Demanding that he fork over his keys to the office, I told him The Tyee would help pay for rehab. But we were no longer his home.
After Paulsen spent a month in a Vancouver recovery facility, he made a phone call to Torsten Ely, a Victoria-based expert in measuring and minimizing energy use in buildings. Paulsen asked Ely to teach him his job. Ely put Paulsen in his calendar for a two-day visit. When Paulsen showed up in his office, Ely remembers, he had a large suitcase and said he’d booked a hotel for a whole week.
The drive to make buildings energy efficient is critical if we are to minimize the climate crisis because the lighting, heating and cooling of structures accounts for about a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Paulsen wanted to be part of the solution. But did he have what it took? wondered Ely. He had no technical background, after all.
Within a day Ely had few doubts. “I could see Monte wanted to make a complete career change. He wanted to do it right. As a student, he never stopped asking questions. He asked questions no one had ever asked before. He asked questions I had no answer to.”
As they got to know each other, “climate change became a very intense topic for him. He wanted to do something he was directly involved in, to be there at the forefront.”
Paulsen passed the test to become a certified energy auditor and started his own business, called Red Door Energy Design. He tapped into City Green Solutions, a networked non-profit that Ely worked with. Ely would book audits required by Natural Resources Canada and often hire Paulsen to do them. Within a very short time Paulsen was firmly embedded in British Columbia’s green building profession.
Some of the last few stories Paulsen wrote for The Tyee examined the impressive results achieved by a construction method begun in Germany called Passivhaus. By building with thick, heavily insulated walls and roofs, angling windows properly and using solar and other renewable power, a home’s carbon emissions could be cut drastically. Passivhaus, proponents liked to say, made for a healthy house.
Paulsen saw an opportunity in this country. In 2018, on a shoestring with a few other early advocates, he organized a national Passive House conference in Vancouver that drew big interest and somehow made a profit.
Soon after, Paulsen started getting a lot of work modelling energy use for Passive House developments, said Ely. “The projects got bigger and bigger. Monte became seen as the most competent Passive House person in Canada. That was remarkable for a person who’d been rather new at it.”
Paulsen played evangelist for what today is a thriving business community named Passive House Canada. “Without Monte, I honestly don’t think it would exist,” said Scott Kennedy, a green building engineer and principal at Cornerstone Architecture in Vancouver. “Monte’s true skill was as a teacher. He was such a great communicator. Any movement needs champions and heroes. He really believed in what he did. And you had to believe in it with him.”
Paulsen made a believer of one of the world’s leading firms in designing low-energy high-performance buildings, RDH Building Science Inc. In 2017 the multinational company purchased Red Door to gain his Passive House expertise and relationships. In so doing, RDH took the remarkable step of naming him an associate.
“That was the dream,” Karen said of the day the deal was struck. RDH had solved Paulsen’s problems of money and finding the next contract. Maybe the job would also solve his inability to pull free of drugs. “He had been using right through,” she said.
“For a while he’d hold himself together, but then he’d talk about needing a relief valve from some pressure building up. He never used at home. He would just disappear and come back. He’d be sheepish. He’d say, ‘I’m sorry, I won’t do it again.’ He saw a therapist. He went to meetings. He had sponsors. He both wanted to stop and yet he didn’t stop.”
Finally, Karen couldn’t bear the emotional turmoil anymore. For too many years the family had been hostage to Paulsen’s chaotic benders and angry outbursts. She ended the relationship in 2020, receiving custody of the boys.
For reasons unclear, last year Paulsen’s position at RDH came to an end. He received a substantial payout and continued consulting on his own. One of the projects he poured effort into was the home kits with the Haíɫzaqv Nation. He’d also helped launch one of the most ambitious Passive House projects in Canada, a pair of buildings completed this year on the University of Victoria campus with 782 student residences and meeting and dining halls.
The session marking that milestone at June’s Passive House Canada conference was held the day after Paulsen presented. Torsten Ely was in the room. As he scanned faces, he was puzzled to notice his friend was not there to bask in the moment.
News of Paulsen’s death shocked his professional colleagues, few of whom had any inkling of his drug use. “It was very well disguised,” said Scott Kennedy. “All I’d see is he’d have three drinks to our one.”
Passive House Canada published an obituary that said, in part: “Monte was full of energy and life and filled the room with his brilliance, humour, and love. He leaves a massive hole in our community and our hearts, and he will be deeply missed.... He leaves behind a career of public service and a legacy of fighting for a better future. Our deepest condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues.”
When Kristen learned her brother had overdosed and was in a coma, she was on the other side of the continent. In the life she’d lived after she and Monte played in Earthquake Park, Kristen had left Alaska and become a police chief and now operated a small farm in Virginia with her husband.
Over FaceTime she peered into the heartbreaking scene in the intensive care room where Paulsen lay hooked to tubes and a beeping monitor.
The medical staff were sure the extent of his brain damage meant he would not reawaken. So they explained to the boys it was time to decide whether to take their father off life support. “Their faces looking at me the whole time during the whole discussion is probably the most painful process I’ve ever been through,” Kristen said. “No kid should ever have to deal with that.”
The decision was made; life support was removed. Paulsen was expected to live at most another day or two. A notice went out that he had died on June 22. In fact, however, he finally succumbed on June 26. “He was always so strong willed,” said Karen.
What state of mind Paulsen was in as he made his last stroll through the night is impossible to know. Perhaps he was just looking to celebrate, in his problematic way, another triumph. But he’d been on a quiet slide. It had been four years since he and Karen had parted ways. Over the previous year, as came to light later, Paulsen somehow had managed to burn through a quarter million dollars, leaving his bank account barren.
“When we were young,” Seamus remembers, his father “was the coolest dad. He was really funny. He taught me to sail. He was good at shining a light on things that were hard to see.
“When we got older, he worked a lot. His work meant so much to him. He wasn’t really there for me like other dads.”
Seamus, now 19, acknowledges what his father accomplished. “He could fix other people’s problems. He just couldn’t fix himself. He told me to stay away from drugs.”
Seamus knew his dad smoked crack, but he also knew that he had a reliably safe source in Vancouver. That is why, said Seamus, he told his father he worried that if he went to his conference in Victoria, he’d buy deadly drugs from some stranger.
“I told him to text me each day, so I know you are alive.”
Galen, who is 16, is finding it hard to cope. He feels anger. “I think my dad could have worked harder to stop.”
“Monte loved Seamus and Galen, the two most important people in his life,” said Jeff Miller, who stayed in contact with his Columbia former roommate. “I know he was not the easiest father to have. But to the best of his ability, he was hoping to be with his sons for a very long time and to see them grow and become men and to go on that journey with them.
“I know you could say if it was so damn important, he should have just cleaned up his act to make sure he could be that person. But that’s not how this film works. I hope in time somehow his sons realize he never wanted to leave them.”
Scott Kennedy would want the brothers to know that their father proved “one person can make a huge difference.”
What Kristen wishes for Seamus and Galen as they try to find a home in this world, she summed up in a single word. “Kindness.”
“I understand how hard it is to be their age and dealing with losing their dad this way. I want them to find their own way. I want them to be kind.
“We all have our struggles. We all have our own pain. We can choose how we treat other people. If you start with kindness, the rest will follow.”
A celebration of life for Monte Paulsen will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 30, at Kitsilano Neighbourhood House from 6 to 8 p.m. It’s free and open to the public. Get more information and RSVP on Eventbrite.
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