Owning country property often raises unsettling questions about personal environmental morality, an idea that did not start with Jimmy Carter’s cardigan sweater and now wants you to squeeze your carbon foot into Greenerella’s glass slipper.

The specter of environmental catastrophe — ice caps melting, polar bears stalking dice-rollers in Atlantic City casinos, Vermont Yankees tapping palm trees — is moving us toward a “green economy” and a greener lifestyle.

If you’re living in the country or considering buying a place out here, you may want to think about how green you want to be…and how much you want to pay for it. As in many other efforts to change our ways, the first dollars invested in greenery yield the biggest improvements while the last increments of getting there often come in costly baby steps.

Here are some major considerations.

Transportation. You can’t live in or visit the country without at least one vehicle.

If snow and mud are seasonal companions, you’ll need an all-wheel-drive or 4WD-vehicle for mobility and safety. Generally speaking, the heavier these beasts, the more they eat, the more expensive they are to maintain and the less green they are by every measure..

A small, 4WD-drive, gasoline-powered truck is probably your best all-purpose country vehicle at this time. The Toyota Tacoma and Nissan Frontier have high ratings.

Full-size, gasoline pickups are expensive to buy and operate, handle badly and have big carbon footprints. (I write as an owner.) You will need one if you’re hauling trailers. Otherwise, smaller pickups are cheaper, greener and generally able to do the same job at lower cost.

No diesel-powered, small pickups are available, even though these engines are now greener than gasoline equivalents. Large pickups are available with diesels, starting at about $38,000, though they can hardly be considered green. The two hybrids available –Chevy Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500 — are full-size trucks that start at the same $38,000.

Second homes, green or not? If you own a second home, you inevitably use more energy, have a bigger carbon footprint and carry a bigger environmental impact than if you had only one. Some environmentalists oppose second-home ownership for these reasons, although many environmentalists I know own second homes because of their environmental sentiments. Consistency can be the hobgoblin of minds yearning to be green.

I’ve noticed second-home owners using a small car for going back and forth. Some keep an old truck at the country place to do the things that only a truck can do and only an old one can do properly and memorably, though, alas, not greenly.

Energy around the county place. The more petroleum-based engines you have, the more fuel you will use and the bigger carbon footprint you create.

Older tractors are not fuel efficient, but if you have limited tractor needs, a used tractor in decent shape is much more dollar efficient than a new one. It doesn’t make much sense to spend $25,000 for a new, fuel-efficient tractor if you only use it 25 hours a year. You might use ten gallons less fuel for the work you do, but it comes at the cost of buying $20,000 more tractor than you really need.

New diesel tractor engines are likely to be greener than new gasoline tractor engines. Old engines of both types are not green, except under the influence of green eyeshades.

No solar-electric, hybrid or plug-in farm tractors are available though some are in the works. DIY solar tractors have been jiggered together; they work, but they’re expensive. GE used to make an electric lawn tractor under the name Elec-Trak, which now has a cult following.

Lawn tractors, chainsaws, ATVs and the like don’t use much fuel or generate much CO2 individually, but do collectively. The carbon footprint of my gasoline lawn tractor provided three identifiable excuses for not cutting the grass in 2008. Riding around like a zombie 12 times last year rather than 15 is one of my small steps toward keeping the walrus on Artic ice.

Human energy is green, and it can substitute for some farm and country tasks. But you have to factor in your tolerance for, and ability to do, hard work by hand. I split six to seven cords of firewood by hand every year instead of using a gasoline-powered hydraulic splitter. I would never consider sawing this wood manually—it’s too hard and too time-consuming. Some handwork substitution appeals to me, but I have no interest in reenacting the 17th Century.

While some might argue that boats on the Volga River should still be dragged upstream by gangs of men harnessed to a rope, I endorse using a diesel engine. I also oppose shipping stuff across oceans using galley slaves.

Country houses. These structures and outbuildings are usually candidates for improving heating efficiency.

Structures can be built or retrofitted to use much less energy, and they can be powered with green energy through wind and solar technologies. Complete energy self-sufficiency is possible, but it usually comes at a very high initial cost—in the neighborhood of $50,000 to $60,000. A mixed system — some site-generated energy, some drawn from the grid or a tank — costs less and is more practical in most cases, though it’s less green.

Photovoltaic panels and batteries are still not cheap enough to make the green choice the obvious economic choice. When money is no object, it’s very easy to be perfectly green and live in the world’s greenest house.

Firewood. Country houses are often heated with firewood. Is burning firewood green? Is it a carbon-neutral activity? Does it pollute the air? Is wood heat greener than heating with natural gas, fuel oil, coal-fired electricity, nuclear-powered electricity or hydro-electric power?

Answers for each comparison depend on how the firewood is harvested; whether it’s burned green or dry, in a fireplace or a woodstove; the degree of woodstove efficiency and the extent to which it diminishes exhaust gases and particulates. A heated discussion is taking place over how carbon-neutral wood fuel is, which, if nothing else, warms our fingers carbon-free as hundreds post comments pro and con.

An informative site is WoodHeat.org, a non-profit focused on the responsible use of wood as a home-heating fuel. The EPA’s current woodstove ratings are here.

Going green in the country costs money. Much of the old capital stock we use to do things and produce stuff is inefficient and generates a lot of carbon. Greener capital stock is still prohibitively expensive in most cases for most people. Greener alternatives — as obvious as a small diesel pickup or hybrid farm tractor — are still not on the market.

While nothing much has come out of the Kubotas and John Deeres, a grass-roots movement of tinkerers with the imaginations of Leonardo da Vinci is fabricating green farm machines and self-sufficient energy systems in their backyards. They’ve been smuggling these ideas into our collective unconsciousness for years.

Greening up the country is one part of going greener nationally. Can we become greener faster in a cost-effective way? And will we be clever enough in greening ourselves to offset the increasing demand for stuff that a growing population requires?

Hard questions usually have harder answers.

When a seller lists property with a broker or advertises as a FSBO, he should establish both the nature of his ownership and its extent.

Real-estate law conceptualizes property as a bundle of rights. A seller may be selling all his rights in a property or just some, with or without limitation in either case.

One or more rights can be severed–sold, leased or given away. A common severance involves separating subsurface minerals from the surface. In some states, where surface is owned by one party and subsurface by another the situation is referred to as a “split estate.” I’ve evaluated properties where ownership of timber, water and wind have been separated from the bundle of surface rights being sold.

The sale, lease or donation of rights in property should be recorded. Most mineral sales and leases are, but I’ve found sales of timber rights not recorded and not disclosed.

A complete bundle of rights in property is referred to as “fee simple absolute.” The shorthand is, property “owned in fee.” Where subsurface rights have been severed from surface rights, that property is not being sold in fee.

A buyer may discover that different subsurface rights were sold to different entities. In the worst case, different parties could own the discrete rights to a property’s oil, shallow gas, deep gas, coal, coal-bed methane, hard-rock minerals, clay and water.

States differ in their views of the rights that surface owners retain when the owner of the subsurface rights wants to explore, drill or mine. Some states require some form of surface-owner consent. Other states more or less don’t.

In addition to determining which rights are included in the seller’s bundle, both the seller and buyer must understand what limitations apply, if any, to one or more of the rights to be conveyed from seller to buyer.

The right of exclusive possession, for example, would be limited by a neighbor having a legal right to cross your property to get to his. Life estates and hunting leases are other common limitations. A neighbor also limits the seller’s rights if he owns the right to tap the seller’s spring, pick some of his apples or dig gravel from his pit. Those limitations run with the land.

The purchase-offer contract needs to state whether the property is being purchased and conveyed in fee, subject only to limitations of record. If the seller cannot convey this way, all the exceptions need to be identified and understood by the buyer.

A buyer may need to state that all unrecorded easements, limitations, licenses (permission to use) and similar understandings of any kind end upon the sale of the property.

How much land is being sold?

Most purchase contracts start with an identification of the property the seller is selling and the buyer is buying. That should be simple enough. But it often isn’t.

A common way to describe the seller’s property is to write language in the contract that states the buyer is buying the same property that the seller bought from his immediate predecessor in title. The property is usually not described in detail, but is referred to as that which is described in the seller’s recorded deed, Deedbook __,

Page __ , found in the Clerk’s Office in the County where the property is located. An acreage number may or may not be included. Sometimes that’s good enough.

The first property I ever bought did not include an acreage figure in the deed. The agent told me it had 100 acres. It turned out to have 60. I didn’t know enough to know that a deed should contain an acreage figure. I was 25, which explained many other things at that time as well.

I believe that both parties need an accurate understanding of the dimensions and area of the property over which they’re bargaining.

While property ownership is properly conceptualized in three layers (subsurface, surface and above-surface), the primary concern is the two-dimensional surface area to be sold, expressed in square feet or acres.

An acre is 43,560 square feet. A square acre has almost 209 feet on each side. This area was thought to represent the amount of land one man could plow in one day with one ox.

Acreage is measured as if it were perfectly flat. The hillier the property, the more surface area it actually contains. A surveyed acre should always contain at least one acre, never less, but often more owing to topography.

The seller will say to a buyer directly or through a broker how many acres he is selling. He may express this in one of the following ways:

• 100 acres
• 100 acres, by recorded survey
• 100 acres, by deed
• 100 acres, by tax map
• 100 acres, by remainder
• 100 acres, more or less

The first of these — 100 acres — fails to specify how acreage size was determined. While it may be perfectly accurate, it is essentially not much more than the seller’s opinion. It is, however, specific, and it does not protect the seller by adding more or less, plus or minus, or approximately.

The second — 100 acres, by recorded survey — is almost always the most accurate acreage number that can be obtained, assuming the survey was performed by a licensed surveyor since WW II. The survey should be signed, dated, sealed with the surveyor’s license and recorded. All rural properties were surveyed at some point during the last 400 years, but those surveyed after WW II are likely to be more trustworthy than earlier ones as a general rule.

The third — 100 acres, by deed — reveals the source of the acreage number, but says nothing about the accuracy of that number. Deeds can contain different types of errors that misstate acreage. Deed acreage may or may not be the same amount that a surveyor would find either in the field or if the deed’s measurements were plotted out.

The fourth — 100 acres, by tax map — is an unreliable measurement, though it may be perfectly accurate in any particular case. Tax-map acreage comes from various sources—deeds, owners, surveys and something I call, “adjustments by negotiation and complaint.” Sometimes a seller will run a planimeter over a tax map or other map-like document to come up with an acreage number.

Tax-maps probably err on the side of undercounting acreage, because owners have a financial self-interest in understating the size of their holdings in order to pay less property tax. But I’ve seen tax-maps that overstate acreage. If a seller is selling acreage by tax map, I would suspect that he knows that it overstates actual acreage.

The fifth — 100 acres, by remainder — is an acreage figure that is arrived at by subtraction. An original large tract is divided over the years, and whatever acreage appears to be left numerically in the seller’s possession is the remainder acreage. A remainder tract may incorporate an acreage number in the seller’s deed. Both parties need to confirm a remainder number.

The sixth — 100 acres, more or less — is quite common. “More or less” was originally intended to account for relatively small errors in linear measurements or compass directions that were produced primarily by the relative crudeness of the surveyor’s instruments. My impression is that it has come to be used legally to cover a much wider range of acreage variation, to protect sellers against claims of fraud.

One hundred acres, more or less, could be 100 acres on the dot, or 10 or more acres, plus or minus.

The quickest and cheapest way I know for a seller or buyer to determine acreage is to pay a surveyor to run the seller’s boundary description (metes and bounds or government survey numbers, depending on the system) through the deed-mapper program in his computer.

This program will plot out boundaries on plain paper or a scaled topographical map. It also calculates acreage contained within those boundaries and determines whether “the calls close.” Calls should close, that is, the boundary line starting from a beginning point should end up at the same point after plotting all the calls. Calls that don’t close by a lot indicate a problem, which may be either minor (a transposition or transcription error in a number) or major.

The calls will come from a deed or a survey where the calls are drawn next to the boundary lines.

Once the deed-mapper program has plotted the boundary lines, it’s usually worth paying the surveyor to walk the lines on the ground to make sure of the following:

That the calls in the deed or survey match up with the boundary lines as found in the field;

That the property in the field is located where the property on paper (deed or survey) says its supposed to be located. Sometimes property boundaries can “drift” in one direction or another. The boundary lines are perfectly accurate, but the whole property is lined out in the field say one degree west of where it should be.

That the functional boundaries (fences, roads) in the field line up with the boundaries in the deed and deed-mapper drawing. The seller may have fenced in part of his neighbor’s property, or vice versa. These are called, encroachments. The party who has committed the encroachment may be able to prove that he has met the state’s tests to establish ownership of his neighbor’s property through adverse possession. Both the buyer and seller have reasons to be aware of an “off boundary line,” which indicates an encroachment, before concluding a sale.

In most cases, a surveyor can figure out boundary lines and do his match ups on a walk-through using a topographical map with drawn lines. But occasions will arise when a boundary line must be searched out in the records and shot in the field to establish it.

From a buyer’s perspective, a deed-mapper drawing, which shows acreage and closure, is usually sufficient evidence to make an offer or not make one.

Deed-mapping is inexpensive and fast.

Once a buyer has confirmed acreage to his satisfaction, his purchase-contract should specify that the property to be purchased contains X acres, as determined by

Y method. This can lead a buyer into an ethical dilemma when, for example, the seller’s deed says, and the seller believes, the property contains 100 acres, more or less, and the deed-mapper shows 150 acres. Most buyers don’t have much of a dilemma when the deed-mapper shows only 75 acres contained within the description; they simply tell the seller that he’s short 25 acres and they’re not paying for it.

Acreage discrepancies are not uncommon in rural property. It makes sense for the seller to know exactly what he’s selling and for the buyer to know exactly what he’s buying before a purchase contract lies on the table between them.