Dec. '08/Jan. '09

LEED

Sustainability in the Aftermath

At this point, what we know for certain is that the current economic blaze will alter the current landscape and reconstitute the soil in one form or another. The question then becomes, what grows in the wake?

For the first time this year, it seemed as if the Greenbuild faithful had their eyes on the true sustainability prize and were asking questions that transcended the petty squabbling over how many reductions of this, how much conservation of that, and how many points this or that is worth. Granted, important conversations about the continued improvement, scope, and equity within the LEED rating systems were raging, and we should look to continue to use LEED as an elegant tool that can both elevate and transform the built environment. But other parallel conversations were taking place as well. Conversations about how to design net-zero-energy buildings and communities; how to re-introduce nature into the built environment; how to grow food on buildings; how to operate buildings and businesses such that they produce no waste (or that all waste is food); and how this can all be done equitably so that these attributes are not a privilege, but the norm. In a larger sense, this means letting go of the notion that we can ignore the landscape, climate, and culture of a place and out-engineer the natural world. In some ways they are the same questions being asked in all of the different corners of the sustainability movement.

It can be seen in Janine Benyus’s Biomimicry which looks to nature’s design for inspiration; or in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, which suggests that humans have a three million year track record of living harmoniously with the world rather than the more recent ten thousand years of living in its opposition.  Or in Michael Pollen’s In Defense of Food, where he questions the wisdom of focusing on the individual constituent nutrients of a food and engineering solutions to provide them, rather than stepping back and looking at the naturally and culturally evolved ‘whole systems’ of foods and cuisines. Whether in food or buildings or cities, there is an act of questioning now present in the mainstream that flouts the conventional scientific or engineering wisdom that we were raised with, and instead embraces a more balanced mix of nature, climate, and culture with technology, architecture, and engineering.

All of this suggests that the little incremental steps of more energy efficiency and less water use and more bike racks are leading to a more substantial shift towards people really thinking about and understanding whole systems. It’s a hopeful thought, but it seems that when we come out of the current crunch, sustainability will be ready for the biggest advance it has ever seen, and that next year’s Greenbuild could be replete with buildings that are zero-net-energy, living, zero-carbon, zero-waste, ground in the culture and history of the place, and predicated on the knowledge and understanding of the connections between the design and the future occupying, operating, living, and working that will go on.

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CBG /Dec. '08/Jan. '09