The Sustainable Home Blog

I received an email this morning from Scot Horst , who chairs the LEED Steering Committee. He describes the behind the scenes narrative that has been going on since work began on LEED 2009.

Person A: “Global warming doesn’t give us much time.”
Person B: “But we can’t address much of anything, let alone global warming, if we’re only dealing with a small fraction of the entire built environment. We need to get everyone involved.”

Person A: “Yes, but why get them involved in a system that doesn’t take them far enough to save us from ourselves? We need our buildings to be restorative.”
Person B: “LEED can’t save us from ourselves. LEED, as a tool, can engage the market in transformation. That transformation is about people. It is not about LEED credits.”

Person A: “You’re missing the point. We have to be tougher. We have to go beyond.”
Person B: “No, you’re missing the point. We have to find ways to engage a market that has never thought about these issues before.”

Persons A and B: “Let’s find a way to do both.

”This is an engaging and very important narrative and perhaps the most important point for me is that LEED is a “tool” that helps to raise consciousness and “engage the market in transformation.” My personal view is that we must “go beyond” and that much of what we currently do in the green building movement, however well intentioned, is nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. The global warming mentioned in Horst’s narrative has provided the catalyst for both LEED and Architecture 2030, but focusing solely on warming misses the point. Warming is a symptom and not a cause. It has prompted us to take some action, but not to “go beyond”. As a premise for action it has been useful, but is easily attacked on it’s “scientific validity”. It is one of the canaries in the coal mine, but there has been is very little discussion of the coal mine. We need to expand the narrative and take a broader view.

Taking a page out of ecological economics, once you picture the built environment as a mere subset of our closed ecosystem, then your conceptual framework regarding sustainable building is forever changed. It means you have to accept that there are limits, and that we are not going to be able to grow forever. It implies the built environment must have some optimal size and level of consumption relative to the larger ecosystem. It means you cannot grow beyond that optimum without threatening man’s survival within that ecosystem. Out of this stream of thought flows a list of very troubling questions?

• How do we stop growing?

• What are the limits? What is optimal?

• Does climate change tell us they have already been exceeded?

• Do we face a kind of built environment armageddon when fossil fuel production peaks and begins to decline?

• Is a zero energy standard imperative now?

• What do we do? How do we do it?

Our very survival depends on how and when these questions are answered. LEED does not provide the answers, but it does help us to prepare.

“Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, 
committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Margaret Mead

On February 20th I attended the Architecture 2030 Global Imperative, web-cast teach-in with 250,000 other design professionals, government officials, and students from around the world. Architecture 2030 is perfect example of the “power of one”. Founded by New Mexico architect Edward Mazria, it lays down a challenge to building design professionals to incrementally reduce energy consumption in buildings and by the year 2030 to be designing only carbon-neutral buildings (i.e. using no fossil-fuel GHG-emitting energy to operate).

This is no arbitrary goal plucked from the air. Based on EPA data, Mazria has identified buildings in the U.S. as the largest source (~48%) of green house gas emissions, and the goals he has identified tie directly to averting a looming global warming disaster.

By any measure these are lofty goals, especially in the U.S., where the architectural profession is responsible for the design of only a small percentage of the buildings constructed or remodeled each year. Mazria’s challenge is made even more difficult by a culture of celebrity within his profession that often seems to have more in common with the fashion industry than the building industry. To an outsider, (although his work is beautiful) Mazria’s challenge to the AIA must look a bit like America Ferrara’s character challenging the petty and superficial world of fashion in Ugly Betty.

Personally, I applaud the audacity, vision, and courage of Mazria’s challenge and stand beside him in doing whatever I can to raise awareness of our housing stock’s impact on global warming. However, it will take much more to solve this problem than just energizing the design community. With over 120 million housing units in this country it will take the kind of Manhattan Project commitment, “Victory Garden” mentality, strong national leadership, and grass roots sense of urgency that mobilized the country during WWII. We need to act as if the ocean’s had already risen 20 feet, and large parts of our coastal cities had already been lost.

Clarification: About 60% of the green house gas emissions attributed to buildings come indirectly from purchased electricity from coal fired (and other fossil fuel) power plants. (So, in the interest of full disclosure, only about 19% of green house gas emissions come directly from buildings.) Looking at the big picture, this is both a supply and demand side problem and both coal plant emissions and building energy demands need to be addressed in the overall solution.