Truth Telling

“All of humanity is in peril, if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth and all the truth, and do so promptly – right now.” – Buckminster Fuller

I started posting to this blog in March of 2007.  It’s been as much a journey as a journal and my posts have been the cairns left on the trail of my search for meaning and truth.  The direction of my search has been open-ended, non-directional, and often both troubling and unexpected.  I changed the name of the blog from “The Sustainable Home” to “Sustainable Dwelling” as my vision expanded and my subject matter broadened in scope and reach.

As a result of one my posts, I was asked to make a presentation this summer to the International Association of Public Participation about making sustainable decisions in the context of the four pillars of sustainability.  In preparation, I was compelled to look back on my journey and ask if I really “knew” anything.  Would I be able to humbly “tell the truth” or fail and spew forth some grossly ego-contaminated version of pseudo truth?  As a result,  this blog has been mostly silent as I struggled to  resolve and make peace with what I’ve written and what I’ve learned, including my readings of others who have walked a similar path.

Much like the journey of this blog, the process of preparing the presentation became it’s own journey and I began to question the mythical foundations of humanity and how they shape our actions and beliefs.  How simple things like canvas shopping bags, electric cars, buying local, and recycling give us a false and comforting sense of “going green” that masks the imminent peril of our ecological overshoot.

In the end, my presentation – my humble attempt at the truth, would attempt to ask and answer two questions:

1. Can humanity achieve a sustainable balance within our closed ecosystem, or have we reached the point where that vision is just another example of the hubris of human exceptionalism?
2. Is it time to switch our focus from sustainability to one of resilience in the face of societal collapse and industrial decline?

I’ve posted a copy of the presentation including the speaker notes on SlideShare.net.  You can find it here.

Is a warning about the future a prediction of doom or a call to follow a different path?

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Beyond GDP – Measuring American Well-being after the Economic Collapse of 2008

“The Gross National Product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them. GNP includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior…And if GNP includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike…It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”  — Bobby Kennedy

When FDR was elected president in the midst of the Great Depression, the economic data  available to help him engineer a recovery was limited to stock price indices, freight car loadings, and a few incomplete indices of industrial production.  As a result, in order to get a handle on whether the New Deal programs were having the intended stimulus effects, economist Simon Kuznets of the National Bureau of Economic Research was tasked to develop a new set of national economic metrics.

Kuznets would win the Nobel prize in economics for his efforts and the invention of Gross Domestic Product [GDP] would become the primary measure of economic health for the U.S. and the developed world for decades to come.  As a macro-economic indicator GDP would receive universal praise as an essential tool to help manage the economy and moderate the effects of the “business cycle”.  Although merely quantitative in nature, it would take on a qualitative veneer in hands of economists and politicians who would paint GDP growth as “good” and any contraction as “bad”.

In a presentation to congress explaining his invention, Kuznets would warn that, “the welfare of a nation can … scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income …”, and yet GDP wrapped around a universally accepted “value of growth as progress”, would evolve to become our de-facto measurement of national well-being.

There have been many comparisons of the economic situation faced by president-elect Obama to the one that FDR faced in the Great Depression.  Although the specifics may differ, the gravity and systemic nature of the economic failures of these two era’s cannot be disputed.  It could also be argued that much like FDR, the Obama administration needs a new set of metrics to engineer a sustainable and equitable recovery.  A set of metrics that measures improvements in our collective well-being as accurately as GDP measures the churn of money through our economy.

GDP is no longer sufficient to measure our nation or any nations progress.  The U.S. economy leads the world in the measure of GDP and yet in many ways our economy and nation acutely lags in the provision of our collective well-being.

• One in six Americans goes without health insurance (around 47 million people).

• The U.S. ranks 24th among the 30 most affluent countries in life expectancy – yet spends more on health care than any other nation.

• The U.S. infant mortality rate is on par with Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, and Poland; if the U.S. infant mortality rate were the same as that of top-ranked Sweden, every year 21,000 additional American babies would live to celebrate their first birthdays.

• One American dies every 90 seconds from obesity-related health problems.

• One in seventeen Americans (about 6 percent of the population) suffers from severe mental illness.

• Fourteen percent of the population – some 30 million Americans – lack the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks like understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.

• More than one in five Americans – 22 percent of the population – have “below basic” math skills, making it impossible to balance a checkbook, calculate a tip, or figure out from an advertisement the amount of interest on a loan.

• Nearly one in five American children lives in poverty, with more than one in thirteen living in extreme poverty.

• The real value of the minimum wage has decreased by 40% in the past forty years and wages have been essentially stagnant since the 1970’s

• More families with children are homeless today than at any time since the Great Depression.

• The U.S. has 5% of the world’s people – but holds 24% of the world’s prisoners.

• The U.S. ranks 42nd in global life expectancy and leads the world’s twenty-five richest countries in the percentage of children living in poverty.

“To be a leading democracy in the information age means producing objective, independent, scientifically grounded, and widely shared quality information on where we are and where we are going, on both an absolute and relative basis, including comparisons to other nations.” — David Walker, Former Comptroller General of the United States

“Happiness is very serious business … the dogma of limitless productivity and growth in a finite world is unsustainable and unfair for future generations.” — Bhutan Prime Minister Jigme Thinley

If GDP is not a meaningful measure of a nation’s well-being then what is?  What metrics are needed to gauge the actions and deeds of our elected officials so that we can objectively measure whether government policies add to or subtract from our well-being?  Where would the U.S. stand when compared objectively with the rest of the world?

As it turns out, there is growing interest in providing indexes that transcend economic output and measure the ultimate objective of a nations economy — the well-being of it’s citizens.

The Human Development Index
One of the first metrics to challenge the supremacy of GDP was the Human Development Index [HDI].  The HDI was developed in 1990 by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and was immediately adopted by the United Nations Development Program [UNDP] in its annual Human Development Report.

The HDI index combines the normalized measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita for countries worldwide. It is a standardized means of measuring human development – a concept that, according to the UNDP, “refers to the process of widening the options of persons, giving them greater opportunities for education, health care, income, employment, etc.”

The HDI combines three basic dimensions:

1. Life expectancy at birth, as a proxy measure of a population’s health and longevity
2. Knowledge and education, as measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weighting) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrollment ratio (with one-third weighting).
3. Standard of living, as measured by the natural logarithm of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) in United States dollars.

The basic use of HDI is to rank countries by level of “human development”.  This has evolved into a way of classifying whether a country is a developed, developing, or underdeveloped.

According to the 2007/2008 U.N. Human Development Report the U.S. ranked 12th based on the HDI among the “developed” nations.  More troubling is that the U.S. ranking has steadily declined since 1980 when we were ranked 2nd.  This decline happened during a period in which U.S. annual GDP grew from about $5.2-trillion to over $14-trillion dollars.

The Happy Planet Index
In 2006, the U.K’s New Economics Foundation [NEF] published the Happy Planet Index [HPI].  One should not be put off by the somewhat tongue-in-cheek title of this index.  This is a very serious and well researched metric with a serious objective.  In the words of the NEF:

“This report takes a very different look at the wealth and poverty of nations.  It measures the ecological efficiency with which, county by country, people achieve long and happy lives.  In doing so, it strips our view of the economy back to its absolute basics: what goes in (natural resources), and what comes out (human lives of differing length and happiness).”

The HPI combines three indicators to achieve a measure of how well a given country converts the earth’s finite resources into the well-being experienced by their citizens.  As an equation the index can be expressed as:

HPI = (Life Satisfaction x Life Expectancy) / Ecological Footprint

where,

• Life Satisfaction is derived primarily from the World Values Survey
• Life Expectance data is taken from the U.N. Development Report
• and, Ecological Footprint is based on data from the Global Footprint Network

The NEF did not intend the index to be a happiness scorecard.  They stress that:

“It is important to recognize from the outset that the HPI is not an indicator of the happiest country on the planet, or the best place to live.  Nor does it indicate the most developed country in the traditional sense, or the most environmentally friendly,  Instead, the HPI combines these notions, providing a method of comparing countries progress towards the goal of providing long-term well-being for all without exceeding the limits of equitable resource consumption.”

Since the U.S. casts such a huge ecological footprint relative to it’s population, it is not surprising that based on HPI, the U.S. ranks 150th in the world just behind Lithuania.  America’s HPI ranking underscores just how out of sync our nation’s outsized GDP is with our actual well-being and our inefficient stewardship of natural resources.

What Metrics are Needed for a New American Century – A New New Deal?

“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.” — Barack Obama

The U.N.’s HDI index and the New Economic Foundation’s HPI index provide excellent alternatives to GDP.  These indexes can easily be used in comparison with other countries and help to underscore some of our nation’s weaknesses, but they do not provide the kind of detail needed for policy makers at the local, state, and national levels to make decisions and for citizens to hold those policy makers accountable.

There are two privately funded American initiatives that are aimed at meeting those local, state, and national goals and to forging a more meaningful way of measuring our nation’s progress.

The American Human Development Project
The American Human Development Project  [AHDP] was founded in 2006 and is modeled on the U.N.’s global Human Development Report.  The AHDP’s American Human Development Index [AHDI] combines indicators for the three domains of a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living.

With their 2008-2009 Measuring America Report we get a first look at the AHDI index in application and can begin to compare various regions of the country.  At the state level, we find that Connecticut ranks first and Mississippi ranks last.  Among the nation’s 436 congressional districts, New York’s Fourteenth District, in New York City, ranks first, and California’s Twentieth District, around Fresno, ranks last. The average resident of New York’s Fourteenth District earns over three times as much as the average resident of California’s Twentieth District, lives four and a half years longer, and is ten times as likely to have a college degree.

The report’s rich volume of data provides a baseline to measure future progress and a new set of benchmarks for state-to-state and region-to-region comparisons.

The State of the USA
The State of the USA, Inc. [SUSA] is a non-profit founded in 2007 dedicated to providing easy access to anyone interested in finding relevant data about the true state of the nation.  SUSA’s new website will launch in 2009 and include data on an array of topics including:

• Animals, Plants, and Ecosystems
• Business
• Civic Involvement
• Crime and Safety
• Ecosystem Goods, Services
• Education
• Employment, Labor Markets
• Families & Children
• Health
• Housing
• Immigration
• Income & Wealth
• National Security
• Population
• Prices & Inflation
• Production & Output
• Research & Development
• Soil, Water, & Air
• Values & Culture

SUSA does not provide a new index but rather a high quality public data hub intended to promote informed citizen involvement in government.

A Model Metric for a New American Beginning
If I were going to choose a model for our new government to use as a benchmark for a new American metric of citizen well-being, it would be the Canadian Index on Well-Being [CIW].  Conceived in 1999, the CIW is a partnership of Canadian national leaders, organizations, and grass root efforts across Canada in consultation with international experts.  the CIW’s visions is:

“…to enable Canadians to share in the highest well-being status by identifying, developing and publicizing measures that offer clear, valid and regular reporting on progress toward that goal and well-being outcomes Canadians seek as a nation.”

The CIW challenges us to imagine an index that:

• Distinguishes between good things like health and clean air, and bad things, like sickness and pollution;

• Promotes volunteer work and unpaid care-giving as social goods, and overwork and stress as social deficits;

• Places a value on educational achievement, early childhood learning, economic and personal security, a clean environment, and social and health equity;

• Values a better balance between investment in health promotion and spending on illness treatment.

After nearly ten years in the making, the CIW index is scheduled to launch in the spring of 2009 and will combine eight indicator domains into a composite index to provide a quick snapshot of whether overall Canadian well-being is improving or declining.  Detailed reports will flush out the composite index and provide trend data and additional information about each of the individual domains.  The eight domains will provide a comprehensive view of Canadian well-being.

• Living Standards are defined as the quality and quantity of goods and services, both public and private, available to the population, and the distribution of these goods and services within the population.

• Community Vitality is characterized by strong, active and inclusive relationships between residents, private sector, public sector and voluntary organizations that work to foster individual and collective well-being. Vital communities are those that are able to cultivate these relationships in order to create, adapt and thrive in the changing world and thus improve well-being of citizens.

• Healthy Populations measures the health of a population in its fullest expression – being alive and well, experiencing disease, disability and delaying death, lifestyles we lead, and care we receive.

• Educated Populace measures the literacy skills required to function effectively in society, and is aware of contextual situations and systems, social and economic interconnections, current world events, the processes of the natural world, and the influence of current lifestyles on population health and on the choices and quality of life of future generations

• Time Use measures the use of time, how people experience time, what controls its use, and how it affects well-being.

• Ecosystem Health measures the state of well-being and integrity of our natural environment.  This includes the sustainability of Canada’s natural resources and the capacity of our ecosystems and watersheds to provide a sustained level of ecological goods and services for the well-being of Canadians and other species in nature. This domain examines both the current state of Canada’s ecosystems and changes over time.

• Civic Engagement measures the health of our democracy. It addresses three aspects of our public lives and the governance of our society: How engaged are citizens in public life and governance?; Do our governments function in an open, transparent, effective, fair, equitable, and accessible manner?: and Are Canadians, our governments and our corporations good global citizens? Civic engagement includes our electoral processes, and the policy and decision-making processes at all levels of government.

• Arts, Culture, and Recreation measures culture as a general term covering all forms of human expression. People’s culture is uniquely expressed in their language, and the contours of our multicultural society can be sketched with measures of linguistic usage. What matters to Canadians sometimes matters in different ways to those observing events from different cultural perspectives. Art is a particular type of culture. Art includes performing arts; visual arts; media arts; and facilities like galleries and all kinds of museums, historical and heritage sites.

As we face the greatest economic challenge since the Great Depression, the citizens of America will be poorly served if as a nation, we continue to rely solely on GDP as a measure of our progress.  Obama has promised change, he has promised to “promote our common welfare”, he will need more than GDP to point the way.

“The true test of the American ideal is whether we’re able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them.” — Barack Obama, Jun. 4, 2005

See Remodelling GDP, Financial Times March 2009

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A Ponzi Scheme Wrapped in a Three Piece Suit of Respectability

“Once you sit down and draw a little picture of the economy as a subset of the larger ecosystem, then you’re halfway home as far as ecological economics is concerned. That’s why people resist doing that. That means you would have to say well, there are limits, we’re not going to be able to grow forever. That means the economy must have some optimal scale relative to the larger system. That means you don’t grow beyond the optimum.
How do we stop growing? What do we do?
These are very threatening questions.”
Dr. Herman Daly, Former World Bank economist and author of Ecological Economics

Fantasy Economics

I’m an architect and engineer by training, so when I began to write seriously about sustainability, I had no idea that the storyline would begin with a discussion of economic theory. Yet when one asks the question of what is sustainable or not sustainable relative to housing you are very quickly tossed into the stormy seas of “growth” and “limits”, and the conflict between neo-classical and ecological economics.

When it comes to our mainstream economic theory, it seems that we are not much removed from our ancestors who thought the earth was flat or at the center of the universe. The neo-classical economics currently taught in all of our major universities dominates both our world view and governmental policy making. Developed in a time of abundant natural resources, it assumes that non-renewable natural resources are infinite and ignores the environmental costs of their production and consumption. It is an economic theory that worships at the church of growth and blindly disregards it’s own existence within a closed ecosystem. Much like the 16th century catholic church that believed that the earth was the center of the universe, neo-classical economics believes it is the tail that wags the ecosystem. Herman Daly, the father of ecological economics, likens the current situation to a chain-letter swindle or ponzi scheme in which “The current beneficiaries of the swindle, those at the beginning of the chain, try hard to keep up the illusion among those doubters at the end who are beginning to wonder if there are really sufficient resources in the world for the game to continue very much longer.” This ponzi scheme would eventually play itself out in the U.S. housing sector in the form of energy guzzling McMansions, and mind numbing suburban sprawl.

The American Church of Growth
The concept of growth in America would be enshrined in our national psyche when Thomas Jefferson penned the words “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” into our declaration of independence. As the country migrated west, growth and development would take on a patina of virtue and goodness and become the religion of the land. Our pursuit of happiness would not always be as pure as the words of Jefferson, and our migration west would be equal parts courage, individual initiative, greed, and genocide. As we moved west we would both take and rape, arrogantly taking land from the native population and casually raping the environment of it’s natural resources.

The discovery of oil and the invention of the automobile would eventually morph our cities and towns into massive developments comprised of weak centers surrounded by a web of suburban wasteland anchored by multi-lane highways as each generation tapped into our balance sheet of natural resources in a mad pursuit of growth and prosperity. The happiness we sought in the rapid growth and development of our built environment would not be defined by Jefferson’s liberty, but by long commutes, road rage, pathological consumption, crushing debt, an epidemic of obesity and national dependancy on anti-depressants.

The impact of neo-classical economics on housing would and continues to be profound and pervasive. This ponzi scheme wrapped in a three piece suit of respectability would provide the hidden intellectual foundation for growing home sizes, suburban sprawl, and countless “cost benefit” studies that would shape the regulations that formed the basis of our inadequate energy codes. However we are now approaching an ecological tipping point and the current generation will find themselves the recipient of the scheme’s inevitable collapse.

Ecosystems self-correct with Unbiased Indifference
Ecosystems are naturally self-correcting and treat all populations that overreach with equal and unbiased indifference. It matters not whether the population is human, animal, plant, insect or microbe, any population that exceeds its natural carrying capacity is either forced to reduce its numbers or its level of consumption. The 2002 Limits to Growth report estimates that human “growth and development” has already exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity by more than 20% and it is evident that the earth’s ecosystem has already begun the process of adjustment and rebalancing. The economic theory and policy decisions that brought us to our current state will be quietly trumped by the natural processes that we have ignored.

The signs and warnings of this natural rebalancing are everywhere. Climate change, rapid species extinction, fisheries collapse, depleted aquifers, loss of arable land, $100/barrel oil, and monthly heating costs that equal mortgage payments are all evidence of natural limits in action. As the world’s largest per-capita consumer of natural resources, the U.S. has become the poster nation for ecological overreach and collapse. As a result we currently face an especially painful and traumatic transition to a more sustainable future.

“Future generations are always free to make themselves miserable or content with whatever we give them. We do not owe the future their happiness, but we do owe them an intact resource base.”
Dr. Herman Daly

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Fantasy Economics and the Sustainable Society Revolution

“Macroeconomic theory in our text books conveniently behaves as if the ecosystem does not exist all the while consuming products and services from the ecosystem which fuels economic growth.”
Mark Anielski

“Despite evidence that the ecology does in fact exhibit constraints in accordance with the laws of physics, we continue down a ruinous path too afraid, paralysed, or unable to acknowledge the truth since such a revelation would put in question all we have pursued since the Industrial
Revolution. This would mean that the pursuit of increased wealth and prosperity by current generations will impose a high price on future generations.”
Mark Anielski

In a perfect Adam Smith world, markets are supposed to efficiently set prices based on relative supply and demand. In the real world, a host of other factors can effect price. Federal and local governments add sales and other taxes. Governments impose tariffs and import duties. Cartels increase and decrease supply to achieve political or financial objectives. Central banks increase the money supply, improving “liquidity” while fostering monetary and price inflation

However, prices for many goods also reflect a fantasy economics that assumes an infinite supply of non-renewable raw materials and zero costs associated with the consumption and disposal of goods. For example, the economic activity associated with an asbestos plant and economic activity to clean up the resulting super-fund site are both counted as positive contributions to our GNP

Crude oil is another great example. Non renewable resources like oil follow a bell shaped supply curve. During the easy to find and extract “up” side of bell curve, supply out-strips demand and prices are low. In most minds supply and reserves are thought to infinite and no thought is given to conservation. Think of Hummers, NASCAR, and SUV’s as the symbols for this side of bell curve. Indirect costs like pollution, suburban sprawl, energy insecurity, and climate change are NOT factored into the price, but are paid none the less through higher healthcare costs, lower productivity, taxes, military adventures, and “natural” disasters

As we reach the top of the bell curve as in the case of oil today, demand is approaching the limits of supply and prices have increased rapidly. According to the IEA, supply reached an all time production in May of 2006 of 86.11-million barrels per day in July 2006 and in 2007 the price of crude oil has increased by about 70% to over $95 per barrel as we draw down the developed world’s stockpiles. And yet even these prices do not reflect the true costs of depleting this non-renewable resource

As we roll over the top of the oil production bell curve sometime around 2010, supply will decline and at some point after conservation and replacement technologies fail to close the gap, a painful path of “demand destruction” will become our only option to balance the supply-demand equation. The economic recession caused by this demand destruction will be just another hidden cost of the economic fantasy of “unlimited” non-renewable resources

What does all this have to do with “The Sustainable Home Blog”? Is this just a self-indulgent rant, rambling for the sake rambling? The reason I keep returning to the topics of economic theory and peak oil is that they have everything to do with limits and reason for sustainable building

The green building movement is already big business and we may have reached a tipping point in 2007, where more than 50% of the key decision makers in the business world of building have reached the conclusion that the movement has legs and that a decades long bull market for all things green is an opportunity worth pursuing. What is the source of this apparent demand for these new green products and buildings? Is it global warming, rising energy costs, insurance claims from sick building syndrome, or the urge to “do good”? I think it’s all of these reasons and more, but “going green” is still more fashion than necessity, and collectively, it has not entered our consciousness that there are limits to growth in a closed ecosystem and that our current path of “development” threatens our very survival

That’s all about to change. The ecosystem has been sending us warning signals (the effects of air and water pollution, species loss, climate change, fisheries collapse, etc.) for decades, but because these signals didn’t have a direct individual impact on the majority of world’s inhabitants, we have continued on a path of unsustainable global development modeled after the American standard of living and consumption. As we push up against the geological limits of peak oil(~2010), peak natural gas(~2015), peak coal(~2025), and peak uranium(~2025), the cheap energy that’s been driving development since the beginning of the industrial revolution will will no longer be either cheap or abundant and we will come face to face with our own unsustainable reality. No combination of known technologies will even come close to filling the gap left by these declining non-renewable energy sources and it will take decades for us to recognize the natural limits to growth of our ecosystem and transition to a steady-state and sustainable economy.

As we enter this period of sustained crisis, it will quickly become evident that the only reasonable standard for building design will be a standard of net zero energy consumption. Because we lack information, initially this will be part science and part intuition based on on passive heating and cooling lessons from the past. Eventually we will come to know the embodied energy of every building material and make many decisions based on the EROIE (energy return on investment of the energy embodied) of building products like insulation, low-e glazing, PV panels, and wind turbines. Houses will become smaller and change shape as energy trumps fashion and becomes the primary design factor. A whole new industry will emerge to help homeowners convert over 100-million thinly insulated, poorly constructed homes into some semblance of energy efficiency. Pattern’s of development and zoning laws will change as the age of automobile comes to a close. Populations will shift and migrate as the end of cheap air-conditioning makes living in many parts of the country less desirable. Home landscaping will change from ornamental to edible, and gray water irrigation will become commonplace as the energy costs to move and purify water change our attitudes about this precious natural resource. Local materials will dominate construction and the age of imported Italian granite countertops will come to an end.

We might look back and call this the sustainable society revolution. A revolution where in we deconstruct, modify, and replace much of what we thought and built during the industrial revolution. In a very real sense, its already started and we’re just seeing the first signs.

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Definitions of Sustainability and a Steady State World

”…the world’s richest 20 per cent of the population consume 86 per cent of its goods and services, over half its energy and nearly half its meat and fish.”

Given how few buildings architects actually design in this country compared with the EU for example, I’m not sure how relevant the profession is to the topic of sustainability. However, I was curious enough to see what might be the official AIA word on the subject. I found this posting on the internet from the AIA Committee on the Environment.

“The linked domains of sustainability are environmental (natural patterns and flows), economic (financial patterns and equity), and social (human, cultural, and spiritual). Sustainable design is a collaborative process that involves thinking ecologically—studying systems, relationships, and interactions—in order to design in ways that remove rather than contribute stress from systems. The sustainable design process holistically and creatively connects land use and design at the regional level and addresses community design and mobility; site ecology and water use; place-based energy generation, performance, and security; materials and construction; light and air; bioclimatic design; and issues of long life and loose fit. True sustainable design is beautiful, humane, socially appropriate, and restorative.”

My first reaction to this lengthy, rambling definition was huh???!!! what the %$#@ does that mean? No wonder I hear quotes like “If it’s not beautiful, it’s not sustainable” from celebrity architects. Definitions like that, however well meaning are a license to do just about anything. So I thought maybe one of the leading schools of architecture would be more helpful and provide a definition with some substance. I found this posting on the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture’s site.

“Sustainable design is a collective process whereby the built environment achieves new levels of ecological balance through new and retrofit construction, towards the long term viability and humanization of architecture. Focusing on environmental context, sustainable design merges the natural, minimum resource conditioning solutions of the past (daylight, solar heat and natural ventilation) with the innovative technologies of the present, into an integrated “intelligent” system that supports individual control with expert negotiation for resource consciousness. Sustainable design rediscovers the social, environmental and technical values of pedestrian, mixed use communities, fully using existing infrastructures, including “main streets” and small town planning principles, and recapturing indoor-outdoor relationships. Sustainable design avoids the further thinning out of land use, the dislocated placement of buildings and functions. Sustainable design introduces benign, non-polluting materials and assemblies with lower embodied and operating energy requirements, and higher durability and recyclability. Finally, sustainable design offers architecture of long term value through ‘forgiving’ and modifiable building systems, life-cycle instead of least-cost investments, and timeless delight and craftsmanship.”

Again, a long, rambling definition full of academic architectural jargon like “timeless delight”. Is this representative of the sustainable mind candy being fed to the future building designers of america? What about limits? What about carrying capacity? What about the huge energy drain, climate impact, and unsustainable ecological footprint of our existing building stock? Where is the call to action?

Looking for answers, I found the following on the Presidio School of Management’s “Sustainability Dictionary” website. Apparently in the academic world there are three different flavors or “criteria” of sustainability.

Social Criteria:

• Socially desirable
• Culturally acceptable
• Psychologically nurturing

Financial Criteria:

• Economically sustainable
• Technologically feasible
• Operationally viable

Environmental Criteria:

• Environmentally Robust
• Generationally Sensitive
• Capable of continuous learning

Although I can sympathize with architectural profession’s emphasis on social criteria such as beauty and “timeless delight”, I don’t think it serves a world facing climate change and a looming carrying capacity crisis brought on by the “peak” production and supply of oil, gas, and coal. The AIA and Carnegie Mellon definitions allude to “environmental criteria”, but only in vague terms. What is needed is a sustainable building standard that addresses the very real limits to carrying capacity and our obligations to future generations. Unfortunately, LEEDS, Energy Star, or any other “green” standard falls far short of meeting such a standard.

In 1987 the U.N. World Commission on the Environment and Development [commonly known as the Brundtland Commission] set the table for the what has been a 20 year debate on the meaning of sustainability. The classic and oft quoted definition from the commission is:

“Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

This definition is not far removed from the “seventh generation” philosophy of the Native American Iroquois Confederacy, a philosophy that put forth that chiefs should consider the effects of their actions and decisions seven generations into the future. However, as often as I’ve seen the commission’s definition quoted, I rarely see anyone expound on what the commission meant by their simple, elegant definition.

Digging into the actual report I found that even 20 years ago the commission was deeply concerned about the impact development and population growth was having on the world’s carrying capacity with respect to several important environmental criteria.

• Global Warming
• Ozone Depletion
• Species Loss
• Desertification
• Deforestation
• Air, water, and soil pollution

In making it’s case for sustainable development, the commission’s report would define carrying capacity as:

“The population that can be supported indefinitely by an ecosystem
without destroying that ecosystem”

Although not generally part of our awareness, it is no secret that various regions and country’s of the world compete for carrying capacity and the so called developed world imports a large portion of it’s own carry capacity at the expense of other country’s and peoples. The commissions report states that:

“The Earth is one but the world is not.
We all depend on one biosphere for sustaining our lives.
Yet each community, each country, strives for survival and prosperity with little regard for its impact on others.
Some consume the Earth’s resources at a rate that would leave little for future generations. Others, many more in number, consume far too little and live with the prospect of hunger, squalor, disease, and early death.”

Carrying capacity is not just a function of population. The actual population that can be supported by the earth’s ecosystem is also a function of the average standard of living or level of consumption of that population. Lower consumption levels allow the support of a larger population, and conversely higher consumption levels will support proportionally less population

Today we find ourselves in a world of 6.6 billion people in which the world’s richest 20 per cent of the population consume 86 per cent of its goods and services, over half its energy and nearly half its meat and fish. Another 1.4 billion people in China and India (nearly 5 times the population of the U.S) are rapidly growing their economies and as they begin to approach the developed world’s level of consumption and energy density, their rising demands on the earth’s carrying capacity is driving up energy, commodity, and food costs around the world. As the world’s collective economic growth rapidly depletes non-renewable resources such as oil, gas, and coal we will soon be faced with a carrying capacity crisis in a post peak world in which countries desperately complete for resources in a limited ecosystem. The commission’s report predicted this condition twenty years ago when it stated that:

“The ultimate limits to global development are perhaps determined by the availability of energy resources and by the biosphere’s capacity to absorb the by-products of energy use. These energy limits may be approached far sooner than the limits imposed by other material resources. First, there are the supply problems: the depletion of oil reserves, the high cost and environmental impact of coal mining, and the hazards of nuclear technology. Second, there are emission problems, most notably acid pollution and carbon dioxide build up leading to global warming.”

Many informed people in and out of government are painfully aware of this impending carrying capacity train wreck. Unfortunately, it is the nature of governments to only respond to an immediate crisis. Another problem, one that the Brundtland Commission omitted from their report, is our almost religious belief in economic growth. Even modest rates of growth mathematically become exponential, so that in the context of a closed ecological system, “sustainable growth” and “sustainable development” are eventually rendered oxymorons. In order to survive, at some point in time we will have to respect our planet’s limits in terms of carrying capacity. This will mean the acceptance of limits to our population size and to our levels of consumption and waste, and the transition to a steady-state economy.

The following definition of steady-state economics is from the Encyclopedia of Earth

The phrase “steady state economy” originated from ecological economics, most notably the work of Herman Daly, but its roots are in classical economics, most notably the “stationary state” by economist John Stuart Mill. The steady-state economy is often discussed in the context of economic growth and the impacts of economic growth on ecological integrity, environmental protection, and economic sustainability. Therefore, use of the phrase “steady-state economy” requires a clear definition of economic growth.

Economic growth is an increase in the production and consumption of goods and services. For distinct economic or political units, economic growth is generally indicated by increasing gross domestic product (GDP). Economic growth entails increasing population times per capita consumption, higher throughput of materials and energy, and a growing ecological footprint.

Theoretically and temporarily, a steady state economy may have a growing population with declining per capita consumption, or vice versa, but neither of these scenarios are sustainable in the long run. Therefore, “steady state economy” connotes constant populations of people (and, therefore, “stocks” of labor) and constant stocks of capital. It also has a constant rate of throughput; i.e., energy and materials used to produce goods and services.

The “growing ecological footprint” of economic growth only becomes problematic as we begin to push up against the limits to carrying capacity. This can occur locally in an “island” economy or globally as we are beginning to experience today. Getting back to architecture and the massive ecological footprint of our building stock, our homes are but a subset of years of unsustainable development that are pushing the limits of carrying capacity. This is especially true when we consider the energy consumption and climate impact of both residential and commercial buildings. My personal definition of sustainable building design is:

Sustainable building design meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs for shelter. In order for our built environment to be supported indefinitely by the earth’s ecosystem without destroying that ecosystem, sustainable building design must be based on a net zero energy standard. A net zero energy standard, in no way constrains designers from creating buildings that are socially desirable, culturally acceptable, and psychologically nurturing.

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Building Codes and Green Accounting

“Green or environmental accounting describes an effort to incorporate environmental benefits and costs into economic decision making.” – Gernot Wagner

If you didn’t think economic and accounting theory were important in our lives, consider this.

Much of what enters our national model energy codes is a some point filtered through a cost benefit analysis (CBA). CBA’s are subject to the principle of “lies, damn lies, and statistics”, in that much like statistics their end product is subject to underlying assumptions like the future cost of energy and discount rates (see CBA Failings). For example, the requirements for insulation levels in our codes is decided by cost benefit analysis which mysteriously always results in requirements that correspond to the exact thickness fiberglass batt that can fit into a 2×4 or 2×6 wall cavity or a 2×10 ceiling cavity.

Green, environmental, or social accounting would add in other factors to a CBA such as:

• the cost of air pollution
• the cost of climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions
• the benefit of insuring energy supply security

This would give us a “sustainable” Green CBA methodology that would transform our code requirements.

The EU and even China has already started moving in this direction, but the politics of vested interests have blocked progress in the U.S. Back in 1993 the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the official bookkeeper of the U.S. economy, did began working on a green accounting system called Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounts. However, the initial results released in 1994 showed that GDP numbers were overstating the impact of mining companies to our nation’s economic wealth. Mining companies didn’t like those results, and it didn’t take long for Capitol Hill to react. Alan Mollohan, a Democratic House Representative from West Virginia’s coal country, sponsored an amendment to the 1995 Appropriations Bill that stopped the Bureau of Economic Analysis from working on revising the GDP and that’s where things stand today.

You can imagine Owen Corning’s response to the application of a Green CBA approach to our current insulation requirements. Consider for a moment the effect a carbon tax would have on the our national requirements for insulation. I’ll use Sweden as a model. In an effort to account for the environmental costs of fossils fuels, in 1991 Sweden enacted a carbon tax of $100 per ton (raised to $150 in 1997) CO2 emitted. If the U.S. were to enact a $100/tCO2 carbon tax it would increase the current cost of natural gas by about 75% and current cost of coal fired electricity by about 70%.

Since the basis for code requirements for insulation are primarily driven by energy costs, if the social and environmental costs of energy were included in a “green” CBA analysis, insulation requirements would increase by the order of 70%.

… more on Sustainable Economics

“To understand what sustainable economics is, and why it would be superior to conventional economics, we need to start with a brief recap of conventional economics. I’ll need to go through a number of definitions and distinctions, but this is far more than an academic exercise. The conventional economics concepts I’ll be describing provide the basis on which those in power all over the world (which to some degree includes most of us in the rich industrialized countries) justify the destruction of the Earth. It would be hard to find a more pervasive, pernicious and powerful evil than the seemingly innocent concepts that currently rule our economic lives. Let me be more precise, it is not so much the concepts on their own – they have served an historically useful role. The real evil is the continued dominant use of these concepts long after they have become seriously outdated and destructive. This is indeed the belly of the beast, and until we can replace these concepts with a more Earth-friendly approach, our prospects are grim.” – Robert Gilman

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