2006
Martin Melaver, CEO

I recently returned from the U.S. Green Building Council’s annual Green Build conference, held in Denver.  What I saw (and heard) floored me.
Yes, there were unprecedented numbers of attendees.  No surprise there.  And there was a plethora of new sustainable developments showcased this year on slick flat-panel screens scrolling through pictures of recently certified projects.  But what really got my attention was the trade show.
No question about it, green has become big business:  we saw floor coverings made in part from recycled materials, counter-tops manufactured from recycled glass, sophisticated versions of intensive and extensive green roofs, building block materials and double and triple-paned gas-filled windows referred to in terms of their R-value insulating capacities, computer systems used to monitor energy and water consumption in real time.  You name it.  Much of the stuff is familiar, since we’ve used a number of these systems on our own developments.  My own house, currently being renovated, looks to include many of these products as well.
Place all of that technology in the context of pronouncements made by USGBC CEO Rick Fedrizzi regarding the wave of sustainable development coming down the pike, and you can see and feel a revolution in the making:  100,000 commercial LEED buildings and one million LEED homes is the target by 2010; one million commercial LEED buildings and ten million LEED homes is the target by 2020.  My own kids, barely teenagers today, will probably be unaware of another way to construct buildings by the time they are adults and raising their own families.  Floored.
There is a “but” here.  And this story, yet to unfold, seems faintly familiar.  One that harkens back to technological advances of the industrial revolution and before that to technological advances of the agrarian revolution – advances that were claimed would ring in unprecedented progress and prosperity and shield us from the vagaries of nature and manual labor.
Don’t get me wrong.  We most certainly need to build in a different way than we do today.  We need to build less wastefully.  We need to construct in ways that encourage less waste - all of which the USGBC points us toward.
But is this sustainable movement, or sustainable revolution truly moving us toward a land community ethic referred to eloquently by Aldo Leopold almost 80 years ago?  Are we moving in a direction that respects the overall health of nature and community?
I’ve got a feeling in my gut that the numbers Fedrizzi is projecting for 2020 will largely be realized.  And I’ve got a similar feeling that the legacy of our sustainable movement will also lead to the following critique down the road:
¨       That the sustainable movement, while it improved upon the technological performance of our buildings, did little if anything to address our overall need for regional planning with large areas set aside for no development at all.
¨       That the sustainable movement reiterated our passion or religion for technology and technological fixes without addressing our underlying loss of community and place.
¨       That the sustainable movement, rather than redress a major underlying cause of growth – our “passion” for consumption and waste – actually helped further contribute to the problem.
¨       That the sustainable movement, like the movement of pioneers westward across the U.S., was more extensive rather than intensive, and never worked deeply into the soil of our culture to address problems of basic housing and shelter for us all.
¨       That the sustainable movement never worked its way deeply into an ethos of conservation and never helped us re-shape our currently one-sided and imbalanced notion of private property rights.
Don’t get me wrong.  Our company is very much in the midst of this sustainable movement and we very much support the waves of change that result in building differently.  However:  there are a number of cogent critiques out there of sustainability – most notably by the historian Donald Worster and the legal scholar Eric Freyfogle – that suggest that as a coherent philosophy, sustainability is lacking.  And, while I don’t care terribly much for academic hair-splitting, this critique does need to be taken seriously.
Sustainability is very much a portmanteau concept, able to be picked up and carried around and used by diverse constituencies with very divergent notions of what it means and how it should be practiced.  It can be used to hide the greatest of sins, used to replicate the same patterns of consumption and growth that have gotten us into a bevy of ecological disasters in the first place.  So maybe before we start throwing around large goals for 2010 and 2020, it might behoove us to think first of what we want this legacy of sustainability to be.
Otherwise, being floored today will leave us with the ultimate result of a concept and set of practices that may indeed be flawed.