Kindergarten Charts - essay 7

Sustainability; a screed

There was a lunch-and-learn on sustainability in the office the other day. I could hear the guy on the other side of the wall reading his powerpoint presentation to the others, who munched their paninis and sipped Sprites while they filled out forms.

Afterwards, someone asked me if I could define sustainability.

Oh, that's easy, I said. Sustainable living means living in such a way that you do not create future obligations. For example, if you purchase soda and it comes in a can, when you discard the container, you create an obligation for someone in the future to deal with the trash. So, folks say, it's better to recycle the containers. And they stop there. Other alternatives include: using permanent containers rather than disposable ones or... not buying the soda at all. In my view recycling is at the very small end of the cost/benefit curve, where benefits are minimal and effort is maximum. Not consuming any soda in the first place provides a 100% capture of the waste of the bottle, and requires absolutely no expenditure of resources. More efficient and more effective behavior than recycling by orders of magnitude. To live is to choose.

Religious recycling is not evidence of environmental consciousness, it is evidence of a guilty conscience. A consumer is a thing that produces only waste; it is consumption itself that is unsustainable, consumption without production.

I watched a woman drive a 5,000 pound car a mile and a half to recycle a bundle of newspapers and a shopping bag half full of glass bottles. There are more than ten trillion trees in North America. Glass is made of sand, perhaps the single most abundant raw material on the planet. She puts Sunoco Super Unleaded in the tank of her car. She also goes to a green dry-cleaner; it's about nine miles each way, maybe twenty minutes in traffic. Not a sermon, just a thought: if you’re all about sustainability, perhaps your wardrobe would reflect it.

Dwell is a delicious little magazine focused on design and touting sustainability, and full of ads for expensive imported cars. I know the advertisements are sincere, the editorial content will have to fend for itself.

Recently WalMart spent a lot of money greening up their stores. The business whose business is supplying the raw materials of our landfills announced their whole-hearted commitment to sustainable design. They bring container ships full of garbage from thousands of miles away to our ports every day, put it in trucks and distribute it to every nook and cranny of the country. We buy it, use some of it for a while, and then put it in the landfill, where it belongs. WalMart is the largest single employer in the country and that is the business model. Does this make a pain in your brain?

How is it sustainable to import bamboo flooring from China? Bamboo grows on the shoulder of the road outside my door.

The LEED framework has created a checklist-mentality about what constitutes environmental responsiblity. There was a project on a military base, LEED was required. The designers wanted the bike-rack point and they kept showing a bike rack on their drawings. The General kept insisting they take it out. Finally, he asked them, "Have you ever seen a Marine on a goddamn bicycle?"

You have experience making thousands of value judgements: can you describe a single example in your adult life where you used a cumulative-points system as the basis for your decision? Other than as a judge of a certain contest in Atlantic City, I mean. The arrogance implicit in the structure of LEED scoring amazes me, the way it insults considered judgement.

The arbitrary nature of the points (providing a bike rack in your project scores a LEED point while using geothermal energy sources does not) makes me suspect the integrity of the whole enterprise. I propose we set up a cap-and-trade-style exchange for trading LEED points. Is there something wrong with that idea? It’s certainly not antithetical to the framework, and we could certainly make serious money doing it.

I'm not interested in assertions (a completed LEED checklist is merely an assertion). I look for hard performance data published for any project that touts itself as green: for energy use (including occupants commutes), water use, maintenance costs, repairs necessary. Not forecasts, actual data. It’s seldom tabulated, rarely published. I am more interested in performance than in promises. Perhaps the truth is even less convenient than we think.

The USGBC takes in $4,718 more than it spends every hour; ten million dollars net last year. Here’s an idea: let’s take some of that money and fund an independent study of performance and energy use. It takes a reprobate dinosaur like me to suggest this? I can assure you that if the actual energy savings were even marginally significant, they would be screaming the news from the rooftops, and publishing independent audits left and right.

A 25,000-square foot house can be LEED certified, all the way wet with platinum, baby. You can have five of them if you want. Is there a problem? After all, it would be so much less sustainable if it weren’t certified. And we’re referring to this approach as a standard? LEED is useful, when you need a rubber ruler.

Sustainability is absolute, not relative; this is not an argument, it is a fact.

We continue to perpetuate zoning restrictions that amplify our oil dependance. We are building housing in cul-de-sacs that pop up like warts on the horizon -- even today we're doing this! Want to pick up some vegetables? Hop in the car. Want to see a movie? Hop in the car. Want to go to school? Hop on the bus, Gus. This is dumb.

If you go take a look at route 95 coming north some morning, out near Occaquan. You’ll see environmentalists in hybrid vehicles, sweating it out in the traffic, every day, making their 40, 50, 60, and 70 mile commutes each way to their office, pleased that they are doing their part for global warming. The government even devotes special lanes on the highway to encourage this idiocy.

Why not change our behavior instead of dealing with the guilt? That would be a healthy, sustainable choice.

If you asked me to define green design, I would say that it’s a thing with a lot of lucre in it.

Matthew Arnold AIA