Greening the Future
Course Correction for an Omni-lateral Sustainability
Jim Gleeson, AIA © 2009
Greening the future implies that what we should do and can do is actually
for the future and will positively effect and benefit future generations to the extent
we allow them to have the same natural resources we had and not less. This is in contrast to current “Green” efforts to market and produce “green” products and projects which
please ourselves and help to generate wealth and sales for today by improving efficiency. Am I condemning the current Green Movement? Of course not, but it is a rationalization to say that we are creating sustainability through “re-branding” our “growth” as “green” when we are actually not getting any closer to sustainability.
Pioneers in the Sustainability arena, an arena which didn’t exist until fifty years after
Buckminster Fuller put forth the idea and labeled our planet, “Spaceship Earth”, set out
in the nineties to bring attention to the growing need to think long-term about energy, health and resource use. The advent of the US Green Building Council and many, many other “Green” based organizations, has truly called attention to this need to focus
on energy and resource use. No one could deny that we have been wasting vast amounts of our resources compared to the savings we now know are possible through more holistic, integrated processes. The question is, “Can we create truly sustainable construction and manufacturing processes through efficiency alone?”
Perhaps we should start by clarifying the difference between “green” and “sustainable”.
“Green” is a term used to describe a host of strategies aimed at improving the efficiency
of resources or energy and the health characteristics of interior spaces or manufacturing processes. It does not signify arriving at a certain “state of green” or “state of sustainability” but is both a relative and unquantifiable term. Green Scoring tools attach arbitrary point values to combinations of strategies in order to grade the participants. There is no arrival point at a state of GREEN. “Sustainability” on the other hand strictly implies by definition a state of being or process which is able to be maintained indefinitely without causing a reduction in resources or a quality of life for future generations. We know the intended result (sustainable!) of any building or process we might call sustainable but we don’t yet know how to calculate, quantify or determine actual “sustainability”.
Our green building guidelines don’t even directly address Life-cycle Assessment (LCA) which is only one component of true sustainability. The life-cycle assessment method considers the air, water and solid waste pollution that is generated when raw materials
are extracted. It examines the energy used in the extraction of raw materials, and the pollution that results from manufacturing the product. It also accounts for environmental harm that might occur during the distribution and use of the product. Finally, LCA considers the solid and liquid wastes that enter the environment following final use of the product. As such, it has been far too complex to be widely useable and so is largely ignored. Hence there are many “green” materials and strategies which would likely be deemed “unsustainable” if LCA studies were done on them.
We only know that Green is somehow “good” and that we must move toward sustainability; that has gotten the ball rolling, but perhaps rolling down the wrong hill.
The Green movement in the
together on holistic processes which actually will change the future for the better.
Those that have actually worked together to produce a LEED Certified building which performed at the level of it’s projected goals, know that it was the cooperation and holistic planning that made it possible not the sophistication of the technologies available.
“Efficiency has long been a key element of the economic design for extending the growth system, and a major focus of the whole global competitive economy for many decades. So far it has had the effect that it would most certainly continue to have, i.e. working as intended to remove bottlenecks, and serving to multiply the consumption of everything else. That’s what efficiency in a growth system is used for. Pushing a system’s limits of efficiency also makes it much less adaptable and resilient to change.” Phil Henshaw, www.synapse9.com
Speaking on the reverse effects of efficiency and productivity, Mr Henshaw notes,
Efficiency and productivity enhancements are the popular strategies for promoting sustainability, but generally have the opposite accumulative effect in fact because of how we use them. It's both a "micro" and "macro" effect, of what we do with the resources "saved". We spend them on something else! If you make cars that use half the gas, "pushing to the limits" then gives you twice the cars, and the same dependency on foreign oil! The problem is with the plan to push the limits, rather than hold back from them, because it actually ends up pushing all our interests into conflict! That's why so many of our interests are coming into conflict. Increasing the effectiveness of talents and techniques saves resources locally, but in our culture that is used to multiply what we do globally. That's the problem. Saving waste locally and ends up multiplying waste and complications globally. It's an even bigger problem that we're relying on it as our primary sustainability strategy, and won't be solved without thinking it all the way through.
In 1866, William S. Jevons expressed it this way:
“An action taken to conserve resources reduces the cost of daily life to such an extent that entirely different kinds of environmental damage become affordable.”
Even more succinctly he states:
“It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”
I have seen estimates ranging from 2- 5 Earths being needed to provide the entire Earth’s population resources necessary to live at our current American lifestyle. Guess what? Everyone wants to live our lifestyle; AND these estimates don’t take into account population GROWTH.
Bucky Fuller used to say that the Creator put oil reserves on the Earth to give us easy but temporary access to energy while we learned how to harness the permanent forms of energy inherent in the wind, water and Sun. Oil is only the “primer” or as Mr. Fuller put it, “like the battery in your car… you wouldn’t expect to run your car very long on just the battery.”
So how do we “Green the Future”?
At the root of the issue is the reality that high-performance/high quality green construction/development is still high impact, if you are talking about impact on the Earth. Current “Green Development” is an oxymoron.
Everything now needs to be coordinated in a way that is very different from how it ever was before.
In Phil Henshaw’s words:
“In a growth environment having everyone become more productive and efficient is what promotes growth, as it always did. "Green design" is just improved technology with a new name. With the global plan to always push the limits no global relief of the limits results. Locally as you relieve pressure on one thing you remove constraints on using it. For a business, reducing unit costs is done in order to multiply the units produced, though, increasing rather than decreasing its total impact on the earth. That's what the curves all show, steadily improving technique with steadily multiplying impacts. One of those is improving our techniques for protecting human lives and welfare that increase population and the growing spiraling cost of resources for supporting people in the style they would like.
We're not confronting the real moral questions with that, and have not been adding up the totals. Our desire to be ever more 'productive', defining "good" as "more", is exactly how we got in our present crisis of dependency on high consumption and multiplying impacts. What we need is a complete switch from being "takers" to becoming "healers", but it's tricky to understand how, so we need to think it through. It's NOT so much a question of reducing your 'waste'. It's finding a way to relieve the urge for growth rather than satisfy it. We need a change of purpose in how we spend the savings that efficiencies and productivity create, understanding true effects, to find choices with our intended effect.
It's a profound error to think efficiencies in a growth system will reduce impacts, but it's nearly everyone's central sustainability plan.
Efficiencies that save you money leave you more to spend on other things, so without cutting back you get to use more. The solution is to make sure the impacts of your uses have your intended effect, figuring out how to use your taking for healing. How to do it is a learning process we have yet to attend to, though, and starts with studying the problem and remembering details of the world we've been skipping over... Your effect on the system is your ripple effect on others, so your way to change the loops is by changing the opportunity and signals offered to others, not by controlling their choices. It's a different approach.
The earth is a stable system and we need to begin becoming one too. “Growth” is an unstable system. Fixing the institutions we've built around it will require a change in perception perhaps as great as being born…. Still, its clear we need to make the Earth our home, not just our launch site!”
So where do we go from Here? Perhaps a Biblical perspective would be helpful.
From The
Public policies to combat exaggerated risks can dangerously delay or reverse the economic development necessary to improve not only human life but also human stewardship of the environment. The poor, who are most often citizens of developing nations, are often forced to suffer longer in poverty with its attendant high rates of malnutrition, disease and mortality; as a consequence, they are often the most injured by such misguided, though well-intended, policies.
From “A Comprehensive Torah-Based Approach to the Environment”:
“So we see that one extreme is to regard no sacrifice today as too much to impose upon ourselves to protect all future generations until the end of time. Had earlier generations followed this perverted logic, they might well have restricted the use of whale oil. One can imagine the decrees from zealous eighteenth-century environmental activists, banning the use of oil lamps past nine o’clock at night to ensure sufficient whale oil would remain to light the homes of the twenty-first century. In so doing, what they may well have effected is limiting the educational possibilities of the early scientists who studied and experimented late into the night to discover petroleum and its many uses.”
For sure what is needed at the least is a broad-based, inclusive, holistic viewpoint and a willingness to work TOGETHER to find appropriate directions for our future AND our children’s future.
Environmental Defense Fund:
Claims that fighting global warming will cripple the economy and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs are unfounded. In fact, companies that are already reducing their heat-trapping emissions have discovered that cutting pollution can save money. The cost of a comprehensive national greenhouse gas reduction program will depend on the precise emissions targets, the timing for the reductions and the means of implementation. An independent MIT study found that a modest cap-and-trade system would cost less than $20 per household annually and have no negative impact on employment.
Experience has shown that properly designed emissions trading programs can reduce compliance costs significantly compared with other regulatory approaches. For example, the
We need to know what they are using for a model. Who has a properly designed Cap and Trade Program? The European Union has yet to make it work:
Instead of being required to buy 100 per cent of their "carbon emission permits" in 2020, as proposed by the European Commission, heavy industries including cement, chemicals and steel will have to buy only 70 per cent.
Robin Webster, Friends of the Earth's climate campaigner, said: "This could have been one of the EU's finest moments, but once again short-sighted national self-interest has been put ahead of the long-term safety of the planet. Huge loopholes allow big energy users to carry on polluting."
Joris Den Blanken, a spokesman for Greenpeace EU, added: "At the time that the
football, in
The ambition of the Östergötland region to become green is reflected in the country at large. Between 1990 and 2006,
Under
In 2007
But developing a green economy is not only about saving the environment and meeting climate standards.
As stated earlier “greening” any process only works in an Omni-lateral framework and in an omni-lateral, consensus-based, all-stakeholders-represented-at-the-table, framework it can hardly fail- it has no one trying to sabotage it and everyone is playing a role.
Climate-Change/Global Warming Debate
We have movies of the very first airplane flight- that’s how recent it was. A wood and paper craft propelled down the beach by a sewing machine motor, with its pilot laying on the wing. Less than a hundred years later the space shuttle goes to outer space, docks with the international space station and returns to land on a runway not far from Kittyhawk.
If Wilber and Orville were alive today I’m not sure they would believe their eyes.
On June 26th 2009 Bertrand Piccard unveiled the Solar Impulse:
The Solar Impulse measures 211 feet from wingtip to wingtip and features four electric motors producing just 40 horsepower. The sleek aircraft has more than 11,000 photovoltaic cells, can fly to 27,000 feet and cruise at 45 mph day or night.
“Yesterday it was a dream. Today it is a plane. Tomorrow it will be an ambassador of renewable energy,” Piccard (pictured), the plane’s creator and pilot, said at a news conference at Duebendorf airfield near
Do we really doubt that in less than one hundred years we can and will be functioning on renewable energy? Do we need Cap and Trade to do it? Did we put a cap on automobile use to promote the airplane?
The real issue is not whether there is Global Warming or whether it is man-made. There are many good reasons to create a broad-based, consensus driven, holistic plan for becoming the first developed nation to transition from fossil fuel to clean, renewable energy. Half of the country won’t successfully force the other half to do it by penalizing parts of society and rewarding others in a complex, unfathomable forced march. It doesn’t matter which side is right and which side is wrong if the argument is over the wrong issue.
A vision for future climate change assessments
includes both sustained, extensive stakeholder
involvement, and targeted, scientifically rigorous
reports that address concerns in a timely fashion.
The value of stakeholder involvement includes
helping scientists understand what information
society wants and needs. In addition, the problem solving
abilities of stakeholders will be essential to
designing, initiating, and evaluating mitigation and
adaptation strategies and their interactions. The best
decisions about these strategies will come when
there is widespread understanding of the complex
issue of climate change – the science and its many implications for our nation.
How can this happen in our current polarized political culture? Our growth strategies must also be healing strategies. It costs much less to save a kw than to produce one (60% of the energy produced is wasted). It costs much less to save a gallon of water than to desalinate one. It costs less to produce buildings healthy to people than to care for the sick. Presumably it would cost less to transition to renewable energy than to fight the wars which will inevitable ensue from fighting over oil.
What we have to do is build consensus one step at a time. Create agreement on issues which affect us all. Would it be better long term, even for the CEO of Exxon and his children, if we were no longer dependant on foreign oil or even oil at all? The buggy manufacturers who were first to switch their production to automobile parts thrived. Would it be agreeable to all that more forests are better than less forests and we need to develop and produce non-virgin wood building products. Would it be better for municipalities if there were no polluted run-off flooding expensive storm water systems and causing the need for ever-expanding storm water and purification systems? Would it be better for people if they lived in well conceived environments which required very few vehicular trips to conduct communication-rich, healthy lives?
There are hundreds of questions like these that have viable solutions, given integrated,
holistic processes with lots of public-private partnerships. Sustainability is NOT a political issue. It is a fundamental issue that must be addressed as a nation and supported
by a partnership of science, private industry and government working together to create and follow a Sustainability Action Plan for the United States of America as an example to
the world.
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