Do We Really Still Not Know What Makes It Green?

First, the 411:
AIA Seattle’s annual What Makes It Green? awards event is this Tuesday, April 28th, 5 – 7pm at the Farestart Restaurant at 7th and Virginia. It will be a unique opportunity to view examples of the latest and best green design efforts in the region.

Second, the gratuitious rant:
Can we please, for the merciful love of the deity of your choice, move on from chattering endlessly about what is and isn’t green? Cause anybody with a pulse who’s paying the slightest bit of attention already knows. OK, so the What Makes It Green? competition is a good thing and doesn’t deserve snark, but something about that tag line question brings out the petulant bee-awtch in me — like a tipping point in a rising ocean of green cognitive dissonance.

Like most in the endless parade of green lectures and meetings in Seattle, the AIA event this Tuesday will be overflowing with big-brained folks who possess piles of knowledge, skills, and desire to make green development happen. But the vast a majority never get the opportunity to implement all their great ideas in real projects. And that is our integral predicament: we know what to do, but we’re not doing it. Green buildng is not a design problem or an engineering problem, it is a people problem — institutional, political, economic, cultural.

Take for example the new Weber Thompson HQ that has been piling up green design awards. The two key design features that make that building most exceptional — passive ventilation and daylighting — have been understood and practiced in buildings for millennia. It’s not the design that is the big mystery here. No, the mystery that we need to solve is why, given the dire need to make buildings more energy efficient, isn’t every new midrise office building being designed for no air-conditioning in a temperate climate like Seattle’s?

There is more processing power in an iPod than would be required to monitor and provide real-time optimization of energy use in a large building. So why is that most of our buildings are operated as if the integrated circuit had never been invented?

Over the past half century it has become blindingly obvious that the single most important strategy for greening cities is to reduce car dependence. So why is it that in the vast majority of Seattle, we still have laws that require on-site parking for development? And why is it that after Metro bus ridership has risen 20 percent over the past three years it now faces a 20 percent budget shortfall and has to go begging to the State for permission to establish new revenue sources, even as the State signs off on $2.4 billion for an underground bypass freeway for cars?

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is widely recognized to be a critical ingredient for sustainable growth in the Puget Sound region. So why is it that so little progress has been made in terms of planning for and establishing TOD at the new light rail stations in Seattle? And why such animosity towards our established policy experts in sustainable growth and urbanism when they propose policy to promote TOD at the State level where it actually would stand a chance of being effective?

It is not new information that sprawling development is destroying salmon habitat and creating massive runoff pollution in Puget Sound. So why is it that as you read these words, billions of dollars and the creative energies of millions of people are being directed towards creating the same formulaic combination of pavement and dispersed single-use buildings that we all know is killing the planet?

It is not, I am afraid, because we don’t know what makes it green.

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Ah well, that’s this world over
Ah well, next one begins
Ah well, that’s this world over
You sadly grin…

Will you tell them about that far off and mythical land
And how a child to the virgin came?
Will you tell them that the reason why we murdered
Everything upon the surface of the world
So we can stand right up and say we did it in his name?*

*This World Over lyrics by XTC, written in the context of the threat of nuclear war during the Reagan years, but the “ah well” sentiment nails what often seems to be the prevailing attitude today as well.