The Empty Promise of Green Design

I hate catchphrases. I try to avoid using them because I find they obscure true meaning and are used as shields to hide behind. The worst offender these days is the term green. You won’t find me use the word green that much (except in this post) since I have grown weary of green washing, especially when the pretense of being green is used to justify design that otherwise just doesn’t make sense.

In the building industry, one of the pioneers of the greening of buildings is the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) which runs a certification program called Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). LEED tells us that a building that meets accumulates a certain number of points in a rating system based on green criteria is certified as a green building. This is a limited view of sustainability in my opinion because it is only qualifying as less bad. All of the LEED credits are based on the notion that if we are less bad then that is a sustainable path. This is the same theory that brought us the green hybrid cars and unfortunately it doesn’t hold up for either industry. Being less bad does not an angel make. The answer is not a better car or better buildings. The answer is a better system.

True Green = Stewardship

True green strategies add an additional criteria by which we can measure the sustainability of an endeavor. That criteria is stewardship. This means looking at a system comprehensively and making the choice that best accommodates all concerns.

The problem is that there needs to be an additional criteria added to the “less bad” checklist. This is a criteria that doesn’t fit well in a checklist because it is something that needs human thought. The criteria we need to use when evaluating projects is one of stewardship. We need to ask ourselves “Will this project make good use of our resources (including material, financial, and human resources)? Does this project make sense? Is this project sustainable from a macro perspective?” It is only through these deeper questions that we can determine true sustainability.