Building Green using LEED

The Audubon Center at Debs Park is a local Platinum LEED Zero Energy Building where local environmental and architectural organizations hold occasional meetings. North East Trees is an org that interfaces with Audubon.

This project is extracted from the Bulding Green database of buildings that actually meet the criteria after completion of construction. This is an excellent database for the LEED-compliant projects and the final level of achievement in conservation.

There are issues around LEED, of course, not only in the criteria (which is continually being updated), but in the new areas of liability that it can open up for professionals. Clients need to understand that LEED is a target, and that multi systems performance in a variable environment is not something that can be guaranteed.

Existing green: Decarbonization

How do we reconcile the issue of tremendous amounts of existing buildings and housing stock that must be modified to lessen their demands upon the environment and our resources?

The "Green Towers" movement in NYC has been going on since the mid-90's. The videos are here. In 2001 in NYC, the American Planning Association put on a "Green Towers" tour featuring the Audubon House by Croxton Associates (the first renovation case study) and their NRDC Headquarters, as well as the Four Times Square skyscraper by Fox and Fowle. These predated the City's innovative High Performance Building Guidelines (1999) which forged a new direction for sustainable building strategies in a highly dense, urban environment.

Now we see this movement becoming the new norm in the building community - Green Revolution Hits Existing Iconic Architecture, from Architecture World News:

According to the U.S Department of State, buildings account for an estimated 36 percent of overall energy use, 65 percent of electricity consumption, 30 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions and 12 percent of water use in America, exemplifying a major area of interest for ecologists.

“Architects are going to be an integral component of our efforts to decarbonise the built environment,” said John Alker, Public Affairs Manager, UK Green Building Council. “They should be absolutely central to major refurb projects in commercial buildings and will increasingly be of use on smaller developments including homes, especially social housing, given the scale of the carbon reductions needed and what that means for the fabric of the home, heating and cooling.

How Green is our City?

Image from Google Maps (satellite) - click on maps to enlarge

Image from NASA shuttle photo database

Opportunities for greening our city are endless, including water conservation, sustainability and urban forestry. What if cities stopped invading nature and nature starts invading cities? What if this became the new paradigm for commerce: such as is promoted by Paul Hawken in Ecology of Commerce. This means that business and processes produce growth and profit on the de-manufacture side as well as the manufacture side, just like the hedge funds do in either an up or down market. This allows human culture to complete the cycle, and prosper as it reduces the ecological burden and contributes to healthy ecological systems that promote all human well-being. "City of Gardens" then becomes far more than just an idealistic vision, it becomes an ecological reality.

Cato’s skeptic ads draw a flurry of responses

From Alternet: For the first time in scientific history, however, climate scientists have not only reached a near-unanimous consensus that human-made global warming threatens humanity, but have formed a global organization—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—to try and prevent it. Their most recent report states: "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal. Eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature [since 1850]. ... [Climate change], together with sea level rise, are expected to have mostly adverse effects on natural and human systems [including] ... increased risk of deaths, injuries and infectious, respiratory and skin diseases ... water and food-borne diseases; post traumatic stress disorders ... increased risk of deaths and injuries by drowning in floods; migration-related health effects." LA's "heat island" effect is discussed here.

See this article at Grist It talks about the capitalist system's denial of the consequences of unfettered growth and pollution.

A response to this - Regeneration, Not Recovery - emphasizes that the regeneration phase of the adaptive cycle on the environmental issues can begin to solve this as well as provide the payoff that capitalism is looking for. See the article here, by Chip Ward.

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Report from the World Water Forum, Istanbul, April 2009

(click on image to see source geotech article)

By Jeff Conant at Alternet:

If we learned anything from the World Water Forum it should be that the privatization model has failed and a grassroots movement is needed:

"On the last day of the Forum I spoke at length with a reporter from Agence France Press who had come to look for stories of appropriate technology and small-scale, community-driven development -- of rainwater catchment and ecological sanitation and village-level water purification and the revival of traditional water management strategies. He didn't find them. So I pointed him to Rajendra Singh, of Rajasthan, India, whose work with villagers over three decades brought seven rivers back to life. "We learned to value traditional knowledge," says Rajendra, "where knowledge is shared for the good of all people and not for the good of some people to keep others down. Knowledge of the land's contours, of the land's capacity to hold water, and of the people's capacity to manage it -- geo-cultural knowledge. So, we have revived seven rivers in Rajasthan with the participation of people who were thought of as poor, as illiterate -- and this not only brought the rivers back; it has brought back the meaning to their lives."

I've outlined a local strategy on my November post. This is a method implemented by strategies developed by North East Trees and the Green Street model.

Watersheds and a habitable planet

Dual LA and San Gabriel watershed basins - Due to pressures of urbanization both rivers have been highly modified with dams and concrete channeling resulting in a loss of habitat and human access to the rivers. Diversions of water for use in groundwater recharge, significant discharges of wastewaters including sewage treatment plant reclaimed waters, and non-point source contributions such as urban runoff have dramatically changed the natural hydrology of the rivers.

Watersheds sustain rivers and aquifers which sustain life, upon which human settlements rely. The issue is discussed at the International Rivers website, and centers on the impact of dams. The most recent resource information from them is as follows:

Track Major RIS Sites on Google Earth

Dams suspected of triggering earthquakes are strewn over all six continents. To learn about individual cases, see the website above and click on the individual pins for more info.

New Factsheet on Reservoir-Induced Seismicity

"A Faultline Runs Through It: Exposing the Hidden Dangers of Dam-Induced Earthquakes"

Besides posing a major risk to dams, scientists are increasingly certain that earthquakes can be triggered by the dams themselves. Globally, scientists believe that there are over 100 instances, strewn over six continents, of dam reservoirs inducing earthquakes. The most serious case could be the magnitude-7.9 Sichuan earthquake in China in May 2008, which some experts believe may have been induced by the Zipingpu Dam.

A re-formation

The global economic and environmental changes are swiftly altering our world in ways that we can't anticipate or plan for, so how can human society deal with these fundamental shifts? The way we inhabit our homes and cities will need to change from old patterns based on manufacture to a new pattern driven by efficient energy and denser urban core. Many ways exist for creating infrastructure that integrates multiple sustainable practices.. Atlantic author Richard Florida outlines a scenario by which the US (and the world) can reinvent its infrastructure to implement these new paradigms in urban design, capturing new opportunities for regeneration, growth and sustainability. This will have to address the issues of climate change, as well as completely change our destructive model of "growth", as pointed out by Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Thomas L. Friedman.

Patterns of energy capture follow not only urban needs, but also follow opportunities for capturing natural energy resources, such as solar power, for example, by appropriating unprotected Federal lands for use. Southern California has immense acreage of federal land, some of which is claimed by corporate entities for this purpose. Like the California water infrastructure, this creates a large footprint upon which the urban centers can draw. Like the old water rights claim system , this infrastructure is a patchwork of energy sources owned by the entities that file land claims, i.e., private profit from public lands (click on image to enlarge)


This new infrastructure interlaces with existing transportation infrastructure to create business opportunities, such as those outlined in Edison's Distribution and Logistics Profile (pdf file). Energy capture and distribution will align with existing systems while they create new nodes. In this manner, the entire system becomes more efficient and less wasteful. For this reason, it's vitally important to create more intelligent SYSTEMS that reinforce sustainable goals.