The Proximity of a Sustainable World
One of the oldest dreams of mankind is to find a dignity that might include all living things. And one of the greatest of human longings must be to bring such dignity to one's own dreams, for each to find his or her own life exemplary in some way. BARRY LOPEZ, ARCTIC DREAMS. 1986 In 2006, Paul Cherrett came from Four Seasons Resort in Jackson, Wyoming, to take over Aspen Skiing Company's hospitality programs, including the Little Nell. Cherrett, who grew up in Florida riding road bikes on the...
A Redneck Ten Commandments
Frank and forthright, brusque and loud, Jack is a classic Maine straight shooter even though he's from Illinois and was educated at Dartmouth. And maybe that's what we need most of all to complement our integrated processes and biomimicry and LEED and life-cycle analysis a painfully candid, redneck ten commandments of green building. 1. Don't bother with green building unless you have a committed owner, sufficient time, and a good project manager. 2. Focus on talent Hire the best goddamn...
Forgive Me Father I Dont Have the Money
As with everything in the sustainability business, the hurdles in the building process aren't technological. So what are they Often, it comes down to money. Here's a case study that illustrates the tensions that can arise between green champions and contractors The building is either in the design phase or designed and ready to go. The green champion says Look, I know your budget is fixed. But for just 10 percent more, spent now, for some better heating and cooling equipment, window upgrades,...
Energy Efficiency The Promise and the Challenge
Here's a funny truth by far the cheapest new source of energy supply isn't supply. It's energy savings, also known as energy efficiency, or what Amory Lovins calls negawatts. In short, energy saved through efficient lightbulbs, pumps, and motors, good building design, and refined industrial processes provides utilities with more available capacity for others who need it. So instead of building a new coal plant, many utilities can and do try to save energy first by distributing efficient...
Green Buildings Simple Elegant and Crucial
And the shadows filling up this land Are the ones I built with my own hand. EMMYLOU HARRIS, PRAYER IN OPEN D An architect in Santa Fe named Ed Mazria has convincingly argued that buildings or more broadly, architecture are responsible for almost half of global greenhouse gas emissions and that, as such, they are the key to solving the climate challenge. There are more than 130 million buildings in the United States. Almost all of them are on life support, like patients in intensive care....
The Issue with Tissue
While government action is crucial, some businesses are so big that their programs have the impact of government policies. Therefore, it's important to crack the whip on other businesses as well. In 2006, in response to a request from Forest Ethics, Aspen Skiing Company joined a Greenpeace-led boycott of Kimberly-Clark K-C paper products, including the legendary brand Kleenex. The concern about Kimberly-Clark was the company's use of paper and pulp from endangered ancient forests. Greenpeace's...
Finding Your Biggest Lever
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. I get a nightmarishly recurring call from businesses trying to go green, and it goes something like this I work with a hotel management group, property management firm, Fortune 500 business. . .fill in the blank . The caller wants to sit down and talk about how they could be greener. What do you mean by that I ask. You know, the caller says, recycled paper and stuff like that. Then I usually say...
Adam Palmer Another View from the Trenches
To understand the challenges facing green building so that we can do it better, we need to get even more granular than Anson's perspective. We need to know what the contractor is saying on the ground, day to day, on a green project. Adam Palmer is the guy to talk to about that. He runs the green building program of Eagle County, Colorado, and he's a true believer. He built his own house in super-green fashion, living the vision. In his midthirties, Adam was Vail Resorts' en vironmental...
Is Like Fighting Ali in His Prime
Ooooooookaaaaaaay. But . . . Sweet Jesus What do we do The prospect of trying to solve this problem is beyond daunting. It's as if you'd been invited to go into the ring with Muhammad Ali, in his prime, for a fifteen-round bout. The obvious response is No thanks. But with climate change, you have no choice someone has a gun to your head and you've got to fight. So what do you do One option would be to cower in the ring and let Ali pound you until you die of organ failure. But another approach...
A Silver Lining
Even though Anson failed with some trophy homes but not all he's got many successful projects completed or in progress , something interesting has happened to his business. It's not the very rich but the middle class, living downvalley from Aspen, who have taken on the idea of net-zero-energy and are implementing it, often investing what is a huge amount of cash relative to their net worth. And business is booming. Why is this happening with the middle class much more so than with the wealthy...
Time Is Running Out
One answer is that change takes time. The problem one of my mantras in this book is that we don't have time. To stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at twice preindustrial levels, we have to displace seven gigatons of CO2 a year. Buildings are a big part of that equation, and we have to cut those gigatons soon. In fact, we have to cut them now if we want to reduce emissions radically in the next decade. That's why the slow growth of the movement is alarming. We must look for ways...
The USGBC and LEED
The good news is that the idea if not the practice of green building has become understandable, even sexy, to the masses. For this, we have to thank Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, the flagship program of the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED is a certification program designed to rate a building's environmental performance. It provides a means for novices to create, understand, and certify buildings. It created a national standard for green buildings where none existed...
Why Is Green Building So Hard
Not long ago, an article in Colorado Company magazine highlighted the partners in Dorado Developments, a company that differentiates its business in one way It believes in nothing but green building. This was a wonderful story. But it brings up a question Why was this still a story at all Despite all the buzz surrounding green building, the massmarket building sector remains oblivious to the issue. Most of the structures in building magazines like Architectural Record and Architectural Digest...
Shameless SelfPromotion and Why It Matters
Those who tell the stories rule society. Climate change is the defining problem of our time. Even George Bush, who has long denied the problem or admitted the problem but denied the need to take action , started to come around He finally mentioned the words climate change in a State of the Union message in 2007 and organized a summit on the subject a year before he left office. Nothing came of it. The prime minister of Australia the only other major Western nation that didn't sign Kyoto was...
Scrapping the Easy Bake Oven
There is a children's toy called the Easy Bake oven those of you over thirty might remember it as the Betty Crocker oven. This device heats small pies and breads using a light-bulb. This was always confounding to me as a child. Why did this oven use a bulb, which was designed to give off light, as a source of heat The goal was to cook the food, not light it up. But the reality is this A lightbulb is a space heater that happens to give off light. And it works through a very roundabout approach...
LEED A Tool and an Obstacle
By 2005, if not earlier, LEED had become the last word on green building, and it is even more powerful today. That makes it even more imperative that the program work very, very well. For all the program's good qualities and all the improvements to it since its inception, there remain three outstanding challenges facing LEED today. Some of these problems would be endemic to any certification program, but they are worth discussing because green building is so important to the future of the...
Scrapping Biomimicry for Simplicity
LEED isn't the only thing that contributes to the notion that green building is some sort of secret language. One annoying school of obfuscation that has evolved in the green building community is called biomimicry, the idea that buildings should be modeled on natural systems. Nature has done millions of years of research, the argument goes, so why not tap into that If we could only learn how spiders make thread stronger than steel at room temperature, or how clams make ceramic at ocean...
The Scale of the Climate Crisis
Fortunately, by now most Americans, and most government leaders, understand that climate change is not just a liberal myth but in fact a major threat to civilization. Yet despite the mind-boggling amount of scientific data detailing exactly what's happening, the scope of the problem remains astounding. If the IPCC report I mentioned in chapter 1 wasn't enough to set your clothes on fire, James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists and the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for...
Sustainable Sustainability Creating Lasting Change
When you walk into a public bathroom, the door almost always swings in, meaning you don't have to touch the nasty, germ-infested handle you can open the door like a waiter, with your foot or shoulder. On the way out, though, you can't avoid it. But that doesn't make sense. You want to be able to exit the bathroom with clean hands . . . and we don't want people with dirty hands contaminating the doorknob for everyone else. Why don't public bathroom doors have the handles on the outside And many...
Aspen Skiing Companys Vision
The restaurant lighting story might lead you to believe that Aspen Skiing Company isn't all that progressive or may not really care very much about the environment and climate. But that's not true. Aspen Skiing Company's environmental mandate is ingrained in the culture. We have a unique set of guiding principles that steer the company, and one of those principles is stewardship of our mountain environment. This may sound froofy so Aspen , but employees can and do slap the principles down on...