I am vice president of BuildingGreen, Inc., editor of Environmental Building News, and coeditor of the GreenSpec product directory. I also work with McGraw-Hill Construction on GreenSource magazine, which has earned me a spot on the masthead as executive editor. For the past 5 years I've chaired the Materials and Resources Technical Advisory Group (MR-TAG) for the LEED Rating System. I'm a LEED Faculty Member, which means that I get tapped to lead workshops on LEED (mostly LEED for New Construction and Major Renovations — LEED-NC — but occasionally others). Back in the 1990s I was a principal author of the Applications Reports for the AIA's Environmental Resource Guide that compares the environmental value of different building materials in various applications. I do some consulting and lecturing on sustainable design, with a particular focus on green materials. In addition to running LEED training workshops, I've taught seminars for various USGBC chapters, CSI chapters, state AIA chapters, and private architecture firms. I also serve on the U.S. team for Green Building Challenge, oversee BuildingGreen's management of the U.S. Department of Energy's High Performance Buildings Database project, and generally lead the content development team for Web and software resources at BuildingGreen.com.

Innovation point for the Hearst Tower in New York: reduced steel in the structure.

One way that teams are getting more sophisticated is in knowing which innovation points are the best bet. It's now well established, for example, that certain specific activities — like entering a case study in DOE's Database — earn you a relatively easy innovation point for "occupant education." To find that information, however, you had to talk to someone in the know, or dig through the online database of credit interpretation requests (CIRs). The scorecard that USGBC publishes listing the points each project has achieved identifies the innovation points by name, but it doesn't provide any details on what was done to achieve those points.

For years, designers have been pleading for a more accessible list of previously approved innovations. Why force everyone to reinvent the wheel? If the point of LEED is to help the industry as a whole innovate its way to greener buildings, shouldn't USGBC be doing all it can to share that information?

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So, this is it. The shoe has dropped. The Fourth (and final) Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is out, and people seem to be paying attention. It got prominant coverage in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and a zillion other places—would have had even more impact if it were not on a Saturday, but what can you do? Apparently emboldened by their shared Nobel Prize, the scientists on the Panel reportedly stood their ground against attacks from the big polluters (that's us, and China) and from Saudi Arabia. They released a final Synthesis Report and a Summary for Policy Makers that doesn't mince words in laying out the likely consequences of various levels of warming.

It's scary stuff. The warming has already started. Some more is inevitable. How much is hard to say. At low levels the impacts are severe, especially on those populations (both human and other) who can least afford to adapt. At higher levels predictions get fuzzy, because unforeseen secondary and tertiary effects of the phenomena that can be predicted could prove overwhelming. If the ice shelves in Greenland and Western Antarctica melt, all bets are off—the Panel won't even hazard a guess as to how much sea levels might rise.

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Mark posted earlier about David Eisenberg and his organization, DCAT, getting USGBC's Organization Excellence Leadership Award at Greenbuild 2007. David has certainly been a great friend and mentor to many of us here at BuildingGreen.

Personally, I have to say that no one has had more impact on my career in green building than Gail Lindsey (except, of course, BuildingGreen's fearless leader Alex). You can see a summary of her achievements in this online bio (PDF format).

Gail was recognized by USGBC for her role in creating Community, which is certainly apt. She has an amazing ability to make connections—between people, ideas, projects, you name it—everywhere she goes. In conversations about specific projects, whenever there is the suggestion that a choice has to be made between two competing possibilities, Gail speaks up as the "And Police"—not "this OR that" she says, but "this AND that". Nothing can be excluded in her holistic view of the world.

Another favorite inside joke is that when Gail is involved in structuring a document or event you always end up with five categories, no more and no less. Ever wonder why LEED has five topic areas? Because Gail was involved when LEED transitioned from an alphabetical list of credits to its current category structure.

Gail's influence on BuildingGreen, and on me in particular, has been nothing short of profound.

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Tuesday afternoon the Materials & Resources Technical Advisory Group (MR-TAG) for LEED hosted a public session for stakeholder input into the ongoing process of reevaluating LEED's certified wood and biobased products credits (see EBN Vol 15, No. 6). The MR-TAG, which I chair, had commissioned a team from Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Sylvatica to provide background research and tools to support the decision-making process. The Yale team posted its reports for expert review in mid-September, and stakeholders were invited to this forum to sound off about those documents before the MR-TAG uses them to form its recommendations.

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