Replacing LEED's heavy metals: Silver, Gold, Platinum

How can LEED hope to transform the building industry in an environmental mold if, to highlight the achievements of buildings, it relies on outmoded stores of value whose extraction and use does vast environmental and social harm: Silver, Gold and Platinum?

Those, of course, are the three top tiers of achievement for green buildings in the LEED Rating System. The lowest tier? Plain-vanilla "Certified." C'mon, USGBC, you couldn't pull out palladium or beryllium as a consolation prize? These tiers are also spreading a pox of heavy metals in the green building world. They've recently been spotted in the NSF-140 sustainable carpet program, and in the Cradle to Cradle (C2C) product certification program, whose founders, William McDonough, FAIA, and Michael Braungart, Ph.D., should know better.

Speaking of C2C, it was Braungart himself who suggested to me last year that there should be a more environmentally conscious tier system. His suggestion at the time was something like:

3) Microbe
2) Ant
1) Butterfly

I guess he likes insects and other creepy crawlies.

I've come up with a few ideas of my own, and please send me yours. The best ideas will be noted, with proper credit, in a future post on BuildingGreen.com. I'll also present them to USGBC.

The fundamental problem is that LEED is a point-driven, hierarchical system, and nature resists that. So we could go with:

3) Fox
2) Panda
1) Tiger

But what does that say about our sympathy for animals with faces, out of all of the species in the world? To put the lie to that focus, we could come up with a tier system just with mammals that have become globally extinct this decade:

3) Western black rhino
2) Pyrenean ibex
1) Miss Waldron's red colobus monkey

Or, how about a little reminder of what our future looks like if we don't change our environmentally destructive ways:

3) Tyrannosaurus rex
2) Brontosaurus
1) Stegosaurus

Or, from a more human perspective:

3) Jimi
2) Elvis
1) Tupac

I can see it now.... "We are pleased to award a LEED-Elvis certification to this new drug-treatment center."

In all seriousness, here is my suggestion for a system appropriate to my region (New England). These three species are found together in the same forest, with none "on top" of the hierarchy:

3) Hemlock
2) Beech
1) Maple

Sadly, all three are faced with threats of anthropogenic origin: the woolly adelgid, beech scale, and climate change, respectively.