If I could adopt a conference, it would be the USGBC Cascadia chapter's Living Future 'Unconference'. As someone who generally prefers to stay behind the scenes talking shop, it was a delight to find myself surrounded primarily by the obsessed of the green building world. Even better, as presenters we were encouraged to bring our own big challenges to the table and get attendees to help us address them — which is exactly what we and many other presenters did. (More about that later, I hope.)

First, this is the only conference I've been to where I left with less stuff than I started with! Yes, you could buy a conference T-shirt (lovely, organic, low-impact dyes, made in the USA), and I did get some green building playing cards, but there was no bag full of conference papers and booth swag. Instead, at registration we were each given a paper nametag and a single tri-fold with the conference schedule. For details, you had to wrest control of one of two computers hooked up to a screen set to scroll through sessions. I, of course, lost my tri-fold, and there didn't appear to be any spares.

Paul Hawken's keynote speech set the tone for the conference with kudos, encouragement, and warning for the audience; kudos for the work going on to transform the world for the better, encouragement that we are not alone (visually demonstrated with an endless scrolling list of nonprofits that can, by the way, all be found on WiserEarth) and a warning of radical changes to come that'll put green practitioners on the front-lines. "I just want to caution you. I think your star may rise faster than you'd want it to... I'm not saying this to flatter you. I'm saying this to warn you."

Read more...

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"Green buildings have captured the imagination of many in the mainstream, but for green professionals the time has come to stop designing for mere energy efficiency and start designing to regenerate and restore. And that means taking responsibility for what people do in buildings and communities after they are built." — www.greenmanifesto.org

Also from the website:

1. Communities are people, not buildings.
2. Communities will change when the people living in them change.
3. At least half of human impact on the planet comes from our lifestyles — the choices we make every day. Where, and how, we travel. What we eat. What we wear. The stuff we buy, and how we get rid of that stuff when we're done with it.
4. These lifestyle choices are not made in a vacuum. They are made in communities, and are indelibly influenced by community design and buildings.
5. The way we've designed our cities and buildings in the past has created a template for living that most people follow without much thought, and that template makes it very inconvenient to live sustainably.
6. Those of us who create and run the places we live in have tremendous influence to change this template, and and to make it easier for people to change their lifestyles.
7. Some of us have been pre-occupied with making buildings, streets, and infrastructure that use building materials, water, and energy in smarter ways. We call ourselves "green professionals." We call our movement the "green building movement." But we now recognize that the biggest problems are fundamentally social ones.
8. Since buildings and technology represent only half of the problem and half of the solution, clearly the present green building movement doesn't go far enough.
9. All across our cities, entrepreneurs and environmental groups are emerging with solutions to specific challenges of our unsustainable lifestyles — car-sharing companies, local food advocates, re-use innovators. But most of these green lifestyle initiatives are not joined up with the green building movement, or each other.
10. We urgently need an umbrella movement that will bring us all together to design, build, and operate truly sustainable communities with intent. The time has come to apply the vast ingenuity of the green building movement to making green lifestyles just as convenient as "grey lifestyles." The time has come to broaden our design teams, to bring green lifestyle experts to the table.
11. We cannot wait for someone else to bring us all together. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Read more. Take the pledge. Participate.

"Can a four-level house with a three-car garage and a kitchen full of energy-hungry Sub-Zero and Wolf appliances truly qualify as a model of environmental responsibility?

Photo by Douglas Healey for The New York Times

NRDC is trying to prove that it can, by applying for LEED certification."

NRDC?! The Natural Resources Defense Council?! Say it ain't so!

It ain't so. This NRDC is NRDC Residential — a division of the National Realty and Development Corporation.

Read the article in the New York Times.

The 96th annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) starts today in Houston, TX, and continues for the next three days. Chances are good that you're not there. Neither am I.

However, the conference proceedings — a tome titled Seeking the City: Visionaries on the Margins — is available. Now. To anybody. All 976 pages. Free.

There's a lot here to be interested in... from "Traveling Professions: How Local Contingencies Complicate Globalizing Tendencies in the Standardization of Architectural Practice" (which not a few of us probably think is a good thing), to "Freeze / Thaw: A Menacing Line and Humble Resistance," by way of "Architecture and the Cinematic Window: Hitchcock's Rear Window and the Fantasy Frame."

I haven't read it all. I think I can safely say that I'm not going to. But I've been happily picking and choosing my way through this big collection of unexpectedly diverse five- to ten-page papers, and it seems like there's going to be something rewarding, or at least sort of interesting, for just about everyone.

The current issue of Environmental Building News reports that PV prices have been going up, reversing the declining cost trend of previous years. Seems to be due to a combination of demand exceeding supply coupled with polysilicon shortages.

But PV is still part of the good answer. A few days ago, a report titled Emissions from Photovoltaic Life Cycles was released, authored by representatives from the PV Environmental Research Center of Brookhaven National Laboratory (New York), the Center for Life Cycle Analysis of Columbia University (New York), and the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development of Utrecht University (The Netherlands).

From the abstract:

"Based on PV production data of 2004–2006, this study presents the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, criteria pollutant emissions, and heavy metal emissions from four types of major commercial PV systems... Overall, all PV technologies generate far less life-cycle air emissions per GWh than conventional fossil-fuel-based electricity generation technologies."

For more, see Low Emissions, Quick Energy Payback for Thin-Film PV.

There are a growing number of green-product retailers, both online and in storefronts. We list some of those with a specialty focus in GreenSpec, but there are so many more popping up all the time. I visited one last weekend that's quite something — Home Green Home, in Ithaca, NY. While most green retailers are either boutique shops with small, unique items, or building supply outlets offering wall finishes, insulation, and sustainable-construction hard goods, Home Green Home has taken a more encompassing approach. "We try to cover every room in the house, including the garage and the patio," founder Joe Nolan said. The range of merchandise displayed in the large, spotless retail space extends from natural paints to locally-made quality furniture to nontoxic cleaning products to organic mattresses. Deliberate care is taken to offer the most deeply green options.

The seed for Home Green Home took root after Joe and Michelle Nolan built their beautiful, code-approved, timber-framed, straw-bale-insulated house a few years ago using local, salvaged, and earth-friendly materials and finishes. People were interested... came in droves to check it out... and were inspired and motivated by the possibilities they saw. A vision formed to provide the benefit of the all the research the Nolans poured into their own choices and actions, making it easier for others to implement the same sorts of green changes in their lives now.

Read more...

Press release:

U.S. Green Building Council to Co-Sponsor Nationwide Carbon Webcast Focusing on Global Climate Change

Face It Webcast to be Broadcast Live at 9:00 AM on January 30, 2008

Washington, DC (January 28, 2008) — The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) will co-sponsor a nationwide webcast on climate change, called Face It, hosted by Architecture 2030, a research organization that focuses on the role of buildings in global climate change. The educational webcast will cover Architecture 2030's approach to halt global warming and will unveil two new student competitions worth a total of $20,000 in prize money.

"Buildings account for 39% of all CO2 emissions in the U.S., and building green is an immediate and measurable solution to mitigating climate change," said Michelle Moore, Senior Vice President of Policy & Public Affairs, USGBC. "Educating the construction leaders of tomorrow is a core part of USGBC's mission, and our support of Architecture 2030 in this essential webcast is a critical part of that."

The Face It webcast will be broadcast live at www.architecture2030.org at 9:00 AM EST on January 30, 2008, with video available later for download on the site. This webcast kicks off the Focus the Nation simultaneous educational symposia to be held across the country on January 31, 2008. Focus the Nation is a national effort to engage students, faculty, administrators, citizens and government officials in discussions to address global warming.

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Notes from BuildingGreen's breakfast gathering at Greenbuild for partners and Sustainable Design Directors from forward-thinking firms around the U.S.

Overarching Issues
Several topics seemed to permeate the conversations among all of the breakfast attendees.
• Expanding the Reach of Green Design: Many attendees discussed how to get green design skills into the hands of more people in their firm, or how to bring these ideas to their interior designers, or even how to how to make relevant green product information available to their Asian-based design teams.
• Understanding Building Performance: This topic came up in several forms throughout breakfast. The contexts ranged from defining what metrics to track to how to share project performance information within each firm and among firms. Everyone was interested in learning how to tell when they'd gotten it right.
• Meeting the Architecture 2030 Challenge: This was the topic that we at BuildingGreen had brought to the breakfast, following pre-breakfast conversations with Charles Brown of sfL+a Architects and Kathy Wardle of Perkins + Will. The topic seemed to resonate on many levels with all of the breakfast attendees.

Read more...

Back on November 5, Nadav Malin posted here about "the imminent creation of the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI)." The USGBC is now distributing the following press release:

LEED AP Credential Now Administered Through GBCI.org

Over the last seven years, the LEED Professional Accreditation program has verified that more than 43,000 building professionals have an understanding of green building techniques, the LEED® Green Building Rating System™ and the certification process.

Now, with USGBC's enthusiastic backing, the LEED AP credential will be administered by a separately incorporated organization, the Green Building Certification Institute (GBCI). The formation of GBCI creates administrative independence between the LEED Rating Systems and the LEED AP credential — an important requirement in seeking accreditation for professional credentialing programs by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

USGBC will continue to handle development of the LEED Rating Systems and offer LEED-based education programs. GBCI will manage all aspects of the LEED Professional Accreditation program including exam development, registration and delivery.

Nothing will change for LEED Accredited Professionals except that the LEED AP Directory listing can now be updated at the GBCI Web site, www.gbci.org. GBCI.org is also the place to learn about LEED Professional Accreditation, register for the LEED AP Exam, find LEED Accredited Professionals in your area, and access your LEED AP exam records.

Visit GBCI today!