What makes it green?

The fundamental, unanswered — perhaps unanswerable — question. And it's not just people new to the concept of "green" who are asking it as technology, information, and philosophy continue to evolve. "Green" seekers are all spread out on an incredibly wide path, and all are at different points along the way. At least most of them seem to be heading in more or less the same direction. One of the things we do as a public service at BuildingGreen is facilitate a couple email lists — greenbuilding (begun in 1996, it's hosted by REPP and we provide day-to-day management)... and focusing on large-scale projects, Big Green (begun in 1999, which we host and manage). Recently there was a thread on the greenbuilding list hashing over the basest definition of "green building." You can read it in the archives if you'd like. I posted the following, which appears to have been a thread-killer. But it feels like it's lacking something fundamental; what did I miss?

Here's what I've learned as an associate editor for BuildingGreen (publisher of Environmental Building News, which is now in its 17th year, predating the USGBC and LEED and even "green building" as a recognized movement); as co-editor of the GreenSpec database (online and in print); as co-editor of the book Green Building Products (now in its third edition); as products editor for GreenSource (the member publication of the USGBC, published by McGraw-Hill); as blah blah blah —

It comes down to this: What makes anything green is having any person (as often as not somebody in marketing) point at any given item or assembly of items and invoke the following incantation: "This is green." There are labeling programs, there are design guides, there are books, and there are endless opinions, but there's no universal law about what "green" is. Nor does any individual hold a universal definition of it. Is energy use reduction the most important aspect of green building? It's been argued on this list recently that to say so reveals a limited focus, that it's a distortion of the reality that green building is more than just energy efficiency... that a residence needs to also have low emissions and be happy-making and the like in order to be green. Well, sure. But there's a counterpoint: It can easily (and successfully) be argued that restricting the green baseline to what an individual residence has to be in order to be green is actually the far more egregious limited-focus distortion — one that fails to consider the global perspective. In the larger view — the other, possibly truer, more holistic view that sees the world at large rather than the world as a single-family dwelling (even though that's a really great analogy) — energy use reduction is the most imperative green thing to do. Yes, it's the first thing on the list. Other things are also important... but no amount of zero-VOC materials or design-for-spiritual-well-being is going to compensate for the effects that unchecked energy use has on the health and happy-making of our Earth.