A Paler Shade of Green

Sustainability may be the cause du jour but it is no "Seven Simple Things" subject. What do we mean when we talk about "sustainable architecture"--about architecture that changes a polluted, eroding planet into a sustainable one? What, moreover, are we greening with our "green buildings?"

I am looking at the earnest work for sustainable architecture; I am studying the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) codes adopted by the enlightened. And I am wondering. I have seen Home Depot peddle new-growth-tree planks and visited Ford Motor Company's bed of native prairie blooms for its new digs even as it flogs its hottest sellers, the SUVs. And I cannot help but ask: what, in fact, is all this sustaining.

Understand, I fancy myself a green missionary. I sold my car. I live in a l9th century building with windows on two sides and low energy bills. I blue my life with energy-efficient compact fluorescent lights. I applaud the rise in energy-hoarding architecture, new and old. And, yet…excuse me if my use-it-up-wear-it-out-make-it-do-or-do-without New England origins are showing, but I cannot help but be dubious of the larger threats to the environment that so-called sustainable tactics STILL ignore.

One reason for my skepticism is a clipping on my desk showing the Sonoran Preserve Master Plan for Phoenix. It is a postcard pretty image. Cactus to the fore. Camelback mountain to the rear. Rocks posed to show their "good side." The image represents a prizewinning plan to control growth in outward-bound, sprawling Phoenix: the New West on Wheels.

"In an area where an acre of open desert land is cleared for development every hour," says the text, "this master plan presents a vision for setting aside 21,500 acres as public open space and wildlife habitat." For this "setting aside," the landscape architects won the President's Award of Excellence from the American Association of Landscape Architects. And, why not laud them?

The "why not" lies in the numbers. For, the 2l,500 acres supposedly secured in this master plan amount to less land than Phoenix loses to development in a scant three years. What good can that do when the larger land grab goes on?

Phoenix is not alone in such shortsightedness, of course, as Americans gallop across the last chance landscape causing 30 percent of global warming's CO2 with their car emissions and paving over of the planet. Consider a recent conference at Las Vegas Imperial Palace where a speaker told the federal Bureau of Land Management, (now ironically referring to itself as "The Open Space Agency") that the gambling mecca is chronically "undergolfed." Consider older metropolises where poor planning produces free-for-all home and road building consuming two-thirds of our energy, swallowing 400,000 acres of farmland and l00,000 acres of wetland a year.

In the hour it takes to read this issue, roughly 40 acres of undeveloped land will have gone under the bulldozers and backhoes. OKAY? As their grim landscape of the exit ramp advances, developers, designers, construction crews, manufacturers and bankers fill some 3 million acres of open space a year with some 2 million new homes.

Not that all our sincere recycling, our water-scrimping showers, our labors to cool this planet are futile. But such larger lapses raise the fundamental question of where and how--and, yes, whether--we should be building anew. Certainly we should not be scattering mega-subdivisions on our greenfields when 600,000 brownfields await restoration in the nation's most needy urban centers. Nor should we allow the development and road-building advanced by a $58-billion highway-based budget to split more neighborhoods, spit more carbon and suck more green space.

The vision of a sustainable planet, one where species (including the human one) can flourish while pollutants diminish, begins with the individual and the local. But, more than that, it requires planners and drafters who act not just locally, nor even globally, but regionally and nationally, too, to endure.

Green wave or not, this reckoning of a larger accountability is tough even for eco-architects and preservation-minded builders, for solar and photovoltaic creators, too. It's going against the grain even for popular do-good designers like architect Bill McDonough, who stirs audiences to environmental values, and wannabees like Fox & Fowle Architects, who wrap themselves in the mantle of "environmentally sensitive-design." It's tough, too, for environmentalists trying to make counter-culture changes in their lives and landscapes.

And, yet, it becomes more and more clear that only if they (or, more pro-actively, we) can become advocates on the larger political and planning scale--activists outside our newly-insulated sustainable front doorways--can we consider ourselves builders of a true sustainability, and not just hammer-wielders building little green islands in a sea of subdivided nature.

Jane Holtz Kay is architecture/planning critic for The Nation and author of Asphalt Nation, Preserving New England and Lost Boston. For more on the subject see www.janeholtzkay.com.

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