I couldn’t help but be struck by the oxymoron in a headline to an article entitled “More green buildings needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions” in the March 14th Kelowna Daily Courier. How could constructing more buildings, I asked myself, reduce carbon emissions? But then instead of just seeing the unintentional humour in the headline, it occurred to me that it totally captured the naïve folly of the green building movement. Green building is construction which increases the efficiency by which resources like energy, water, and materials are used while reducing the harmful impacts of such construction on the environment. But although green building methods do increase efficiencies and reduce harmful impacts, they are still a long way off from being sustainable as a sustainable activity is one that can continue indefinitely without doing damage. Take a green building technique like LEED certified construction, for example. Structures built to a LEED gold standard reduce the energy consumed by about 50% compared to a conventional building, but they still result in a net increase in the demand for energy as opposed to building nothing at all. And in a day and age when we can look forward to a time when there will be an insufficient amount of energy available to maintain our current lifestyles, any increase in energy demand is too much and is simply not sustainable. Although I applaud those who advocate more efficient buildings, I wonder if they aren’t also doing the public a disservice. This is because they proffer the deception, which is eagerly received by developers, builders, and others, that green building is a sustainable practice when in fact it is not. In that regard, those in our community such as our mayor who propose that rapid growth is acceptable as long as it is “green” growth are merely proposing a band-aid solution to our problems at a time when our city (and the world) is hemorrhaging to death.
Note: In an excellent article, Dr. Glen Barry exhorts us to look beyond attempts to greenwash growth and to get to the core of sustainability through the only genuine path — fewer people and less consumption. http://earthmeanders.blogspot.com/2008/01/time-to-stop-greenwashing.html
Tags: green building, green development, greenwash, sustainability
