Blinded by sustainability

Today it seems like the new fad is sustainability. With LEED and other certifications, architects are striving to make buildings more sustainable. However, what really is sustainable architecture? It seems to me like we get blinded by a focus on sustainability and lose sight of bigger things. We get caught up in making a building energy efficient, but forget about cost or other factors. We try to imitate nature, while destroying it in order to build our sustainable building. We focus on how to collect water, while ignoring the fact that we are using tons of unnecessary materials that will one day clog a landfill somewhere. We focus on using sustainable materials, but ignore the life-span of the material. Sustainability in order to be successful must focus on the whole building, materials, and processes. It cannot be focused on only one area of sustainability.