To LEED or not to LEED

I think Jeremy Till brings up a critical issue in this week’s reading, Scarcity contra Austerity: that contemporary discourse fundamentally misunderstands sustainability as a problem of scarcity and using less. All too often, the market and general public champion LEED and other programs as solutions to all the environmental issues we face today. To me, LEED is America’s way of capitalizing on the sustainable movement; it seems innovative by focusing on passive strategies like natural ventilation, but really it’s just a watered-down, corporatized appropriation of environmental strategies that other cultures have been using for years.

His point of changing the way we think about sustainability reminded me of a talk we had in Barrios’ biomimicry class last semester. We often assume sustainability means shiny and high-tech, partly due to LEEDs ratings being associated with precious metals. Sustainable buildings have to be new, shiny, and clean and they have to perform better than standard building by using less. But shouldn’t sustainability and environmentalism be more closely associated with the thing they are trying to save: nature? In this class, we talked about how sustainability should shift from high-tech solutions that allow buildings to use less resources to changing the design process so that our way of thinking about the built environment aligns more with nature. Using biomimicry to draw inspiration from nature, buildings would mimic natural forms and processes to operate more in sync with the natural environment.

I think the idea of shifting the way we think about design as it relates to sustainability and the environment parallels Till’s claim that sustainability shouldn’t be about using less but about rethinking how we use what we have. Don’t get me wrong; I think LEED has noble intentions behind it. But I think it has developed as a reactive standard rather than a proactive process.