Research and Solutions: LEED-ing Away from Sustainability: Toward a Green Building System Using Nature's Design

Abstract

The only truly sustainable designs we know of—the flora and fauna of the Earth—are successful in their sustainability because they interact with the environment in holistic, integrative, and reductive ways. Conversely many of the current green building rating systems are structured to promote solutions that are iterative, dissective, and additive, inadvertently encouraging consumption over conservation. This outcome can often be traced to how the programs were initially conceived, that is, as a set of sections that make for sustainability, which are then filled with technologies and products to achieve that sustainability.

This result is exacerbated by the industry itself, where every manufacturer or subcontractor wants their environmental activity recognized with points toward green certification. An alternative conceptualization of a green building rating system might be primarily developed around overall designs rather than on discreet specifications. This alternative system might determine a buildings environmental responsibility through measures of overall resource consumption, such as volume and mass of structure per occupant, site distance from existing infrastructure, or regenerative connections of building systems with the environment.

Once these base design aspects are accounted for, the specifics of systems, products, and materials could be evaluated (with a much lower overall score percentage) toward the building's total environmental rating. In this way, green building rating systems might better promote the use of resources in designs that emulate natures holistic, integrative, and reductive processes.