Newsletter // GreenerBuildings News :: October 8, 2009 :: Reinventing Fire, Taking a Green Footstep, Tips for Healthier Buildings and More

As a season, autumn is the time of nature's preparation to renew or reinvent itself. It's also my favorite season. I love the colors, the smells, the intermingling of summer's warm, soft air with winter's steely crispness.

There is something anticipatory about the fall. Of course, there's the anticipation of winter with its brutal, brittle mettle-testing of all living creatures (at least in the latitudes farther north and south). But looking ahead even further to the spring, the groundwork of the past year's decayed and fallen biomass becomes fully realized in the season's new growth.  So for me, fall is about pure potential.

Now fall is also a time of turbulence and discomfort as our bodies adjust to their new thermal environment and as our circadian rhythms want to change . . . but can't due to the 24/7 clock of the modern world.

Much of the thrashing about I see in our economy, our politics and the building industry itself has to do with "reinvention pains." For quite some time, many of us who have been involved in the green/sustainability movement have been trying to realize the reinvention of a system that, while remarkably effective in doing what it did for the last 200+ years, had essentially run its course. Visions of such a future have been articulated by ahead-of-their-time visionaries (heretics?) such as Buckminster Fuller, yet connecting the dots between current and future realities is a game of centimeters.

The latest innovation coming from all-around genius and modern Renaissance Man Amory Lovins is Rocky Mountain Institute's "Reinventing Fire" program, which launched last weekend.

The sub-heading of the Reinventing Fire initiative is "driving the profitable transition from oil, coal, and ultimately gas to efficiency and renewables." So, RMI essentially is trying to overcome the 1900s mental model and its power system analog, which can be summed up as: "When in doubt, boil water." Whether it is the earliest version that used wood or coal, or the modern version that uses split atoms, or even the sun as the fuel source, the vast bulk of our energy services come from fire. And while this would continue to be true in a solar economy, at least the fire and associated emissions would not be of our own making (or undoing).

Also being reinvented is the notion of the cost-effectiveness of green. A study from the University of San Diego measured productivity increases of 1 percent or more in several hundred buildings, but the report did not get the attention it deserved, probably because it was launched in the middle of the Climate Week circus. 

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce may end up going through a forced reinvention after the exodus of many of its highest-profile members as a direct result of its position on climate.

Our economy is slowly getting reinvented as green and jobs find themselves in the same sentence more often as not as shown in the newly unveiled "Green-Collar Jobs: Realizing the Promise" report by the Sightline Institute. This report shows that for every dollar of investment, green jobs are 3 to 6 times more effective than fossil-fueled jobs, simply reconfirming that all sustainability is local.

More evidence that green is the new greed (and it's good) comes from the CERES-led lobbying effort to promote comprehensive energy and climate legislation (yes, Virginia, those federal dollars do go to pay people and don't just get buried in the back yard).

Finally, we may be getting some timely reinvention of basic health precautions, which in recent years seemed to have taken an "all germs are bad, so we must nuke them with antibiotics or alcohol/pesticide-based 'soaps.' "  Now that our infatuation with loading ourselves and our meat with antibiotics is producing "super-bugs" such as MRSA, we run the risk of making things worse in the name of staying healthy.

Please don't get me wrong . . . wash your hands . . . all the time.  Just stay away from washing with things that will only let the strongest, most lethal bugs live, because not only will your immune system become weaker, but everything trying to attack it will become strong and lethal-just like Eric Sevareid said: "The cause of problems is solutions."

To close, this week's Look-Grandpa-I-picked-up-the-$20-bill-you-said-was-fake-but-it's-real! award goes to the Sightline Institute for adding to the literature yet more evidence that even under Egonomics there's money and prosperity to be had in moving toward a green economy.

Rob Watson
Executive Editor, GreenerBuildings.com
You can reach Rob at rob.watson@greenerworldmedia.com or follow him on Twitter @KilrWat.

Researchers at the University of San Diego's Burnham-Moores Center for Real Estate and CB Richard Ellis find that people who work in green buildings are more productive and call in sick less often than employees who work in conventional buildings.
 

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