Rules, regulations, and the eco thing

I realize it’s lame of me to be several days late in noting an article in, of all venues, the New York Times Magazine. For whatever reason, I was a little slow to get to the “Eco-Tecture” issue from this past weekend, but was pretty interested in Nicolai Ouroussoff’s piece.

For one thing, I was glad to see that he specifically noted that there have been early waves of pop-culture eco-interest, but that (for whatever reason) it disappeared in the Reagan era:

In the late 1960s and ’70s, the Whole Earth Catalogue, with its D.I.Y. ethic and living-off-the-land know-how, encouraged a whole generation to dream of dropping off the grid. By the ’80s the green dream had faded somewhat.

More substantially, I was curious about his main point, which is that European architecture is far ahead of the U.S. in its “green”-ness. At least, he makes a pretty convincing case that this is so. And in explaining why, he basically says that European governments have imposed efficiency standards, and the U.S. government has not.

The United States has no federal regulations that would guarantee a minimal level of sustainability in new construction — or spur an ecologically attuned approach to new architecture. The LEED guidelines, which were drawn up by the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit group founded in 1993, are a voluntary program that is now more than a decade old. Even when they are adhered to — they’ve been adopted by a number of government agencies, most notably the General Services Administration, which oversees the construction of federal buildings — they still have little effect on the majority of commercial or residential construction. In most cases, the decision to make an efficient building still rests with the client.

Nobody likes to hear about government regulations as the solution to anything these days, and I’m sure that the various libertarian thought leaders out there have all taken shots at this and assured their followers that the profit motive conquers all, and rules would come at the expense of aesthetics and innovation, etc.

Sometimes, however, rules can inspire innovation, especially in creative fields. And on the aesthetic side, Ouroussoff not only doesn’t seem to see any problems with what rule-bound European architects have created, but indicates that they’ve moved beyond buildings that overtly look “green;” they just happen to fold efficiency into the creator’s other goals and vision.

One of the problems with the idea of eco-ness as a kind of feature that attracts supposedly trend-setting consumers is that it tends to stay too much front and center. Consider Ouroussoff’s critique of LEED standards, which have always struck me as a kind of marketing talking-point.

The guidelines often lead to a constricted idea of what sustainability means. “In Europe the guidelines tend to have to do with broader organizational ideas,” Thom Mayne, the founder of the Los Angeles-based architectural firm Morphosis, told me. “Energy consumption, the organization of the workplace, urbanism — they’re all seen as interlinked. Here, the whole focus is on how to get these points. You just check them off: bike racks, high-efficiency air-conditioning units.”

I don’t know if that’s fully accurate or hyperbole, but I found it pretty compelling. Here in Savannah, there’s a pro-green contingent that’s always talking about LEED certification. It sort of reminds me of schemes to “certify” various food products in various ways, culinating in a bright certificatoin logo, as a kind of competitive advantage at the retail shelf. The problem is, this reinforces the notion of ethics as a luxury, and makes the certified product almost certain to become a niche: People who care are attracted to this certification, people who don’t, aren’t. Wholesale change may occur eventually. But it may not.

Last night I went to a presentation unveiling the proposed new master plan for downtown development. One suggestion was offering financial incentives to builders and developers who choose to get LEED certification. That’s nice for possibly inspiring some piecemeal efficiency improvements. But I’m not so sure that’s the goal we should be aiming for.