Sustainable Smackdown: Beyond LEED

Suzanne LaBarre wrote a snappy article on the “Living Building Challenge” (LBC) in the October 2009 issue of Metropolis magazine. She says that we should “think of the Living Building Challenge as a Port Huron Statement for the green age.” I had to look that one up on Wikipedia and found a tie-in to the University of Michigan as follows:
“The Port Huron Statement is the manifesto of the American student activist movement Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), written primarily by Tom Hayden, then the Field Secretary of SDS, and completed on June 15, 1962 at an SDS convention at what is now a state park in Lakeport, Mich., a community north of Port Huron[1]. It begins: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit…”
So it’s the radical voice of green building according to Suzanne whose “motto, “No credits, just prerequisites” rebukes the moderate incrementalism of LEED, which favors plaques and incentives of soup-to-nuts sustainability.”
The LBC may well pressure USGBC to “radicalize, effectively tamping the entire industry into smaller carbon footprints, one pretty little building at a time.” Ouch!
And further, LBC “turns architecture into a series of Carthusian statutues that no one, not even the most devout among us, could possible follow to a tee.” Huh? Back to Wikipedia where the site for Carthusian statues is a bit rough and reads in part:
“(The monks) follow their own Rule, called the Statutes, rather than the Rule of St Benedict (as is often erroneously reported) and combine eremitical and cenobetic (sp.) life."
I’ve been out of school for a long time, so it’s off to the dictionary for “eremitical” (like a hermit) and “cenobitic” (a member of a religious order living in a convent or community). Cool! LBC will make us all monks and nuns living in convents and following all sorts of neat rules and rituals!
So how far out does the radical voice of green building get? Well, the article is really about the Omega Center for Sustainable Living, “the newest addition to the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, a non-profit that is every bit as New Age as it sounds and wherer shape-shifting courses and “bootcamp for goddesses” do the work of its sunny mission: “awakening the best in the human spirit.”

There are 16 rigorous prerequisites and lots of inherent conflicts. You really need to read the article, if only to get to the part where the Omega therapeutic dance teacher has you “exhale out through your hands and feet today.” And don’t skip the very last line!