Bill Reed: Why LEED Certified Buildings Wont Save The World

Sustainability is not just about green buildings and carbon-neutral business practices. Bill Reed, co-founder of Integrative Design Collaborative, will tell you that. Hell also clue you in to what it is about: Re-addressing the system through natures patterns, admitting theres an awful lot we still dont know (and even more things that we dont know we dont know) and designing our living systems to be both energy-efficient AND good for our well-being. We were lucky enough to sit down with Bill, who will Emcee the inaugural EcoDistricts Summit in October, about his vision for a better designed future and what it will take to get us there. Social Enterprises: Can you give us some background on your work and why the EcoDistricts concept is exciting to you? Bill Reed: Ive been doing environmental work since the 1970s in passive solar energy, planning and architecture. From a building perspective, we were one of the early members of USGBC and founders of the LEED programwhich was meant to transform the marketplace. It was never meant to define what green buildings are. My lifes work has been a search for how we do green buildings and create a sustainable societybut as two separate initiatives. Green buildings do not make a sustainable planet. What Ive been doing is figuring out how we can integrate design and create integrated systems. SE: Is that similar to creating structures using bio-mimicry? BR: Bio-mimicry is about mimicking nature, but its not necessarily about integrating ourselves with nature. Integrated design takes into account multiple benefits from how all systems work together as wholeas an entire living organism. With building, you can either add parts to a structurefor instance you can add green attributes like sustainable paneling or efficient light bulbsbut that isnt how to make a building effectively green because its lacking a sophistication of integration. The most simple example is making insulated windows a part of a structure, which does allow you to reduce the size of the mechanical system needed to heat and cool a building. Now if you integrate those systems (the efficient windows and the mechanical heating/cooling system) together you can actually save money on a building. So instead of just adding green components, you actually have to look into how they work together. Thats the beginning step of integration. The next level is how humans are integrated with all life on Earthand the green building movement doesnt really talk too much about that. Thats why we have to get into community planningand thats why Im excited about EcoDistricts. Communities and/or watersheds of students of design can achieve a sustainable condition. Youre not going to make a green or sustainable planet with 100 million certified LEED Platinum buildings or 100 million living buildings. They dont make a green planet. They make buildings that are less damaging to the planet. But it doesnt heal the damage thats already been done or make things work together in a synchronistic way with the living systems that are exist all around us. Youve got to go a step further to get the results we need. SE: How do you see concepts like EcoDistricts, which are more focused on integrating systems into neighborhood scale projects, helping our cities be better at what they donot only retroactively, but in future city planning as well? BR: When we talk about EcoDistricts, what were really talking about is a community. What we need to figure out is what the smallest system is that we can activate all the attributes of sustainability withinfood, soil health, habitat health, watershed health, groundwater healthand still be self-sufficient. We have to define our terms. Theres no hard definition for an EcoDistrict or a place or a community, because all these systems are nested within one another. The work becomes about finding out how we work with complex, living, technical systems. How do we work with complex socio-ecological technical systems? This conference is an opportunity to explore that on a deeper level. One thing that is very important is the shift from working with pieces to working with patterns. You can glue all the pieces of sustainability in the world togetherenergy, water, infrastructure, transportation, socialand theyre still just pieces. Its like gluing Humpty Dumpty back together again. You cant really glue Humpty Dumpty back together again once hes shattered. The only thing you can do is to start overfrom a living systems perspectiveand begin a whole new chapter with a new egg. Its the living system that puts Humpty Dumpty back together. The thing isliving systems are incredibly complex. One reason we dont work with living systems very effectively is because we try to treat them as if theyre a technical system. If youll let me get a bit geeky here, Ill try to explain. Theres a difference between a closed system and an open system. A closed system is found in a watch or an automobile engine. You can map the way the pistons or gears work, and understand that system pretty easily. An open system, on the other hand, has multiple exchangeswhich makes it very complex to map. The issue comes when we try to impose closed system thinking to open, living analytic systems. You remember that PowerPoint slide on the War in Afghanistan that made the cover of the New York Times a couple of months ago? It became a joke, because it showed incredibly complex diagram of the war, and somebody made this PowerPoint slide with a bunch of arrows connecting all the issues. And it was so complex that you couldnt understand it. It was totally ineffective. Thats what we try to do with living systems. We try to draw all these arrows between pieces of them and it doesnt work. The only way to really understand complex, living systems is through the patterns of life. The opportunity for a community or an EcoDistrict is to begin to work from patterns, not just from pieces and technology.

One analogy to help explain natures patterns versus human technologyin other words, who we are versus what we areis in the way that we approach both types of placescommunities and EcoDistrictsby assembling a bunch of data together. Typically, we look at groundwater work, human systems, plant systems, animal systems, archeology, anthropology, infrastructure, carbon footprint, etc. We gather all that data and present it to you in a 3-5 foot tall stack and say: Heres the EcoDistrict youre working. But we cant understand it from that kind of data. That would be like me trying to understand you by describing what you look like. Lets assume that youve got dark hair, brown eyes; youre about yay tall and you weigh this many pounds. Thats you. Well we know that this information doesnt really describe you very well. What we really want to know is who you are, not what you are. We want to know what you are too, but who you are is more important. And the only way to tell who you are is to look at how you interacts in relationship to the multitude of people you come in contact withyour partner, colleague, kids, parents, work colleagues, me, the dog on the street, strangers. Those relationships are invisible. But we can characterize the multiplicity of invisible relationships by learning how you behave within those relationships. There is a certain core essence or pattern to how you live your life. So whats required for the community, city or EcoDistrict that were working with is to begin to work with who those places are, and how those complex relationships work. And when people begin to shift their understanding from sustainability just being about stuff and physical things, into an understanding that theyre a part of a living, complex systemthats the beginning of a truly sustainable condition for humanity. Remember Easter Island? That island in the Pacific where the human population went extinct? Well Easter Island was carbon neutral. Carbon neutrality had nothing to do with whether they thrived or not. The reason they went extinct is that they failed to understand the systems that were supporting their lives. The other half of sustainabilitybeyond the technologyis the ability to understand how life works. Theres a technical system half which includes LEED and Living Building Challenge. Then theres the living system half. This is the patterning half. The only way we can take advantage of the opportunity to weave those two halves together is to work at the scale of the community unit or EcoDistricts. SE: How do you think shifting our focus to working in micro-systems and in patterns translates into better, richer, fuller lives for people? Especially people around the world who might be living in a ghetto or a disadvantaged neighborhood who dont have access to the typical areas of development and gentrification? BR: Whats critical to understand here is that its very difficult to understand something until you live it. When we speak of a living system, we are speaking of it as a whole. That includes human beings and should address the quality of life for them as well as for the bacteria in the soil, plant habitat and animal habitat. Once people are engaged with how life works in a community, they begin to change themselves as a community. Thats been proven many times. Research done in the early 1980s on community gardens that sprung up all over Harlem on vacant lots shifted peoples sense of responsibility, care and love, if you will, for the place they lived. And it shifted how they valued themselves within that system. So this union of all life with humans is essential to understand. We arent separate from life. The question is: How do we start integrating ourselves again? When we treat life as abstractas something there to serve usthen we lose touch with what the meaning of life is. You know, the two fundamental criteria for lifebesides water, sun and soilare nutrition and shelter. Its sad, because the primary ways were destroying the Earth are through our shelter and agricultural systems. SE: Whats the value in gathering a small group of committed citizens, as Margaret Mead famously said, to tackle these issues? What do you hope to accomplish? BR: Hopefully we give people more than just talking points and provide them with an experience in a different way of thinking. We learned from an old Harvard study that if we talk to people we retain 10 percent of what weve heard. If we share ideas with people, we may retain 20-25 percent. If we exchange understanding, through dialogue, process and co-teaching, we might retain 40-50 percent. But if we create a developmental process, we retain 70 percent. Thats because a developmental process requires on us to acknowledge that we dont know all of what were doing and that we have to think deeply about our role in a given system. How were behaving. How we actually improve ourselves. Practicing development means were actually creating new potential. Were discovering and working at discovering new ideas. Hopefully at the EcoDistricts Summit we can share and exchange ideas and maybe do a bit of developmental work. But the best way is to actually practice something. To be on the ground and experience how things are working so that you internalize what happens. So whats the role of conferences? Its to expose people to new ideas and share experiences with them, so they can take them back and have the confidence to try things out on their own. SE: How is the future that you envision difference than the one we see today? What are some of the key elements we need to manifest to thrive? BR: The key element, to me, is that were humble enough to know that we dont know everything. And that we have the will to learn. If we could always be in that state of humility, wed have world peace in an instant. We know what we knowthats 5 percent. Maybe another 5 percent is that which we know we dont know. The remaining 90 percent is that which we dont know we dont know. If we could actually engage in and have time to exchange in a way that were able to discover ideas and systems were entirely unaware of right nowwell be in a great position to create positive change.

SE: Anything else to add before we wrap up? BR: I think Ive ended up launching into some pretty deep territory, but this is the situation were in today. Dealing with these issues of integration and patterning is where the sustainability movement needs to go. Im hoping that all the technologies and infrastructure were playing with will lead us to address those very pressing questions. In the context of this event, Im delighted that Portland is leading the way in looking at community in a much richer context. And everything that Ive spoken about today is not to say that all the technological work were doing is bad. It isnt and we absolutely need to do it. But its not the end game. Its an insufficient means to cover the whole story. Bill Reed is the Principle of Integrative Design Collaborative, Regenesis, Inc., and Delving Deeper. Hell also be Emcee at the inaugural EcoDistricts Summit put on by Portland Sustainability Institute, October 25-27, 2010, in Portland, Oregon. To learn more about the EcoDistricts Summit and to register, visit: http://www.ecodistrictssummit.com/register.html. To learn more Bill Reed and his firms, visit our speakers page: http://www.ecodistrictssummit.com/speakers.html.