Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [119]
Now don’t get me wrong. It took a lot of work to create this: hundreds of hours of organizational and design meetings; compromise, patience, perseverance, tolerance, surrender, humility, and compassion in learning how to be flexible and how to live with other people. Visioning a goal for how we would like to live. Being creative in solving hundreds of small questions like “Can we have only one lawn-mower for eleven households?”
If you want to take on the challenge, you’re going to have to work for it. And as far as I’m concerned, that makes for a good life. If it were easy, I wouldn’t be forced to grow. Yes, it is harder (up front). It does take more effort. You do have to be extra creative, committed, and intelligent about how you live your life. And I choose to do it.
My clients come to me specifically because my firm is known for green design. We will work on anything—houses, schools, churches, offices, restaurants. I don’t believe there is a bad project. I would design a Walmart if they asked me. Why? Because I can make it as good as it can be. And the worse is it to begin with, the more opportunity there is to make it wonderful.
Ironically, Walmart, often cited as the epitome of environmentally evil business, is currently embarking on one of the largest and most complete green building ventures in the world. The only entity going bigger is China. The thing they have in common is their architect. No, not me. It’s a staggeringly inspiring fellow named William McDonough (co-author of the revolutionary book on responsible consumerism called Cradle to Cradle). He is the former Dean of the Architecture School of the University of Virginia, and his work has inspired a lot of what I do. In 1993 McDonough gave a speech to the American Institute of Architects here in Colorado. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone speak publicly about the moral imperative of sustainable design. Like the other four hundred people in the audience, I leapt out of my chair (I think I actually stood on it) and gave him a five-minute standing ovation at the conclusion. I got the gospel.
McDonough has few built projects to his name, and he is rarely the designer of the buildings he works on. He landed clients like Ford, Walmart, and China not because of a pretty portfolio, but because he was able to convince them that they could go green or they could go the way of the dinosaur. Did they change their ways out of the goodness of their hearts? Mmmmmm … who knows? But we can bet on the fact that survival is what inspired them to immediate action. What action? China hired McDonough to design a dozen completely sustainable, new prototype cities. Ford and Walmart are both undertaking worldwide green building initiatives of a colossal scale.
What did McDonough say that caused this quantum shift? Foremost, he showed the Chinese government and these transnational corporations that green is good for the long-term bottom line. For example, if you spend a bit more up front on an energy-efficient mechanical system, you will make that money back in energy savings each year. If you specify the “more expensive” non-toxic paints, natural ventilation, and good solar day-lighting in your office, you will have fewer sick days among employees, less staff turn-over, higher sales, and significantly better worker productivity (as governmental and private industry studies have demonstrated). And there are those indirect things that have a less obvious relationship: nuclear power seemed pretty cheap at first, but it doesn’t look quite so clever from a business perspective now that we’ve had to spend hundreds