A multi-year drought from 2000 to 2004 that lowered crop productivity and reduced water levels across western North America may become "the new normal" over the next century as the climate warms, a new study says.

Photo by Patrick Emersonflickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

By Verlyn Klinkenborg

A recent study noted that most of the 6,900 languages spoken on Earth occur in regions of high biodiversity. These findings point to a strong correlation between biological and linguistic diversity, with languages closely connected to the habitats where they are found.

Like many people, I've spent a lot of time thinking about - and mourning - the cascading extinction of species caused by human activity. But only recently has it occurred to me to frame it this way: Humans have lived past the peak of biological diversity on this planet. There may well be other, higher peaks of biodiversity after we're gone, but the best I can imagine as long as we're around is a slight decline in the calamitous rate of extinction.

As it happens, we've also lived past the peak of linguistic diversity - the number of different human languages spoken on this planet. The loss would be more evident if each of this planet's nearly 7,000 human languages was spoken by a separate species - one species per language. But losing language is as human as using language. After all, we live in a country where, for the past two and a half centuries, people have come to abandon their ancestral tongues in the second generation after arrival - a country where most of the aboriginal languages had long since been destroyed.

According to a recent study, there is a close correlation between biological diversity and linguistic diversity. A biological hotspot is likely to be a linguistic hotspot. Put simply, there are more human languages where there are more species. "Of the 6,900 languages currently spoken on Earth," the authors write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, "more than 4,800 occur in regions containing high biodiversity." The corollary? Most of those languages are threatened. Nearly 60 percent of the languages in high biodiversity regions, like Amazonia and the lowland forests of West Africa, are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people; more than 1,200 of those languages are spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. Every language is a species, but most languages are also habitats, linked closely to the physical habitats in which they occur.

Human languages evolve far more quickly than the single species - Homo sapiens - that speaks them. And languages speciate for some of the same reasons that organisms do - topographic separation, for instance. A good example is New Guinea, which is as rich in linguistic species (972 endemic languages) as it is in biological species. Topographically speaking, New Guinea is famously difficult, a torturous landscape that isolates humans as well as other species.

It's tempting to assume that the correlation between biological and linguistic diversity is functionally negative. In other words, high linguistic diversity occurs where the conditions of biological diversity - dense forests, harsh terrain, and other barriers, like disease - force small human societies to remain separate. But there's another way to think of it. What if the correlation is functionally positive? Instead of merely forcing linguistic diversity, high biological diversity also affords linguistic diversity. The richness of one sustains the richness of the other.

There's something curious and unsettling in all of this. It seems odd to think that such a pure and somehow abstract extension of humanness as language itself (apart from mere vocabulary) is so niched, so profusely and divergently rooted in the natural world. A universally shared language seems like a universal good. But most languages spoken by small numbers of humans in regions of high biodiversity do not and will not survive extended contact with widely-spoken languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. No matter how desirable it may seem, a universal language is a bulldozer with measles.

I think we inevitably underestimate the bond between biological complexity and cultural complexity. Let me turn to a landscape I know far better than the jungles and mountain ridges of New Guinea: northwestern Iowa.

Within my lifetime, the cultural and biological complexity of rural Iowa has declined precipitously. What underlies both kinds of loss is the decline in the number of farms. Modern farming is a way of spreading vacancy. The farms grow bigger and bigger - declining in number - and fewer and fewer people live on them. This has been accompanied, in Iowa, by a decline in the biological diversity of the farm itself. In most of the state, there are now only soybeans, corn, chickens and hogs, a huge change from even 50 years ago.

This much is easy to see. But so is the loss of cultural complexity. The way to measure that is to ask as many good questions about the components of social and cultural texture as you can. What kinds of questions would you ask to get at the diversity, the complexity of a small town? Some are fairly obvious. How many independent banks are there? How many independent grain elevators? How many independent slaughterhouses? Creameries? Grocery stores? How many farm implement and auto dealerships? How many butchers and livestock breeders? How many farmers sold milk and eggs in town? How many entries were there in the county fairs?

But these are really technical and economic questions. So let's consider some others. What percentage of the children learned how to play a musical instrument? How many amateur theatrical societies and singing clubs - even small-town opera houses - were there? How many softball teams? What about sewing circles and baling rings and card clubs?

All these questions point in one direction. With the decrease in biological complexity - the regression to corn and soybeans - came a decrease in social and cultural complexity. The farmscape emptied and the towns became ghosts of themselves. You might argue that the one didn't directly and necessarily cause the other: in other words, if most of the 203,000 farms that existed in Iowa when I was born (1952) suddenly switched to growing only corn and soybeans, that wouldn't necessarily have reduced the population and complexity of the countryside. But the fact is that Iowa did switch to corn and soybeans and when it was done, fewer than 90,000 farms remained. Not many people live on 90,000 farms.

It may seem far-fetched to compare social and agricultural change in Iowa with linguistic and biological correlation in some of Earth's biodiversity hotspots. But the underlying premise is the same. Biological diversity and cultural diversity go hand in hand.

This is a hard idea to absorb for the simple reason that humans, in our pride, have always assumed that cultural diversity (and complexity) is the result of who we are, not what nature has made of us and we have made of nature. We still believe fiercely, against all the evidence, that we are independent of most other species. And we still believe fiercely that the habitat that matters most is the one we create. We could not be more mistaken.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Guy Champniss

I am not sure the dots are being connected. In fact, I think there are more dots being added (rather than lines between them) -- and they're being added farther and farther apart.

I'm talking about the link between sustainability and CSR, and the marketing and brand teams.

At a structural level, new research by GlobeScan and BSR highlights how little contact brand and marketing teams have with the CSR and sustainability folks in large businesses. As obvious as it may sound, if you're not talking to each other, then you cannot listen to each other, and you certainly cannot spark off each other to create great ideas that lead to engaging experiences farther afield.

Consumers Want the Experience of Sustainability

It's fair to say that for consumers, it really is all about experiences today. Where once it may have been about ubiquity of product, then about price, and then about service, now it's about experience. That should be music to most marketers' ears, as experiences always outrun transactions, and present far better opportunities for consumers to get closer to other consumers, and to get closer to the brand.

They are also driven far more by emotion than rational assessment -- which should be another check mark on the right side of the table for what brands want in their relationships, both internal and external.

Report the Drama, Not the Documentary

With that in mind, on the few occasions when brand and marketing do talk to CSR and sustainability, why is the output so typically data-driven? Why do both sides reduce the most important -- the most strategic -- conversation for businesses today to an almost Morse-code like tap of information for consumers?

While the reasons for this are many and complex - and beyond the scope or point of this blog post - this still represents the dominant approach at most organizations. Discounting the rare exceptions, we're still very much in the realm of what we could call 'reporting the documentary'.

Yet ironically, brands are far better at producing drama.

In previous posts, I've often talked about a unifying, central concept that underpins the brand in a broader social context -- what we call the brand's Social Signature. The Social Signature tries to capture the little bit of code that presents an opportunity for the brand to not just engage around one type of value for the consumer, but all forms of value for all stakeholders.

It tries to surface the greater potential of the brand to create distinct but interlocking forms of immediate and embedded value for consumers, employees and civil society (leading to more value for shareholders).

The Social Signature: Connecting the Dots of the Sustainability Story

In some cases, this idea of a Social Signature captures people's imagination, drives the process towards uncovering core insights, and galvanizes action towards a common goal -- common to both the brand and sustainability teams.

But in others, people wonder what it has to do with CSR at all.

They worry that if they're not reporting on what's happening in the supply chain, or they're not remaining focused on a cause-related campaign, then it doesn't really fall under CSR and sustainability. If we lose sight of the seriousness of the issue, we're no longer trying to solve it.

I think that is wrong. This is where the dots are being missed.

If CSR and sustainability are to be central to a business's strategy, then there has to be an abandonment of this positive discrimination towards these areas. Just because the issues and consequences are potentially dire, it doesn't mean these apocalyptic outcomes need to be coded into the minutiae of data-driven brand communications.

And that's the whole point of the Social Signature idea -- to help a brand see beyond this granularity, and think how to address a more fundamental social tension -- a tension that if removed, could deliver a quantum leap forward in CSR and sustainability terms.

The Social Signature model asks brands and CSR teams not to think literally about how to work together. It asks that we think laterally about how to build together.

Use Big Ideas Built on Solid Ideals

For me, some of the most effective CSR and sustainability campaigns don't even use these words. Think about VW's Fun Theory campaign, or Toyota's Ideas for Good. These are initiatives that have made stronger and permanent inroads into social improvement than arguably any traditional CSR-led campaign.

The most powerful route to really engaging brand, marketing, CSR and sustainability lies in inclusive social marketing campaigns -- big ideas built on solid ideals, driven by authentic ambition.

As an example, I was recently invited to speak at a conference for a global leader in the beauty and personal care sector. Despite a real interest and commitment from them to embed CSR and sustainability into the core of the business, when it came to conversations about marketing and communication, it proved very difficult to convince the room that the brand's most compelling contribution to the wider debate could be around making sustainable lifestyles: aspirational, hopeful, social and beautiful.

This was the social tension that was missing -- that society knows what the bad stuff looks like, but not what the good stuff could look like -- and that through a clear expression of their Social Signature, they could potentially lead on.

To get to these insights is certainly easier said than done, I understand. But there needs to be an appetite to embark on these journeys. And this hunger requires one founding 'eureka' moment within the business.

Discover Your Brand Value Principles

For CSR and sustainability to really take root within the core of the business, and for the brand to really deliver enduring multifaceted value to all with whom it comes into contact, we need to recognize this: it's no longer about refining your brand value proposition (to be sold). It's about discovering your brand value principles (to be shared).

If we get this right, the brand is unleashed as a value driver, and sustainability will finally have the opportunity to emerge as a charismatic natural outcome, rather than be seen as a curmudgeonly spanner in the cogs of the communications machine.

Photo by Curran Kelleher/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from CSRwire

by Peter Asmus

Recently I had the chance to tour the Island of Alcatraz, once the site of one of America's most famous prisons. The prison was closed in 1963 due to the high cost of maintenance in such a remote location, but it remains a top tourist destination.

My justification for this junket was an invitation from Princeton Power Systems, a smart inverter company based in Princeton, New Jersey, whose technology forms the backbone of a microgrid installed on Alcatraz with the help of federal government stimulus and which began operation earlier this year.

An inverter converts direct current (DC) from generation sources to alternating current (AC), at the voltage and frequency required by utility distribution companies (i.e., 60 hertz). Recent advances in inverters for solar photovoltaics (PV) and small wind turbines are setting the stage for a viable microgrid market to evolve. New inverters allow for safe islanding - i.e., the creation of small distribution systems cut off from the larger power grid. When connected to the larger grid, inverters enable distributed renewable resources, such as solar PV, to continue to operate when the larger grid goes down, thus avoiding the feeder fault concerns associated with synchronous generators, which may take 2, 5, or even 10 seconds to respond to a grid outage. (Pike Research's new report, Inverters for Renewable Energy Applications, forecasts that the total inverter market will surpass $4 billion in global revenues by 2018.)

In the case of Alcatraz, access to Pacific Gas & Electric's electric grid was severed several years ago when a ship's anchor accidentally cut the transmission line from mainland San Francisco. As a result, diesel generators were installed to provide on-site power. However, as the price of diesel began to climb, and the cost of solar PV fell, developing a state-of-the-art microgrid appeared attractive.

On the day I visited, unfortunately, none of the nearly 1,000 highly efficient SunPower solar panels were working because a switch had failed. So the entire island was still running on diesel generation, with back-up being provided by banks of lead acid batteries. Of course, that's the beauty of a microgrid: a diversity of resources can run together or serve as back-up to each other.

I learned a lot about the nitty-gritty issues of trying to build a microgrid on a windswept island. For one, construction of the microgrid was delayed several times due to regulations protecting bird breeding activities, which limited the use of light and sound during a three-week period. Along with these environmental factors come the quirks associated with preserving historical artifacts, which include rusting (and useless) water and fuel pipes as well as a hole in the roof.

The most persistent issue facing the microgrid, though, revolves around the birds. Though naturalists initially worried that the solar PV panels that cover the roof would scare away birds, gulls have actually found them quite appealing. In fact, they sometimes nest under the panels. Unfortunately, they tend to leave behind their waste, which degrades performance and requires an ongoing, and messy, maintenance task. Kept clean, the solar PV panels can meet the entire island's power supply, even during San Francisco's famous fog, which reduces potential output by more than half.

Beyond the Alcatraz project, Princeton Power Systems has three other microgrids up and running in San Diego, Texas and Missouri. The company offers 10 kilowatt and 100 kilowatt versions of its "DR Inverter," which accepts four connections to and from power loads (two AC and two DC). The inverter is designed to sell stored solar energy into the burgeoning U.S. market for demand response revenue streams being authorized by grid operators in response to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Order 745. Funded in part by the Department of Energy, PPS's technology aims to make solar PV more competitive by capturing new revenue streams. The firm was in San Francisco at the Intersolar North America conference to showcase this new commercial product.

Two US electric vehicle charging companies are merging to create the nation's largest public charging network with more than 1,000 locations.

Car Charging Group Inc. (OTCBB:CCGI), which has a strong municipal foothold in locations such as Chicago, plans to acquire 350Green, which is allied with Simon Property Group, the largest US real estate investment trust.

The merger will expand CarCharging's reach in one of the fastest growing US electric vehicle markets, California. It will also solidify its foothold at shopping malls: CarCharging will have contracts with almost every major US mall operator thanks to 350Green's relationship with Simon Property.

Both companies offer turnkey installation and management services for commercial and municipal organizations deploying public charging infrastructure. And Car Charging Group has filed two patents which could "dematerialize" the charging process.

Terms haven't been disclosed, and the transaction is subject to regulatory review. Once approved, the deal will close in 30-75 days.

"Adding 600 EV charging stations in 20 markets to CarCharging's network will create the most robust network in the nation," says Mariana Gerzanych, CEO of 350Green. "This partnership will be highly advantageous to the EV charging industry and will contribute significantly to the overall growth of the market."

CarCharging's customers include the nation's parking garage operators including Central Parking and Ace Parking; drug store chain Walgreens (also a 350Green customer); Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection; City of Miami Beach, City of West Palm Beach, and the City of Norwalk, Connecticut. These organizations manage or own more than 6.4 million parking spaces.

350Green has projects with several hundred chargers underway in Chicago, the State of Pennsylvania, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The biggest worldwide player in electric vehicles is Coulomb Technologies, which supports more than 6,900 locations. Other leaders are Better Place, ECOtality Inc. (NASDAQ: ECTY) and NRG Energy (NYSE: NRG).

GE also seeks to be a major contender with WattStation, which has been installed in several thousand locations worldwide. In early July, GE forged an exclusive relationship with PayPal to make it simple for drivers to charge up via mobile phones.

Here is CarCharging's website:

Website: http://www.carcharging.com/

Photo by Portland General Electric/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from SustainableBusiness.com

By Roger Cohn

At the Rio+20 conference this week, conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy received the prestigious Blue Planet Prize. Before traveling to Brazil, Lovejoy talked with Yale Environment 360 about the loss of biodiversity and about whether it is too late for the world to do something about it.

For decades, conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy has repeatedly warned - sometimes in dire terms - about the loss of biodiversity. But Lovejoy, who this week was awarded the prestigious Blue Planet Prize, remains an optimist.

"There is no point in being unduly pessimistic, because that just guarantees all the bad things will happen," says Lovejoy, who received the international environmental prize at the Rio+20 summit. Currently a professor at George Mason University, Lovejoy has worked since 1965 in the Brazilian Amazon, where he has helped lead one of the world's largest and longest-running field experiments, studying the impacts of habitat fragmentation. Credited with introducing the term "biological diversity" to the scientific community, Lovejoy has spent his career promoting it, with stints at the Smithsonian Institution and the World Wildlife Fund.

Before heading to Brazil for Rio+20, Lovejoy sat down with Yale Environment 360 editor Roger Cohn and talked about the multi-pronged threats to biodiversity, from habitat loss to climate change; the potential impact of major dam projects and other planned development on the Amazon; and why he supports market-based conservation schemes that provide benefits to local residents.

On the need for a global effort to promote biodiversity, Lovejoy says, "I go to sleep at night almost praying that there will be a bolt of awareness, and then we can move forward."

Yale Environment 360: It has been 20 years since the first Rio summit, and now you're heading back for another international environmental conference, Rio+20. How do you feel about the progress, or lack of progress, on the issue of biodiversity loss in the last 20 years?

Thomas Lovejoy: Anybody who just looks at the facts will know that basically the entire global effort combined has failed to reach the scale it should have. There were some initial goals set out at Rio+10 and at the last meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Japan [in 2010]. But not a single nation has met their goal, and global extinction rates are probably a thousand times the norm. And we are beginning to see some really major things, like what climate change is doing to coral reefs...

Hopefully, the countries can really make a much bigger effort coming along. But it is not pretty.

e360: The U.S. was one of the few developed countries to not ratify that [1992 Rio] convention on biodiversity, right?

Lovejoy: This is correct. The United States signed, but did not ratify. And there were some strange politics that went on influencing the Senate in the first two years of the Clinton administration, which by the time it was sorted out, the control of the Congress had changed, and the U.S. has never found a way to go back to looking at formally ratifying. However, it does have to be said that U.S. policy is to behave as if the country had ratified [the convention]. So we are not a totally bad actor.

e360: But why isn't the issue of biodiversity more front and center when it comes to talking about environmental issues in this country? It doesn't seem to be. Do you agree that's true?

Lovejoy: I think it is true. I think actually most environmental awareness has subsided in this country. And biodiversity is mostly seen as an endangered species issue, even though that is really just the tip of the iceberg, or the eco-iceberg [laughs]. And I think it also relates to a complacence in this country about the state of the environment and the de-validation of science as being important in the public debate and discourse. And so things like biodiversity just get shunted to the sidelines.

e360: You are actually credited with coining the word "biodiversity," and now we find there are numerous threats to biodiversity from climate change to deforestation to habitat loss and more. What do you see, currently, as the greatest threat to biodiversity - if you had to pick one issue, one concern?

Lovejoy: That is a very hard question to answer because I don't think we have great metrics on all of these things. Globally, habitat destruction is probably still number one. Invasive species is edging it out. Unknown is the impact of the tens of thousands of man-made chemicals that basically have created this chemical soup we are all living in whether we are a whale or a human being.

And climate change is coming up fast on the outside, as it were. I was out in Yosemite for Earth Day and it no longer snows down to 3,000 feet above sea level - it only goes to 4,500 - and the Ponderosa pine, which depends on that winter snow, is dying out in that belt. So the fingerprints of climate change can be seen biologically essentially all over the planet - and it is just the beginning.

e360: There are protected areas that were set aside for certain species, plant or animal, and now as the climate changes, in many cases recent research is showing that these places are no longer hospitable habitat for the species they were set aside for. Do you see this as a real, growing problem, and if so, how do we address it?

Lovejoy: Well, certainly we are going to have to think about protected areas differently. It doesn't mean they don't have value, but basically nature is on the move wherever we look. You know, the Joshua trees are moving outside of Joshua Tree National Park because of climate change - they are just tracking their conditions. And that is just the beginning.

So we are going to have to think very differently about protected areas in the biologically dynamic landscape. We need to think about how to put natural connections back in the landscape and move more toward a matrix in which human aspiration is pursued within a natural matrix, as opposed to the other way around, and thereby make it easier for plants and animals and microorganisms to actually adjust to the changing natural conditions. Hopefully, most of them can make it through.

e360: The bulk of your work, back to your doctorate days, has been in the Amazon. I believe you have a long-running project down there on fragmented forests in the Amazon. Can you explain what the goal of that project was and is, and what you have learned from it?

Lovejoy: The initial purpose of this project was to generate data to answer and resolve a huge controversy in the ecological literature of the '70s, which was: What was better, a single large reserve, or several small reserves adding up to the same total area? I was asked, with Brazilian colleagues, to set up this giant experiment, I think it is the largest in landscape ecology, looking at habitat fragmentation. And now we are in year 33, and in 2003 we published the paper that makes it very clear that large is the answer. But we have learned a whole lot of other things in the process, including important things about secondary succession, which can play into the plants that are reforesting the Amazon and things of that sort.

e360: There now are a series of major dam projects either underway or planned in the Amazon, along with other major development. Are you concerned about the impacts of these projects, both individually and cumulatively?

Lovejoy: The plans for hydroelectric in the Amazon are both impressive and frightening. And it is not just within the Brazilian Amazon - the Brazilian energy authority has made these plans to build dams in other countries, like Peru, and then transmit the energy back to Brazil. And all of those kinds of plans are being developed independently of the plans looking at roads and other infrastructure, which is planned independently of agricultural policy, which is planned independently of conservation policy.

What really needs to be done is to develop an integrated plan to manage the entire Amazon as a system. If you don't do that, it will eventually undercut its hydrological cycle, which is what keeps the Amazon in rainforest but also provides rainfall south of Brazil for agroindustry. So it is actually hugely important in the continental climate system.

e360: I've read articles that you've written in the past that have proposed looking at market-based conservation schemes, and one of the ones that has been most talked about and tried to move along in the last decade has been REDD [Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation], and yet it has had its problems and has not really gotten as far along as people hoped it would at this point. What do you see as the advantages and values of a market-based approach to conservation versus a government or NGO-based approach to conservation? And, in the case of REDD, why do you think it has been so long and such a hard road to really get it moving?

Lovejoy: The advantage to having some globally-blessed market scheme like REDD, is that it can operate at a global scale. It will also provide some return, some recognition of the value of what forests are contributing to how the world works and bring, if it is done right, some income to the landholders. It actually advanced quite well in climate change talks, but failing an overall agreement about climate, it is just sitting there waiting to get started. Some nations want to resist it - they see it as an invasion of sovereignty. But you don't have to do anything unless you want to, so there is much less reason for concern there. And what is particularly interesting is if you talk to the governors of a lot of these states in the Amazon and even some in Indonesia, they are quite interested in moving that forward.

e360: Why? What benefits beyond conservation do they see for their regions?

Lovejoy: Enough of the Amazon governors recognized the importance of the forest to the future of their states. They saw that if you could find a way to reward people who were living in the Amazon for pursuing their aspirations in ways that did not destroy the forest that you could actually move toward this whole idea of managing the Amazon as a system.

e360: And the Brazilian government supported that going into [the 2009 international climate talks in] Copenhagen?

Lovejoy: The Brazilian government supported the Amazon governors. Almost all the Amazon governors went there and had a memorable afternoon event, in which even some of the less environmentally oriented ones spoke in favor of this.

e360: Were you surprised by the lack of action on REDD at Copenhagen and do you see the chance of anything like that really emerging now?

Lovejoy: At the moment, the conventional wisdom about the UN Conference of the Parties on climate change is that getting something going globally is unlikely in the near future because of the absence of the United States playing an important role in the entire process, and that we will probably have to, in the interim, try and build a mosaic which can approximate but not achieve what a global agreement would.

e360: And do you see the U.S. position ever changing?

Lovejoy: Well, I see the U.S. position as possibly changing. But it will require much better public awareness and concern to create the political space to make it happen.

e360: If you had five minutes with Barack Obama to talk to him about an environmental issue, what would you say to him?

Lovejoy: I would make the point, one, that the planet works as a linked biological and physical system. Second, that two degrees of global warming is too much for ecosystems. Three, that planetary-scale restoration of ecosystems could actually pull a significant amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere. And four, that if we fail to do those kinds of things, it will just create environmental havoc for the U.S. as well as the rest of the world.

e360: Have you had those five minutes?

Lovejoy: I have not, as yet, had those five minutes.

e360: You have had some pretty, I don't want to say dire, but uncomfortable, predictions over the years about biodiversity loss and, regrettably, I think many - if not most of them - have come true. Are you at all optimistic that we can stem the tide of biodiversity loss in a meaningful way, or can we just do the best we can against the tide?

Lovejoy: There are two ways I look at that. One is, that the fuse is very, very short, that we could see just a lot of environmental havoc and a growing inability of society to cope with it as the various problems erupt. On the other hand, I could also see a moment of awareness where globally countries will recognize that this is in fact the greatest challenge to society in its entire history and that we have a choice before us of entering into what, in a sense, could be the real dark ages. Or we could get our act together and rise to really deal with the problem... I go to sleep at night almost praying that there will suddenly be a bolt of awareness and then we can move forward.

e360: But when you wake up in the morning?

Lovejoy: When I wake up in the morning, you know, you have just got to try and make it all happen. There is no point in being unduly pessimistic, because that just guarantees all the bad things will happen.

Photo by Fernando Silva/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

In June, the U.S. Green Building Council announced that a proposed tightening of its LEED building standard would be delayed until the market was ready to "absorb" the change. In contrast, two days after this announcement an alternative to LEED won the 2012 Buckminster Fuller Challenge for pushing the building industry "to reimagine business as usual."

The Living Building Challenge, as it's known, is gaining stature as the most stringent green building standard in the world. But since its inception in 2006 the challenge has only fully certified three buildings and partially certified two others, raising the question of whether it will be a trendsetting project in the world of green design, or little more than an elite initiative with faint real-world impact.

One of the core distinguishing features of the Living Building Challenge is its performance-based accreditation: While other environmental standards pre-certify buildings based on conformance of design specifications with best practices, the Living Building Challenge approves buildings only after a rigorously documented 12-month occupancy phase.

The Living Building Challenge monitors 20 so-called design "imperatives" across seven categories: site, water, energy, health, materials, social equity, and beauty. These imperatives, which include mandates like net-zero energy and water use, must be maintained over the full trial year of occupancy. Amanda Sturgeon, program director of the Living Building Challenge, said that perhaps the most challenging of the 20 is the Red List of materials, which bans 14 material types, including halogenated flame retardants, PVC plastics, and chlorofluorcarbons. Projects must prove their exclusion of these materials through supplier audits for every product used in construction.

Sturgeon says that such intensive documentation requirements demonstrate that the Living Building Challenge goes well beyond a one-time certification, pushing architecture and design to be more progressive, sustainable, and accountable.

"When teams start to ask their suppliers for every ingredient of every product, the message moves up the chain," said Sturgeon. "We're starting to see manufacturers that are more transparent about what's in their products." Other imperatives have inspired similar reform: In Oregon, gray water and rainwater were recently made legal for use in residential and commercial buildings to help them meet one of the water imperatives.

The largest of the three buildings currently certified under the Living Building Challenge is a 6,000-square-foot environmental education center and water reclamation facility in Rhinebeck, N.Y. The other two certified buildings include a slightly smaller science classroom and energy lab at the Hawaii Preparatory Academy and a 3,000-square-foot educational center on a satellite campus of Washington University of St. Louis. Twelve other buildings that are now being evaluated are considerably larger, ranging from 50,000 to 100,000 square feet.

In total, approximately 140 projects in eight countries are working to meet the Living Building Challenge, which Sturgeon cites as evidence of a growing push for sustainability among architects and engineers. "We have a lot of big things in the works," said Sturgeon. "It's kind of endless."

Another important aspect of the Living Building Challenge is that it seeks to move beyond individual buildings and bring principles of sustainable design to entire neighborhoods. A handful of neighborhoods and one infrastructure project, the tiny 2,600-square-foot McGilvra Place Park in Seattle, are currently striving to comply with the 20 imperatives.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360