On Ecosystems and Hospice Ecology

The February [

EBN

Vol. 10, No. 2] cover story on site restoration and the editorial on hospice ecology in Hawaii were excellent. In the piece on Hawaii and its loss of habitat and native species, your question of how this relates to green building is so important. It goes to the heart of what is “green” and what is “sustainable” in the built environment. People use the terms “sustainable building” or “sustainable design” so easily, but we don’t really know what these concepts mean in the U.S. and globally. I think most of us would agree that truly sustainable design is far beyond what we now call “green.” In fact, many of our tools for green design don’t address critically important sustainability topics like habitat protection and protection of biodiversity. Because these topics are hard to measure, they are generally left out of LCA software, building rating systems, and other tools. If we agree, as suggested, that these might be among the most important elements of sustainability, we need to think about how to incorporate them into our tools. Even if we can’t quantify these considerations yet, to ignore them is simply wrong. Hopefully, some of the efforts underway to develop sustainability indicators for building performance assessment, such as the Green Building Challenge, will be successful and will enrich our understanding and our tools.

Scientific Consulting Group

Gaithersburg, Maryland