Our 10th Anniversary Issue!

EBN, but it has. That one was dated July/August 1992.

Ten years ago, the U.S. Green Building Council was just a gleam in the eyes of its visionary founders. The Forest Stewardship Council had yet to coalesce out of separate and quite different forest certification efforts. The National Audubon Society was nearing completion of its groundbreaking New York City office renovation. The Rocky Mountain Institute’s Green Development Services program was just a year old. In short, green building was still a pretty new idea.

While the going hasn’t always been easy, researching and writing what you hold in your hands (or view on your screen) remains as satisfying as ever. I am constantly inspired to find out about the green building projects being created by the many players in this still-emerging field. I am amazed to watch the growth and mushrooming influence of the U.S. Green Building Council and its LEED™ Rating System. I am always excited to learn about new products and new ways of approaching old problems.

Looking back over these ten years, there are some highlights we’re especially proud of. We stuck our necks out in 1997, calling for a phaseout of CCA-treated wood; just this spring that became a reality! In 1998, we tackled the seemingly tangential topic of light pollution, and that effort led directly to the inclusion of a point in LEED for avoiding light pollution. We are still getting requests to reprint our 1999 article on the benefits of smaller houses. Our 2000 article “What Makes a Product Green,” now several revisions later, forms the basis of our product selection for

GreenSpec.

We have also had some embarrassing moments, such as our May/June 1996 premature report on the “groundbreaking” for Haymount, a great project that has been two weeks away from securing its financing for about eight years. In 2001, we overstated the paved area in the United States 1,000-fold by writing “million” when we meant thousand (those pesky little details!), and we’ve had our share of metric mis

conversions!

For the opportunity to learn about all the great stuff happening in the green building world, I thank you—our readers. Of our roughly 3,000 current subscribers, 141 of you have been with us from the beginning—which is remarkable since we only had a few hundred subscribers at that time. Nearly a third of you have subscribed for five years or more. Your support of our work, through your subscription dollars, is greatly appreciated. Even more, however, we thank you for all that you are doing to improve the environment by creating greener buildings.

In this issue of

EBN, we are premiering a periodic column in which we reexamine a topic that we covered a decade earlier and report on what’s going on today. In the first of these columns, we look at rigid foam insulation and how it is doing relative to ozone depletion. (See Revisiting Rigid Foam Insulation and Ozone).

– Alex Wilson