Committee on the Environment

If the profession had not done such a poor job in energy efficiency
and environmentalism, there would be no need to focus on sustainability.
If sustainable design were truly main stream, it would not be an extra cost.

Similarly, if everyone behaved, there would be no need for rules.
Experience tells us that there are always those who will cheat for
short term advantages.
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Perry Richardson AIA
Canizaro Cawthon Davis
Jackson MS
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I think it's a good question to ask, why sustainable design became a fragmented concept.  It may seem like backtracking, but there is a simple unifying method for assigning a sustainability value to all project decisions. You might call it the "whole value rule" and put it on a list of general "common sense sustainability" principles to follow like Vishal Charles's list.

What it does is offer a good way to compare the value of any purposes you or a project spends money on to the usual environmental impact for the same amount of money, i.e. the nominal share of the total environmental impact of the whole economy.  It starts with realizing that the world average energy consumed by the economy per dollar is a real average share of all impacts of using energy.  

The world averages happen to be Energy/$GDP = ~8000btu/$ and carbon/$GDP = ~.5kg/$.  It turns out to be a fuzzy indicator... that is so much more inclusive that it is actually more accurate than the precise measures of the impacts you can directly trace, that's the systems science behind it.    

To use it just look at those physical quantities and ask if the spending on "X" is worth that scale of impacts on the earth?   It's that simple.   Simple, yes, but also a genuine comprehensive (if fuzzy) assessment of the total impact of any given choice.  As you do it the first thing you notice is WOW that's a lot of energy and pollution to account for.   To NOT assume your spending has more like no impacts than average ones... you'd need to have some good reason to think the people who are the end recipients of the money are are not going to spend it in the average way people spend money.   

So, the sustainability question... is whether your purpose for the money you spend or invest compensates for the average direct effect on the earth of using 8000btu/$ and producing .5kg/$ of CO2.

 See also: synapse9.com/design/dollarshadow.htm and synapse9.com/SEA

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Philip Henshaw AIA
New York NY
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