Ecobuilding's New Mortar

The marching order to "leave nothing but footprints" enlisted an infantry of green builders this season, before our collective attention turned to security. While our man from the Midland Petroleum Club (a k a George W. Bush) dissed environmental causes and dismissed global warming, before his attention, too, was turned, a growing number of land-shapers and place-makers began to cast an ecological eye toward planning and construction. Whether labeled green building, sustainable architecture, organic architecture or what one inclusionist calls "The Whole Building," this new constituency of ecologically attuned and everyday builders has begun to consider environmental values in building inside and out--from the materials in the making, to the siting of the structure, to the energy it consumes.

"Every architect wants to build green," one would-be organic architect says longingly, listening to speakers at a conference on "Building Energy 200l." Sponsored by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) at Tufts University, the assembly was one of two events pulling in record numbers of builders looking to tread more lightly on the land. The second, "Sustainable Communities by Design," the Southface Energy Institute's annual Greenprints meeting in Atlanta, likewise drew green-minded "carpenters"--sick-building doctors, clean-air experts, developers, engineers and construction firms--as well as professional architects, landscape architects and planners with a growing green agenda.

"What is starting to change a heretofore esoteric or niche market to make it more viable?" Peter Yost asks rhetorically. "People are starting to make a value connection between health, sustainability and the environment," says Yost, senior editor of Environmental Building News. The biological impact of building has begun to enter their calculations, in other words.

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