The Origins of Sustainable Development

The roots of the "green" movement can be said to have been planted in 1980 when the International Union for the Conservation of Nature produced a World Conservation Strategy (WCS), which not only attempted to ensure that the development agenda informed the environmental agenda, but also attempted the reverse, and drew attention to the need for development efforts to be based upon a respect for ecological processes. After the WCS, the concept appeared in 1981 in the book Building a Sustainable Society, by Lester R. Brown of the Worldwatch Institute and in Norman Myers' Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management in 1984.

In 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), in Rio de Janeiro, which became known as the Earth Summit, two of the foremost scientific institutions in the world, the U.K. Royal Society and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, produced their first-ever joint communique which arrived at the conclusion that not only was our development process "unsustainable," but that "the future of our planet is in the balance."

The U.S. National Energy Policy Act also was signed into law in 1992, and a year later the World Congress of Architects meeting in Chicago under the umbrella of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the International Union of Architects, framed a Declaration of Interdependence for a Sustainable Future.

Its conclusions: that building materials should have a benign environmental impact, that buildings should be minimal consumers of energy and other resources throughout their life cycle, should have healthy and pleasing internal environments, foster community, be arranged with accessible green spaces in urban areas, and that they should enable a kind of transport infrastructure to be developed around them in a way that would discourage use of the automobile.

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) also started-up in 1993. It took a decade−and an alarming rise in energy costs− for the organization to reach critical mass. But in the past four years, the USGBC has grown from 600 members to more than 6,000, drawn 25,000 architects to take the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) accreditation exam and, by the end of 2004, was growing at a rate of 150 new members per month.

A crush of new building owners embraces green building as a means of differentiating their project, ensuring the well-being of occupants and achieving dramatic energy savings.

A peek inside the project, from a vendor's perspective, will help us appreciate the extent to which "green" considerations have become pervasive in today's marketplace. Nearly every project today, whether LEED-certified, or not, embodies green principles, and nearly every vendor has a green package.