Looking Ahead: The Next 10 Years of Green Building
(Page 4 of 10)
May/June 2009
By Eric Corey Freed
From an environmental point of view, houses need to be Designed for Disassembly (DfD) so that massive reuse of resources can take place.
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NH: What roadblocks or obstacles are blocking progress? How do we remove them?
DAVID ORR: I think the big roadblocks are political. In the 1930s, GM, Firestone and a few other companies got together to buy up the light rail systems around the country and put them out of business. They were fined a token amount by the courts. That political clout existed without a break until just very recently. It is how the oil and auto industry, and all of the ancillary industries such as auto parts, insurance and roadside facilities survived. This political clout has been studied for the better part of the 20th century. Now in the 21st century, with the auto industry on its knees, it’s possible, I think, to forge a very different political dynamic. Put the public interest first, for the long term, in place of corporate, private interest.
SERGIO PALLERONI: The obstacle of practice, how we do things. It's so hard to get people to change the way they do things. How do we get a professional culture to be willing to understand that it's not working and we really need to rethink everything? It really is a change of mindset. There are so many technologies that are promising right now, for which there need to be changes. But I also believe there are technologies that haven't been discovered because we haven't gotten into the frame of mind to understand what technology will be most effective. Half of it is a technological issue, half is human behavior.
We can solve half the environmental issues overnight if we could just get people to act differently.
SARAH SUSANKA: The biggest obstacles I've seen are apathy and fear that our problems are too big to solve. I hear this from architects, from homeowners, from builders. They are all waiting for the other to act. For example, I have builders saying, "If I don't have clients coming to me asking for green features, I can't really do them on my own." So homeowners say they can't find a builder who knows how to do this. The biggest challenge is connecting people together who have the same desire and vision so they can implement these ideas. That is happening more now than it has anytime in the past. So I think the biggest obstacle is really not being able to find the right people to support your vision. They're there; we just have to be better connectors.
GIL FRIEND: In the short term, the roadblock is this financial meltdown (that you may have heard about!), which is affecting credit and the ability to collect capital to do things people already know need to be done, or the things that might be financially attractive. But that will unlock, and the market will readjust at some period of time.
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