Sustainable Development My Arse!
This article set me off a bit: GAIA HOTEL IN NAPA VALLEY GETS LEED CERTIFICATION. The eco-community seems to be celebrating an unnecessary luxury hotel built in the center of Napa Valley (more or less where I live). Replete with LCD flat screen TVs in every room, plush lawns and koi ponds (water waste, maybe?), this new hotel is about as much a boon to Gaia as a brand new oil rig. Why are we celebrating “sustainable” development? If a building is LEED certified, the eco-blogosphere goes gaga - there is little questioning of the need for the new building in the first place. In fact, in some ways the LEED system merely empowers developers to develop virgin lands as they know environmentalists are going to go easy on proposed LEED buildings.
In short, it can be argued that there is no such thing as sustainable development. As James Lovelock puts it in The Revenge of Gaia, “Two hundred years ago, when change was slow or non-existent, we might have had time to establish sustainable development . . . but now is much too late; the damage has already been done. To expect sustainable development to be a viable policy is like expecting a lung cancer victim to be cured by stopping smoking and to deny the existence of the Earth’s disease, the fever brought on by a plague of people.”
Sustainable redevelopment is our only hope. The shrinking of cities, the rebuilding in denser, more compact fashions of our living spaces, the adoption not of more efficient (some of you are familiar with what William McDonough has to say about efficiency) automobiles, but of cities that do not require cars in the first place - this is what must happen. I know, it sounds radical, but to think that anything less than radical measures are going to save our species and the globe is to deny all reports of the coming calamities. For more on sustainable redevelopment, check out Richard Register’s Ecocities. It’s not rocket science, nor difficult - we can transition our cities in no time, really.
We aren’t going to get out of this by buying clothes at the Gap or phones from Motorola. Nor are we going to escape our fate by patting each other on the back for our booming eco-friendly business model. The Earth’s ice caps could give a penguin’s ass about how many hits a given “sustainable” website is getting or how that is driving ad revenue through the roof. Or haven’t you heard? The Earth is still heating up despite the LEED-certified hotels, the green arm bands, the organic mac & cheese and the hybrid Honda Accord. Go figure! Real solutions? I don’t see them talked about nearly often enough. Individuals like Monbiot and Lovelock are immediately cast out, even in the green community, as alarmist and shrill. Well guess what folks? The sky really is falling.
On a positive note, I did see THIS ARTICLE today on Treehugger (the best of the online ecosphere, hands down) in which Lester Brown outlines what we need to do, but it passed by nearly without comment. Lester Brown knows what needs to be done and urges us to act at wartime speed. I hope we start listening to him. We can’t wait any longer.
Technorati Tags: gaia hotel, george monbiot, james lovelock, leed, lester brown, sustainable development, treehugger, william mcdonough, richard register
Tags: commerce, Ruminations
understand where you are coming from, but its hard to change consumer trends over night. people want the luxury hotel and the suv. so give them solar powered spas and hybrid trucks for now. in the next years we will continuously improve efficiency…. but don’t waste time fighting energy use or opposing current lifestyles… that’s 1990s environmentalism. let’s shift the source of energy first, reduce where possible, and slowly change the addiction.
Yes, I have to agree with you, Matthew. I see things like this and my first reaction is “AH, THE HYPOCRISY.” After I simmer down, I do realize that it’s a series of steps and while I’m frustrated at how small and slow they are, leaving us to likely fry no matter what we do from this point on, they do provide sparks of hope. As far as this site goes, it’s the initial reaction that gets captured, not the reasoned dissection. It’s for people like you to come along and get it out there - so many thanks!