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Integration as the Solution
Submitted by Nina Emkin on December 11, 2007 - 11:23pm.
As the conference winds down, one of the things that strikes me the most is the way that certain themes are repeated over and over again, by people in seemingly unrelated fields, in seemingly unrelated contexts. The theme that keeps cropping up in the sessions I've attended is integration.
In the "Green Infrastructure/Sustainable Urban Landscapes" session, Travis Longcore, a professor at the USC Center for Sustainable Cities, quoted ecologist Frank Elger, who said, "Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, they are also more complex than we can think." He illustrated his point with one of the most surprising statistics to emerge over the past two days: insects provide $57 billion worth of services to the United States annually. He hammered home the point that nothing, not even a LEED-certified building, exists in a vacuum, and that the buildings must not only be green as individual entities, but exist harmoniously with their inhabitants and with their surroundings.
At the same session, EDAW's Isaac Brown contrasted NYC with Irvine, CA. He talked about the future of cities as somewhere in between the two, combining New York's density and public transit with Irvine's park space and lack of traffic. I can't imagine two cities less alike than Irvine and New York, and I'd love to see the hybrid realized someday.
At the "Greening the Built Environment: Energy Smart Homes and Buildings," Claire Bonham Carter of DMJM H&N argued that integration IS sustainability. She argued that engineers, master planners, and architects must get together in the beginning of any kind of development process to ensure a green, integrated approach to sustainability.
At "The New Corporate Stewards of the Environment: Chief Sustainability Officers," Robyn Beavers, Eliot Abel, Roberto Munoz, and Rachel Webber all discussed the way that sustainability needs to trickle down from the top of organizations, both internally and externally. They all suggested that a holistic strategy on the financial and social benefits of going green was the most effective way to to deal wih climate change.
Integration as the key to dealing with climate change -- only time will tell.