A Special Invitation

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jason F. McLennan, Founder of the International Living Future Institute and the Living Building Challenge. Jason is a keynote at this year’s Living Future Unconference, now online around the world for the first time in history. In this post, Jason shares how he is #SustainingHope during this crisis and extends a special invitation and call to action to all readers to come together as a community at this time.

Share your own story by May 1 about how you are #SustainingHope at this time. Please submit your stories, photos, art, or whatever is keeping you going, through social media or by emailing media@living-future.org, with the hashtag #SustainingHope. We will be sharing select posts online during the week leading up to Living Future 2020.

It’s Spring in the Pacific Northwest. This is the home of the Living Building Challenge. Yes, we are a global organization, but our roots are here, and it is here where we see hope bursting forth in every blooming cherry blossom.

The Bullitt Center, home of ILFI

This is the season of renewal and emergence. It’s now that the Bullitt Center’s windows would normally be opening and closing, the blinds raising and lowering to the pattern of the shifting natural light and gently drifting cloud cover, keeping us comfortable through our Hemisphere’s gradual tilt back toward the sun.

But this year, it also brings something new: a humbling, shared, global experience in which we are all feeling the weight of the world on our shoulders. Not one of us is escaping what all of us face–a daunting, evolving crisis with an unknown end date.

More than 16 years ago when I launched the Living Building Challenge, I never could have imagined that what I felt then about the damage we were doing to our planet would be so similar to what the entire world is feeling now about the global COVID-19 pandemic. It’s clear that people are finally realizing we need to change how we do things.

In moments of crisis, we are naturally drawn toward hope. As my good friend Anthony Guerrero wrote to all of you recently, hope is what gets us out of bed in the morning and keeps us going til dark, even in the current haze of ambiguity.

“How can this moment of change inspire you to break old patterns you have for the benefit of your health and the health of the world?”

Jason F. McLennan, Founder, ILFI and Living Building Challenge

This moment has catalyzed me to rethink many of my old assumptions and to make changes, and I invite each and every single one of you to do the same. What is your superpower? How can this moment of change inspire you to break old patterns you have for the benefit of your health and the health of the world?

The Living Future 2020 conference is now online.

In this crowd, we stand among the heroes of our own industry–people like you who have been pushing for change in our industry for a long time. This global pandemic will pass and it will be time, with renewed vigor, to solve not only our climate crisis but also the numerous environmental and societal challenges that are affecting life on the planet as we know it. It will take an even greater mobilization of global energy and resolve to confront the much larger and more impactful global disruptions to come.

I don’t want to take away from the gravity of grief and loss that so many people around the world are facing right now. But we must steel ourselves for the challenges ahead and as soon as we are safely able, we must come together again in solidarity.

I invite you to show up the best you can right now given the circumstances, with whatever hope and whatever strength you can bring. Show up for your family. Show up for your partner, your children, your parents, your loved ones, your chosen family. Show up for your community, and show up for your coworkers. And as we move toward what is normally the biggest event of our community every year, Living Future, we hope that you will show up for our planet. I will be there, on your screen. I hope to see you there too.

With warmth,

Jason F. McLennan, Founder, International Living Future Institute, Living Building Challenge

Written By

Jason F. McLennan

Jason F. McLennan is one of the world’s most influential individuals in the field of architecture and the green building movement. He is the winner of the Buckminster Fuller Prize, the National Award of Excellence Winner from Engineering News Record, a senior fellow of the Design Futures Council and the Ashoka Foundation. He is the creator of the Living Building Challenge, Living Community Challenge, Living Product Challenge, JUST Social Justice Label, Declare and the International Living Future Institute and is the author of six books on sustainability and green building. He is an architect and planner at McLennan Design (his own firm) and currently designing some of the most leading-edge green building projects anywhere. Jason is on the board of ILFI and is the immediate past chair.