On the Importance of Being—and Moving Forward—Together
The intention behind the Living Future conference is to strategize, to build the movement, and to work together to change the industry. Compared to every other year I’ve experienced since I started doing this work 25 years ago, this year is different. This year requires more of us, because some of the fundamentals have been pulled out from under us. Our industry is in a state of instability.
As many of you know, I host a podcast, Design the Future, with Kira Gould. We’ve been asking one question to all our guests for the past five years: “Do you think of yourself as a part of a movement, or an industry?” We’ve heard some wonderful answers over the years. But I’ve recently started to realize what I was trying to get at when I came up with that question. In many ways, our movement created an industry—the green building industry—that many people work in today. For the past 30 years, our movement has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs all over the world, we’ve built up conferences and companies, new software platforms, new government agencies, incentives and regulations, new professional accreditations, and degree programs, and, of course, quite a few standards and certifications! This industry was born out of a movement of people who wanted to change how buildings were built and managed and how products were made, and we’ve been growing and expanding ever since.
In the past few months, a lot has changed, and our industry is shaken. Not only are we all nervous about economic downturns and trade policy, but many of the foundational pieces of our industry have shifted, like the support of our federal government. I know many of us are feeling vulnerable or nervous about how this impacts our jobs, our firms, our contracts. But I want to ask us to think beyond our own firms and join us in being a part of this movement, because it needs you now more than ever. Being a part of a movement can look like a lot of different things, but what defines it is collective action, not individual action. And that’s what we do when we convene, when we come together. As an Oberlin graduate, I’m really honored and pleased that David Orr has joined us to talk about how we think about democracy and climate together. And here is a small sampling of the people and projects spotlighted at Living Future this year:
- Indigenous leadership: Danny Desjarlais spoke about the amazing work growing in the Lower Sioux Hemp Program and Housing Project, and we had stories of tribal forestry and wood procurement supply chain work. We had a session about Maori knowledge and principles and how they are translating into building practices in New Zealand. What might it look like to learn from, support and follow these leaders and this expertise to new materials and methods?
- Biobased building materials: We continue to lift up this category because of its potential and this year we heard from Christian Benimana of MASS Design Group, we had sessions on the topic, and we had a popular “petting zoo” of biobased materials.
- The Albina neighborhood in Portland: We are fortunate to have a number of sessions to highlight the work of the Albina Vision Trust on this neighborhood. This is some of the most deeply thoughtful and meaningful work in the country from the perspective of process and centering people and community.
Collective strength
I suggest that we all continue to prioritize this collective work as much as we can, in the days and months ahead. What does that look like? I encourage you to consider how you spend your precious travel budgets this year. Are you going to for-profit industry conferences designed to help you with business development? Or are you going to the movement-led events where people are in dialogue, figuring out the tactics, tools, and narratives we need to expand and accelerate this work? I’m talking about your ASHRAE committees, your TAGs, your CLF hubs, your local meetups. Please prioritize them. I hear a lot these days that people can’t get funding to go to conferences unless they are marketing their firms’ sustainability work. I get it, I know it’s hard to justify the spend when you don’t get to present. But the green building industry only exists because a lot of people fought hard to create it. We fought to get the budget to sit down with each other and collaborate and do collective work. We fought to get the policies and regulations passed that incentivize this industry, that allow it to function. We fought to create the tools that would allow us to build our businesses. Now it is time again to fight—to find your courage and creativity to keep doing this work, so we can navigate our work through a rapidly changing political landscape. We are not here to create or protect a niche market, we are here to transform the entire industry. And right now we need collective strength and work to keep this transformation going.
New Just momentum to meet this moment
I have confidence that we will build new momentum and strength, because I see it every day in this community. Last year, in the tradition of Atlanta’s strong civil rights history, we brought in a lot of leaders from Atlanta to talk about their work in this area, and we learned from them. I challenged us all to double down on our commitments in this area. Not the DEI term, but the work to increase diversity and inclusion in our firms, to address the historical inequalities we are living with today, especially along racial lines, and find design and construction levers for meaningful change. I didn’t image the scale of the backlash that we’ve seen this year. It’s profoundly disheartening. And yet … I am deeply inspired I am by our incredible community of Just champions and how they’ve handled this moment. Our staff team has been working hard to support the questions and concerns that you all have about how to navigate the changing landscape. We see your work and your continued commitment to your values. The Just community is not shrinking, it is growing.
Disappearing federal support
As many of you know, we are one of the many organizations that were impacted by the federal administration pulling back on climate action. Last May, we were selected to receive a grant from the EPA’s C-MORE program, which aimed to help the US reduce its impact on climate change by decarbonizing the supply chains of the built environment and reducing industrial emissions. This grant would have been truly transformative for us; its loss is profound.
Despite the setback, we are moving forward with our plan. We are doing this in deep collaboration with our community, and building upon our Declare Program, the Living Product Challenge, and the last few years of our research. We are sharing our vision and asking for your help and support.
As the momentum has picked up around materials transparency, the demand for better tools and verification has also grown. We now have the wonderful Common Materials Framework that mindful Materials has championed, providing us a clear lexicon, if you will, for the different attributes we should be looking at when we select products. As this ecosystem has grown, we have seen the need for Declare and the Living Product Challenge to evolve to reflect this multi-attribute world in a more modular approach that helps everyone make progress towards creating and specifying materials that are healthy and safe for our bodies, for the environment, and for our communities. We decided what was needed was a program that provides incremental recognition with a clear, ambitious goal across the multiple attributes of a product’s impact. This is where the concept for our “three sisters” labels was born.
I really like the metaphor of the three sisters, because I’m a gardener, so for those who aren’t familiar, the “three sisters” are squash, beans and corn. This concept and name comes from the Iroquois Nation of Native Americans in what is now the Northeast US and parts of Eastern Canada. Because they have a symbiotic relationship with each other. The idea is interdependence and intersection. This metaphor is fitting for our work as we always strive to learn from nature’s wisdom, as well as the wisdom of traditional indigenous knowledge.
Over the next couple of years, we will be evolving towards a system of three sister labels: Health, Environment and Equity. They will cover the full spectrum of product attributes in one unified program. We want to honor the fact that manufacturers are often starting in different places with different areas of focus in terms of their impact. But ultimately, reaching true positive impact requires looking and acting across all facets of a product’s impact- that is where true regeneration occurs. So manufacturers can start with just transparency in any of the three areas, you can start with an ambitious goal in one area, transparency across the board. But the broader picture will always be clear that we are pushing for not just transparency but, ultimately, positive impact across all facets of a product. When products achieve the highest levels of impact in each of the three labels, they will become Living Products.
We need your help: The Resiliency Fund
We had a plan to complete this project with funding from the EPA. We had begun the preliminary research and development, we had jobs posted, we were ready to go. And the closer we’ve come to starting, the more we have become confident that this is the direction we need to go. So we are putting our flag in the sand and moving forward. And this is where we need your help. We are going on a virtual roadshow conference to find supporters who want to help this program grow, and we need your ideas and introductions. So if you have them, please tell us, especially me and my colleagues Benson Gabler, Mike Johnson, Hannah Ray, Paul Swensson, and Chelsea Duckworth. We are bootstrapping this, we are moving as fast as we can, and we are ready to get this new system out in the world as soon as possible.
Please support our rapid-response campaign to accelerate R&D for Declare and the Living Product Challenge, and to build the technology needed to bring our three integrated labels—Health, Environment, and Equity—to life faster.
