Page 250 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

228 CHAPTER 7

our environmental vision, our social goals, and our financial aspirations really are inter-
twined. Seeing the world this way speaks to our values, and it’s in our congruent values
that we find the fabric of a sustainable community. Everything we love can be taken
away—it is already happening, every day. We don’t have time to be lost in anger and
blame—we need a positive, practical vision for how to correct the situation. And we
need to fight like hell to do so. It is from this standpoint that I personally feel sustain-
ability has a quiet fourth bottom line, a bottom line having to do with spirituality.
Sustainability, deeply felt and practiced, is about locating oneself in a larger, largely self-
less endeavor having to do with re-establishing, reinforcing, nurturing, and protecting
the fabric of community and the habitat that gives that community its sustenance.
Sustainability is about the deep practice of respect for all things. That is the legacy I want
to leave my kids, as we leave the movie theater in Birmingham after watching Cars.
Chief Seattle of the Suquamish Indians reportedly wrote to the United States gov-
ernment in the 1800s: “This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs
to the earth.” This view is as revolutionary today as the Copernican reworking of plan-
etary movements was in 16th-century Europe, placing humankind not at the center of its
natural home, but at its service. It’s an ethos that may indeed provide for dollars, but of
necessity it makes common—and communal—sense.

NOTES
1 The base used to establish the expense stop was that of the most directly comparable property,
in both location and size.
2 Assumes a similar usage pattern to other office buildings in this submarket.
3 The base used to establish the expense stop was that of the most directly comparable prop-
erty, in both location and size.
4 Bob Willard, The Sustainability Advantage: Seven Business Case Studies of a Triple Bottom
Line (Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers, 2002), p. 34. The calculation for losing
and replacing a good employee is actually estimated at an astounding two to three times the
person’s salary.
5 Joseph J. Romm and William D. Browning, “Greening the Building and the Bottom Line:
Increasing Productivity Through Energy-Efficient Design” Snowmass, Colo.: Rocky Mountain
Institute, December 1994, Revised 1998), p. 10.
6 These statistics are cited in a number of studies, with some indicating improvements as high
as 33 percent. Specifically, “Greening America’s Schools—Costs and Benefits,” by Gregory Kats,
Capital E, October 2006, is an excellent source of detailed information regarding productivity
and the health benefits of green building.
7 Bama Athreya, Executive Director, International Labor Rights Forum. Used with permission.
8 Source: www.scorecard.org. Visiting this website allows you to examine the environmental
scorecard for any county in the United States and overlay similar social measures.
9 To view how we attempt to answer these questions, visit www.rethinkrebuildrenew.com.
10 David W. Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Island Press, 2004) pp. 160–161.