Page 260 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

238 CHAPTER 8

Why Broker Green Development Practices?
Market forces helped answer part of the question and provided the financial context
for questioning the paradigm within which brokerage has worked for decades. May-
be we wouldn’t lose business by promoting a new way of doing real estate. Maybe
we would lose business by not promoting a new paradigm. Market forces, in many
ways, served as the catalyst. Personalizing the issue helped us with the actual re-
framing.
I can’t help it. I’m the type of person who wears my heart on my sleeve. People say
they can read me like a book, and they are probably right. But it’s a curious thing about
business—we feel that in order to be professional, we need to keep emotions and feel-
ings at bay. Yet some of the most successful and innovative businesses and business
models of our time have been fueled by passion and feeling.
Ray Anderson, as a result of reading Paul Hawken’s book, The Ecology of Com-
merce, concluded that the petrochemical-intensive floor tile company he founded,
Interface, made him a plunderer of the planet and a thief, stealing the futures of
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generations to come. Hawken himself, who got his start running a natural foods store
in Boston and then founded the high-end mail-order gardening business Smith &
Hawken, notes that at the very moment he was being awarded the Environmental
Stewardship Award by the Council on Economic Priorities, his company’s practices
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were antithetical to sustainability. Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, who likes
to refer to himself as a reluctant businessman, describes his company’s purpose as
one that challenges conventional wisdom and “presents a new style of responsible
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business.” David Gottfried, recognized as the founder of the U.S. Green Building
Council, argues that it should be the mission of environmental groups such as the
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USGBC “to change how we make money and define financial value.” Jeffrey
Hollender, founder of Seventh Generation, believes that a business should be about
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“spiritual and moral and personal growth.” Gary Hirshberg, co-founder of Stonyfield
Farms, frames his entire story of running his company in terms of one simple, pro-
found mission: “The truth is that we’ve all got a limited time in which to do something
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useful on this Earth.” And so on.
Personalizing the issue—whether it’s selling carpet tiles or outdoor sportswear or
organic yogurt or real estate—is a fundamental aspect of a sustainable business. In
terms of brokerage work, personalizing the issue means coming to terms with the fact
that when we brokers are stuck in traffic in the morning coming to work, we have at
least partial ownership of the problem by having brokered deals that foster unsustain-
able transportation issues. Or that when we see our well-planned, historic 18th-century
town diminished by franchise blight, we are in part responsible for our unique town
beginning to resemble a geography of nowhere.
Sustainable brokerage starts with caring about what happens in our own backyard:
protecting our marshes and local fisheries, keeping nearby tracts of land from being
clear-cut, preserving buildings (both remarkable and ordinary) that are a part of com-
munity lore and everyday use. Sustainable brokerage recognizes a sense of authentic
community—not something that looks like a Hollywood backlot—and an apprecia-