The following question was recently posted on Quora:
“Sustainability: What are the key tenets of the Original Green movement?”
Check out the response from Steve Mouzon, architect and urbanist:
The Original Green was the delivery system of sustainability worldwide throughout almost all of human history, up until the Thermostat Age. It aggregates the wisdom of sustainability and then distributes it broadly to cultures at large. Its operating systems are known as Living Traditions. It begins by first building sustainable places, so that it then makes sense to build sustainable buildings within them. Sustainable places should be nourishable, accessible, serviceable, and securable. Sustainable buildings should be lovable, durable, flexible, and frugal.
1. Sustainable places should be nourishable because if you cannot eat there, you cannot live there. Nourishable places are those where you can look out over the beds, fields, and waters from which much of your food comes. Today, we can ship food of any kind from around the world to get to our tables, but that may not be affordable after Peak Oil takes full effect.
2. Sustainable places should be accessible because we need many ways to get around, especially walking and biking because those methods are self-propelled and do not require fuel other than your food.
3. Sustainable places should be serviceable because we need to be able to get the basic services of life within walking distance, and the people serving us those services should be able to live nearby as well. We also should be able to make a living where we are living if we choose to.
4. Sustainable places should be securable against rough spots in the uncertain future because if there is too much fear, the people will leave. This is a difficult discussion to have because of the emotion bound up in this bundle of issues. But it’s an essential discussion because, by getting just this one item wrong, American cities nearly emptied out from the 1960s to the 1980s.
5. Sustainable buildings should be lovable because if they cannot be loved, they will not last. The carbon footprint of a building is meaningless once its parts have been carted off to the landfill.
6. Sustainable buildings should be durable because if they cannot endure, they are not sustainable. This also means that we must do better at preserving the lovable buildings we already have, because how can we call ourselves sustainable if we keep throwing things away?
7. Sustainable buildings should be flexible because if they endure, they will need to be used for many uses over the centuries, many of which are not even anticipated today.
8. Sustainable buildings should be frugal because energy and resource hogs cannot be sustained in a healthy way long into an uncertain future. But they should first be frugal naturally and passively, focusing on the equipment only after all natural measures have been taken.
Today, most discussions on sustainability focus on Gizmo Green, which is the proposition that we can achieve sustainability simply by using better equipment and better materials. We do need better equipment and better materials, but this is only a small part of the whole equation. Put another way, Gizmo Green is only a secondary part of frugality. Focusing on Gizmo Green misses the big picture entirely.