Doug Farr.

“Ugh. I’m really over green buildings,” Farr said, with a dash of weariness.

Nicholson said nothing, waiting to see if Farr was joking. It was, after all, a strange thing to hear from one of the world’s premier green architects. Farr needed no prompting to continue: “We have to do more. We have to think bigger. We have to start thinking about how we can build whole sustainable communities.”

“That would require systemic change,” Nicholson replied.

“Well, then I guess sustainability is about systemic change.”

It was somewhat of an epiphany, and a maxim that both would later employ. But for Farr, it would also become the panacea for his peculiar architectural malaise.

A New Approach

No one disputes Doug Farr’s place on the pioneering edge of architecture and planning. His firm, Farr Associates, designed two of the 23 buildings on the planet that have received the U.S. Green Building Council‘s LEED Platinum designation — the highest available — and is the only firm with more than one Platinum building to its name. He was recently featured in design: e², a Brad Pitt-narrated PBS series on the green-building revolution, and his firm — whose mission is to design “sustainable human environments” at the urban neighborhood level — is nearing completion of Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature, a cutting-edge book that proposes leadership standards for governments and lawmakers.

Meanwhile, Farr is helping to shepherd the creation of a different set of standards, an outgrowth of USGBC’s voluntary, consensus-based LEED rating system that’s known as LEED for Neighborhood Development, or LEED-ND. The Council, whose LEED steering committee Farr sits on, decided in 2003 to expand its efforts into urban planning and neighborhood development. The intention, quite simply, was to design America’s first green neighborhoods.

With an all-star team including the Congress for the New Urbanism (whose Environmental Task Force Farr also co-chairs) and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the group sought input from Chicago’s pioneering Center for Neighborhood Technology and leaders of the smart-growth movement. Together, these experts tackled questions of architecture and design, planning, development, promotion, and the environmental requirements for site guidelines. They even commissioned a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the first reports that would not only summarize the impact of the built environment on public health, but also discuss how this information can be used to redesign how we live, work, and get about.

Unlike the original LEED program, which rates only single buildings and for which site selection is an afterthought, LEED-ND “will place the emphasis on the elements that bring the buildings together into a neighborhood, and relate the neighborhood to its larger region and landscape,” says the council.

McNeighborhoods: this is not sustainable.

Photo: iStockphoto

In short, LEED-ND seeks to revolutionize the way we look at our living space. It envisions compact, walkable neighborhoods with a diversity of green housing stock and commercial buildings, connected to ample park space, no more than a 10-minute walk from any amenity or mass transit stop. Row upon row of green roofs and solar panels renewing heat, water, and energy, and community recycling stations spread throughout. No parking lots, no McMansions, no big-box retailers, no gated communities. Just living with each other, in harmony with the environment, with a true sense of time and place. And the good news is, aside from the various roof adornments, it wouldn’t look that much different from life as it has been lived in America to this point.

It’s a shift that Farr says is long overdue. “There is so much effort that goes into designing and building this one small thing, this single green building,” he says. “The same amount of effort goes into planning two square miles of regular neighborhood, and that will serve us for the next 200 years. [The focus on individual buildings] just doesn’t make any sense.”

Come One, Come All

Of course, coming up with LEED-ND was the easy part. The hard part is selling it to anyone outside the somewhat erudite choir of designers, planners, activists, and policy wonks who make up the sustainable-development movement. This stuff isn’t exactly Snakes on a Plane.

“Most people will not give up conveniences and amenities as long as their income allows them to [afford conveniences and amenities],” Farr says. “It’s just the dominant way of life. It’s a value our society reinforces. There is no measure of shame or guilt that will stop people from unsustainable practices, only price will. If their energy or water costs suddenly skyrocketed, then they’d know what green building was.”

Since homeowners and developers are under no particular obligation to build green, and most cities and states have not taken any regulatory initiative, the burden lies upon the shoulders of the partnering organizations to make LEED-ND the logical and more attractive option to traditional development. The key word there is “option,” since the public, particularly the American consumer, is unlikely to go along with something foisted upon it. Farr believes LEED-ND will become the preferred option when it has proved to save money and retain value, not because of concern for the environment or attachment to a fad.

And the process is moving forward. The rising tide of Katrina/Inconvenient Truth-inspired green awareness and marketing has propelled the LEED-ND idea out of meeting rooms and listservs and across the nation in search of willing participants for the experiment of the decade.

The first stab at a coherent set of guidelines was completed in September 2005. After taking public comments on the draft, the organizers are beginning to work toward version 2.0. As a first step, they’re planning a pilot program in which 40 to 120 neighborhoods across the nation will transform anywhere from two buildings to their whole community. By January, LEED-ND will begin taking applications from retailers who want to be part of the great green experiment by opening or relocating their businesses in a pilot neighborhood. A few high-profile developers and politicians, including Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (D), have signed on to promote it. And after the pilot stage, a second public comment period will begin.

This second round of comments will allow the coalition to work directly with the neighborhoods to fine-tune the guidelines and get them ready for mass consumption. By late 2008, LEED-ND version 2.0 will be voted on by the council’s member organizations. By 2009, the LEED-ND Core Committee hopes to release the final version of the guidelines with a media launch, a series of educational programs, and marketing and outreach aimed at both developers and consumers.

But the dripping caveat to all this unbridled optimism is that without a mandate or regulation, it’s still a total crapshoot as to whether LEED-ND will ever take hold.

A Trip to the Farrside

The office of Farr Associates is no next-generation green-building prototype — it’s located in the historic 114-year-old Monadnock Building, Chicago’s tallest all-brick skyscraper. But inside, green spores of sustainability burst forth. The open studio spaces have walls that have been painted by a local artist who used milk-based, non-toxic paints. The desktops are made of natural linoleum, and a translucent divider embedded with leaves separates one desk from another. “Occupancy sensors” trigger energy-conserving lights in the kitchenette, conference room, and main studio. Large, operable First Chicago School windows gaze over nearby Printer’s Row, letting in eastern and southern light that is welcomed by the many living creatures in the space.

More important, the office is also a nexus of cerebral eruptions, a rip in time through which Farr’s staff — 18 brilliant, eccentric, committed souls — have forced their heads to steal a glimpse at the future. The space is the most pure and organic form of think-tank there is, where conversations travel from room to room, in and out of the office, online and offline, taking anywhere from the span of two meals to two weeks.

This is why walking into a Farr Associates happy hour on a Friday afternoon in mid-August took preparation and a dash of improvisation. The mingler/brain-tingler for the staff and their partners in crime over at the Congress for the New Urbanism — whose offices are just across Federal Plaza — was a partial celebration for a successful inaugural presentation and panel discussion on LEED-ND held at the Chicago Metropolitan Planning Council’s office the week before.

Those assembled make fast work of the organic microbrews, wine, and high-grade snacking miscellany. Farr is discussing with two others the method by which speed limits are calculated, and what speeds roads and traffic signals are actually engineered for. He jumps back and forth between his seat and the chalkboard, sketching out small equations and flow charts. Occasionally, he stops to consult with his tireless marketing director, who is wrapping up a grant proposal for a neighborhood-focused public-health project that would look at the effects of sprawl, commuting, and other unhealthy aspects of current urban lifestyles.

In the corner, one of the firm’s architects talks to a visiting consultant from Atlanta and to a young Farr Associates designer from the Twin Cities. They are three brainiacs in varying shades of blonde, clustered together like an American Apparel ad. They busily compare notes on art, science, and how many miles a week they drive.

While Farr’s rival Bill McDonough is ass-deep in China’s industrial revolution, Farr has largely stayed behind to fight the war at home with these energetic troops. It suits his more affable, less ostentatious manner. Preternaturally, he understands his firm as he would one of his designs — each person an essential and integral support beam to the overall success of the structure.

Looking around the conference room, listening to the laughter, factoids, and badinage, one can’t help but feel a sense of calm. These people are actually trying to save the world. And if anyone can, they can — one neighborhood at a time.

Dark days or bright opportunities?

Photo: iStockphoto

There are, however, two contemporary thinkers for whom this question is primal: William McDonough, green architect and designer, and Derrick Jensen, neo-tribal environmentalist and philosopher. They epitomize the vanguard of the new green zeitgeist. They are the elemental planners of a future sustainable society.

Both visionaries are mythically Shakespearean in the quirk, richness, and lyrical beauty of their respective evangelizing characters. But one is Establishment, the other Counterculture. One wears a bow tie, the other wears beads. One comes from the corporate aristocracy, educated at Dartmouth and Yale; the other from working-class Spokane, Wash. and the Colorado School of Mines. One founded three revolutionary companies; the other keeps the company of revolutionaries.

One was named Time Magazine‘s “Hero of the Planet” and is the only recipient of the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development. The other lists more modest encomiums, but to many in the movement, he is every bit as much a hero.

Though these two men share a common belief — that industrial civilization, with its outrageous fortune, is killing the planet, plunging all life into a veritable sea of troubles — they represent two sides of the most important question of our age: Is civilization worth saving?

McDonough says “yes,” and is prepared to suffer the slings and arrows required to make it work. Jensen says “no,” and is prepared, in a manner of speaking, to take up arms and end the whole experiment.

William McDonough.

Photo: Amy Graves/WireImage

The Priest

The priest, by his very nature, derives his faith from pre-existing dogma, which he believes is the One True Way. In the case of William McDonough, the dogma is that technology and human ingenuity can solve virtually any crisis.

Some of McDonough’s more prominent projects include the Lewis Center at Oberlin College, a building that was designed to clean its own wastewater and produce more energy than it consumes, and the famed Herman Miller Furniture factory in Michigan, which boosted productivity so much that the building paid for itself. He is co-creator of the design imprints GreenBlue and MBDC, which have become the harbingers of what McDonough calls “the next industrial revolution.” Instead of an extractive, polluting, single-use “cradle to grave” system, McDonough promises everlasting economic life through his renewable Cradle to Cradle system.

McDonough sees civilization as a good thing, something worth saving, and chalks up our current environmental crisis to a kind of growing-pain mentality. He explains that our industrial childhood — the Industrial Revolution — was predicated on the cradle-to-grave lifecycle. Realizing the limits of this system, and its inherent social and environmental toxicity, he endeavored to create an industrial system that mimics the environment, which takes the principles of nature and applies them to design, and in many respects, integrates the built environment with the surrounding ecosystem.

He has become an archetype for the burgeoning field of “sustainable development,” a traveling missionary proselytizing for the church of technology, bearing the gospel of “zero-impact, carbon neutral, closed-loop smart growth” — a fancy way of saying that he designs buildings that are “like trees” and cities that are “like forests.” He presides over the marriage of technology and ecology, and sends the two off with the church’s blessing to be fruitful and multiply, bearing living, breathing structures that take care of themselves.

Imagine a building, enmeshed in the landscape, that harvests the energy of the sun, sequesters carbon and makes oxygen. Imagine on-site wetlands and botanical gardens recovering nutrients from circulating water. Fresh air, flowering plants, and daylight everywhere. Beauty and comfort for every inhabitant. A roof covered in soil and sedum to absorb the falling rain. Birds nesting and feeding in the building’s verdant footprint. In short, a life-support system in harmony with energy flows, human souls, and other living things.

On the surface, his creed seems noble. But is it even possible?

Certainly on an individual-building scale. But his ultimate goal for civilization is not limited simply to a “paradigm shift” in design. He aspires to a more utopian ideal, totally rethinking how we live and work and prosper.

In McDonough’s world, there would be no “trade secrets,” which allow corporations to legally pollute in the name of profit. His world is a transparent one, where the Constitution still reigns, but “freedom” is not reinterpreted as the right to pollute, endanger, or destroy — and our intentions are not measured by what is not against the law.

“Imagine an economy … that purifies air, land, and water …!” GreenBlue’s website boldly claims. If only we’d listen to him, the growing crowd of acolytes wails, we’d have a chance of saving the planet and ourselves! We can have it all!

Though this priest is preaching hope and harmony, a prophet has appeared who is making people distinctly uncomfortable. He is preaching that the church of sustainability has gone astray by placing its faith in technology and valuing human life above all others. He believes the priests have become corrupt, and has nailed his theses to the door.

The Prophet

His prophesy is of a slightly more acerbic and apocalyptic nature, the man in the dark robe, staff in hand, barking in the marketplace of ideas, warning of the perils of hubris. He has gone into the wasteland of industrial society, with its dams and pavement and cell-phone towers, and returned to the ecosphere bearing tales of the end of days. But unlike the biblical Armageddon, this apocalypse is entirely human-made. It is what he calls the “culture of death” — and what we call industrial civilization.

Portrait of Derrick Jensen, part of the Americans Who Tell The Truth collection by artist Robert Shetterly.

Derrick Jensen believes the current “civilization” — a system of sprawl, consumerism, monoculture, industry, war, empire, and a near-total disregard for non-human life that relies on finite resources and is predicated on unlimited growth — is, in a word, insane.

It should be noted that McDonough does not, in principle, disagree with this take on civilization’s path so far. He says quite clearly, “This cradle to grave flow relies on brute force (including fossil fuels and large amounts of powerful chemicals). It seeks universal design solutions (“one size fits all”), overwhelming and ignoring natural and cultural diversity. And it produces massive amounts of waste — something that in nature does not even exist.”

But whereas McDonough believes all we need is faith in technology to persevere, Jensen believes civilization should be brought down as soon as possible in order to save the planet. So much damage has been done, he says, that it’s not a matter of if, but when. The only question becomes, what are you doing to prepare yourself?

The moneychangers in the temple think he’s nuts, not to mention bad for business. But when has the voice of truth ever been welcomed with a drink and a snack?

Jensen’s two-volume, consciousness-shaping testimony Endgame takes as two of its central premises: civilization, especially industrial civilization, is not and can never be sustainable; and civilization is not redeemable. He believes we will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we can’t get people to stop buying McMansions and SUVs, how on earth are we going to teach them to survive when there is no more food?

Moreover, continued development means less access to land, where access to land means access to self-sufficiency, which means access to life. “Land is primal,” he says. “Everything else is based upon it, even culture. There cannot be only one culture.” Because of this, Jensen claims sustainable development is “an obvious oxymoron,” a “synonym for industrialization.”

Despite the purportedly radical and fatalistic nature of his thinking, Jensen’s analysis might be closer to the truth of our situation than the understandably alluring optimism of McDonough. For all his brilliance, McDonough’s dependence on technology might be — stressing might — that fatal flaw, or at best, the myopia that keeps us spinning our wheels trying to save a system that ain’t no good for us.

This thoroughly depressing idea may explain why, throughout history, the prophets were killed in unspeakable manners for being heretical, while the priests continued to promise a better life for the adherents, even in the face of destitution.

One thing is clear: ideologically speaking, neither would exist without the other. In this case, the natural but unwitting binary system between McDonough and Jensen serves to push the issue of sustainability further than before, folding space, continually challenging the very notions upon which our society rests, and forging ideas for a new, perhaps even better future for life on this planet.

Regardless of the rationality of our need for change, it won’t be easy, or pleasant, and it will probably end up looking a lot different than the way things are now. Revolutions tend to do that.