MOVING BEYOND SUSTAINABILITY In theory, sustainability should allow us to continue to meet the needs of this and future generations. That was the point made by the Brundtland Commission in their definition of sustainability. But that does not address a more basic question of whether or not we should be continuing the current situation. The ecosystems that support safe habitation for communities around the world are degrading or degraded. The climate is changing, and slowing the amount of carbon being put into the atmosphere will not reduce the existing overcharge. Arguably, sustainability is an insufficient mental framework for how we address environmental decline and its impacts on societies.
For many, the mental framework of sustainability is about getting to zero—zero waste; zero emissions; zero carbon footprint; and such. Pursuit of a goal of zero is a worthwhile and important step, as it moves us to stop doing additional harm to the environment. What this approach does not do is restore the things that have been degraded or destroyed.
Arguably it is time to move beyond net zero. The next step would be to restore or regenerate ecosystems and their services. There are many services that nature provides to us as a consequence of how ecosystems function. Intact ecosystems have amazing capacities to store carbon, clean water, produce abundant food and multiply species.
Where possible, this involves restoring the ecology of a place, and a deeper exploration of beneficial human interactions with that ecosystem. Indigenous cultures can be a source of knowledge about both the function, and frequently, the management of a healthy ecosystem. The concept of pristine wilderness, untouched by humans, is foreign to many indigenous cultures. There is evidence that significant habitats, like some of the savannahs of eastern and middle North America, and rainforests in the Amazon Basin and Borneo, coevolved with centuries of human interaction. That is not to say that all indigenous cultures had salutary relationships with their surrounding ecology, but those that did have much to teach us.
In more urbanised areas, removing buildings and restoring the local ecology is not possible. Instead, the focus would be to replicate the level of services that would have been provided by that ecosystem. This would be a form of regenerative development. It involves crafting of a series of tools to assist in advancing regional sustainability efforts beyond current practices toward a regenerative approach to building design and community development. The goals of such an endeavour are to connect people to natural systems, align local ecosystems with larger regional systems, and integrate comprehensive ecosystem impacts into planning and decision-making. Using this holistic approach, it is possible to address some of the most intractable design issues to owners and their project teams, while fundamentally strengthening the connection between the built environment and nature for all.
Fundamentally, we need to start with place, specifically the place for which we are designing. What is the ecosystem that would naturally occur in this place if we were not putting a building or infrastructure there? In the United States, this can be determined by looking at state-by-state maps produced by the US Forest Service that break down bio-regions into finer-grained ecosystems. Once the underlying ecosystem of a place is identified, then begins the task of researching the functions that it accomplished. How were nutrients cycled, and in what amounts? Did it sequester carbon, and how much on an annual basis? How much precipitation fell on the site, and where did it go? What was the suite of species that made up the ecosystem, and was there a keystone species? These and other questions can define the ecosystem services that were provided on this site.
1 Cloud Forest Dome at Gardens by the Bay, Singapore 2 Diagrams comparing the ecosystems in 1609 and 2011 3 111 8th
Avenue building
From this research a set of metrics can be developed. These typically include measures such as kilogrammes of carbon sequestered per hectare per year, or litres of rain per square metre per year, and then how much of that water is infiltrated, evapotranspired, or runs off. These amounts are then translated into equivalent amounts for the built environment. If there is an existing structure on the site, then the same
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