From less bad to more good

The environmental agenda is sometimes seen as being about reducing impacts, mitigating emissions, avoiding harmful chemicals, and so on. In other words it is about reducing the damage we do to the planet. The sustainability agenda extends this to the human side: reducing social injustice and poverty, maintaining human rights, avoiding deterioration in quality of life, etc. Again, the focus is on being less harmful that we otherwise might be.

These are of course desirable goals. But they suffer from two problems. First, because they are usually expressed in negative terms, they are not very motivating. Being less bad is a good thing, but hardly inspiring. Second, they are insufficient. We don’t need simply to reduce harmful outcomes; we need to create positive ones. We don’t want a less unsustainable world, we want a sustainable one.

We need to take a leaf from the playbooks of industrial ecology, biomimicry and lifecycle assessment, and begin to look for restorative and regenerative approaches. We need a positive agenda, one that will improve environmental and social conditions. That is the agenda we are following in the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (www.cirs.ubc.ca). CIRS will be a 50,000 sq. ft. building that is net positive on water quality (it will rely entirely on rainwater and improve the quality of the water flowing through the building), net positive on energy and carbon emissions (adding CIRS to the UBC campus will reduce UBC’s energy use and carbon emissions) and net positive on structural carbon (the building will sequester more carbon than the carbon emitted in building it and decommissioning it at the end of its life). We also plan to improve the productivity, health and happiness of the building inhabitants over time.

How can our buildings and cities be regenerative, and enhance ecological and social conditions. I think that’s a good question to be asking.