Transforming the debate on green building leadership

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Chris Forney is the director of expansion markets for Brightworks.

“Oregon no longer a leader” was the collective sentiment of headlines summarizing the U. S. Green Building Council’s recent list of top 10 U.S. states by square footage receiving LEED certification in 2011. Ranking 12th, Oregon missed the list.

The headlines and articles prompted a lively noon-hour discussion among my colleagues here at Brightworks. That discussion led to thought-provoking new views of the issue that clarify a path to Oregon’s continued leadership in sustainability.

First we correlated the tally of LEED square footage to each state's GDP. Among the top 10 states on the list plus Oregon, LEED certification is strongly correlated with economic activity, as measured by state GDP. In other words, Oregon is delivering LEED certified space in proportion to the size of our economy.

However, of the 10 states on the USGBC’s list plus Oregon (see charts below), our economy is the second smallest, with a GDP of $166.7 billion, trailed only by Washington, DC’s $90.7 billion GDP.

With LEED certification and state GDP so closely correlated, there may be a de facto limit to the amount of space we can certify here. Moreover, as LEED becomes mainstream and other states with larger economies certify more square footage, they will rise up the list. This combination will lower Oregon’s LEED ranking to a level closer to our GDP ranking, currently NO. 25 out of 50 states.

While it may be inevitable, this will leave Oregonians unsatisfied. Historically, we have not been average performers in environmental stewardship. Instead, we have earned the mantle of leadership that we enjoy to this day through stand-out achievements. But to maintain a position of leadership, we will need to think more broadly about our cause.

The second chart shows the country’s 10 top emitters of carbon plus Oregon. As the chart shows, our impacts are relatively small — 1/15th the largest emitter (Texas) and 1/37th the emissions of the top 10 emitters combined.

LEED square footage are from 2011 and sourced from the U.S. Green Building Council. State GDP numbers are from 2010, the last year with conclusive data, and sourced from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The USGBC’s 2011 ranking of U.S. states by LEED certified square footage per capita used 2010 state population numbers to calculate rankings. Metric tons of carbon emissions are for the years 1990-2007, released 2009, and sourced from the U.S. EPA report Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990 – 2007.

In sustainability-related professions, it is common to hear the phrase "transformative change" used to characterize the outcomes needed to reverse human impacts on the natural environment. Given the magnitude of those impacts, and the rate at which they are worsening, the alternative — incremental change — is simply insufficient.

But when Oregon’s economy has 1/37th the impact of the 10 economies ahead of it, we are guilty of incrementalism when we focus only on those sustainability measures that take place within our borders. It's time to take Oregon's leadership beyond Oregon's borders.

For example, Brightworks has launched what we call an "expansion markets" strategy where we export our distinctly Oregonian expertise to places like California, New York, Ohio and Illinois where there is high GDP, high associated environmental impact (as measured by carbon emissions), and lower rates of expertise in sustainability than we enjoy here in Oregon. Outside the United States, our work has taken us to Columbia, Peru, Sweden, China and South Korea.

Every square foot we help clients LEED certify outside of Oregon may lower our ranking on a top 10 list in any given year, but it will quicken the adoption elsewhere — where impacts are much greater — of the green building innovations that Oregonians pioneered.

In 1978, James MacGregor Burns published the seminal classic, "Leadership," in which he introduced the distinction between transactional and transformational leaders. Transactional leaders initiate mutually beneficial exchanges. By contrast, transformational leaders raise others to higher levels of moral purpose.

Oregonians have long viewed environmental stewardship through green building as a morally purposeful cause. Coupled with this moral clarity, our many tangible actions have led to our leadership credibility. For this reason, we must continue to advance this cause within our state.

But if we look long and hard at the scale of the impacts we are working to reverse, we must acknowledge that increasing per-capita LEED certification rates in Oregon will still leave the natural world imperiled. We must now assume the mantle of transformational leadership, heightening moral purpose elsewhere, where impacts are greater, and taking the Oregon way to new markets in pursuit of truly transformative change.