http://www.cascadiagbc.org/lbl The argument about whether or not the tremendous challenges our planet faces - now and in future years - can be reversed by proactive human action falls short. We have enacted the planet’s decline, and together we can and must move to affect vital regeneration. Yet the heated debates over defining how and the means by which this action will take place wage on. Amid the politics and global chatter that translate to more talk and less action, a few enlightened groups around the world are engaged in leading a straight-forward, inspired charge with impacting vision. In the heart of the United States’ Pacific Northwest, a veritable hotbed of sustainable development and leader in the op-timization of natural resources, a movement is emerging that has the potential to rival anything else of the sort in the world with respect to its aggressive approach, and potential lasting impact for change. Moving beyond the once revolutionary LEED (Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design) scope of strategies and requirements for building green, Cascadia’s “Living Building Challenge” meets once unimagined sustainability standards in areas of: Site, Water, Energy, Materials, Indoor Quality, Beaty + Inspiration, and Process + Leadership - breathing life into buildings as not only self-sustaining structures, but those that harmoniously give back more than they take from the environments in which they’re built. Living Buildings. Literally. Bringing to mind the age-old parable that ‘if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime’, Cascadia’s Living Building Leader Program aims to cultivate its own crop of green building leaders that will enable unprecedented strides in the design and construction industry for generations to come. The Living Building Leader Program is, as Cascadia eloquently puts it: “a series of intensive, advanced eLearning ses-sions in green building topics, taught by experts in the diverse fields that underpin the multidisciplinary field that is green building.” The program is aimed at green building pros worldwide, many of whom may have already acquired previous training such as LEED Professional Accreditation, and are interested in supplementing their green building chops in a way that will most certainly distinguish them in their respective fields of Architecture, Engineering, Design, and Construction. Cas-cadia’s message is clear: Together as inspired and educated industry leaders, we can be agents of hope and affect great change. And we must do it now, for the planet’s sake. by Russ Lowe *To learn more about the Living Building Leader program, please visit: http://www.cascadiagbc.org/lbl
