For those of us who are aware of the environmental impact of buildings, it has become increasingly difficult to justify the construction of new ones at all. While new information resources – comparative matrices, computer databases – are helping us more and more to choose the least environmentally degrading building materials, we must still pause and reflect on the fact that all buildings, to varying degrees, negatively impact the environment.

The increasing calls for “sustainability” in new building design and construction, while sorely needed, are in some ways misleading. We simply cannot maintain, much less “sustain,” the current level of consumption of natural resources in the construction industry, regardless of the source or nature of the materials. We cannot, for example, recycle newspapers for insulation only to make bigger houses. Instead, we should concentrate more on “sufficiency.” A word that means “to be enough for . . .” or “to satisfy the requirements of . . .”

In many urban areas, existing buildings may be sufficient to meet the huge demand for both commercial and residential needs. Utilization of the embodied energy in their materials and improvements to their thermal efficiency could be promoted with economic development incentives. Reinvestment financing and the diverting of infrastructure moneys that subsidize sprawl could help promote urban redevelopment and, in so doing, recognize the sufficient building stock already standing.

Most of our urban areas are already overbuilt, with huge inventories of vacant, underutilized buildings, poorly planned urban tracts of unused parking lots, industrial brownfields, and crime-ridden neighborhoods. It seems that environmental design and construction today should have as its main goal the reclamation of these areas and not building “new” environmentally friendly buildings.

Urban planners and ecologists, landscape architects, economic visionaries and development officers, industrial ecologists, architects, and builders all need to pool their skills and implement the changes needed to “un-build” and then rebuild urban ecosystems in America. Meanwhile, as we continue to put off implementing solutions, our children observe the cumulative effects of two generations of overconsumption – the harm inflicted to both our urban and natural environment.

There is hope. Change is happening. Both single-handedly and in determined groups, we are making slow but impressive improvements in assessing and reclaiming the health of urban ecosystems; Chattanooga, TN, for example, has made an impressive commitment to its urban environment. These changes will continue if we can develop viable solutions and, most importantly, initiate successful implementation.

We need to make small but steady gains and pick the low-hanging fruit first: we should focus on the adaptive reuse of existing buildings, historic preservations, and brownfield initiatives such as those currently conducted by the EPA in over 50 cities across America. We need to decrease the demands of transportation on urban centers and bring people back to city centers.

Rethinking the scale of buildings and past development in our urban areas is more important than the new thinking of sustainability. Recognizing this is an important first step in reducing our need for “new and more” and understanding how much is “enough.” By redeveloping existing land and buildings, we can meet our urban needs while at the same time decreasing sprawl into the surrounding natural systems – the systems that best embody the meaning of sustainability.

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