U.S. Green Building Council Establishing a Resilience Working Group

The LEED Platinum plaque at the Brock Environmental Center in Virginia Beach. While the project preceded the pilot credits on Resilient Design, it would have been able to meet the credits without too much difficulty. Photo: Alex Wilson

Following completion of the LEED pilot credits on Resilient Design last year, those of us who worked on them have remained involved in advancing the credits. We’ve worked on getting the word out about the credits. We’ve responded to questions that have come in about them. We’ve tracked projects using the credits. And we’ve discussed tweaks to the credits and how they could be adapted to other LEED products (such as LEED for Homes and LEED for existing Buildings).

With all this ongoing effort, we thought it would make sense to establish a standing LEED Resilience Working Group at the U.S. Green Building Council to carry out this work, and we proposed that idea to the USGBC. I’m pleased to report that the LEED Steering Committee approved our proposal to establish such a Working Group.

Volunteers sought

In keeping with USGBC policies, when committees and working groups are established, membership in those groups is opened up to USGBC members, and there is a process to select among applicants in filling those committees and working groups.

That’s where we are right now. An announcement about the Resilience Working Group was posted on the USGBC website at the end of May, and members have until June 30^th to apply for membership on the Working Group. I understand that over 20 applications have so far come in.

There are no guarantees as to whom will be chosen for the Working Group, but if you’re interested, take a look at the notice that is posted online. The application takes a bit of time to complete, but it isn’t too onerous.

If I end up on the Working Group, I’ll look forward to ongoing participation in these important discussions. I’m excited about the tremendous response to the invitation—even though it will make the selection process pretty difficult for the LEED Steering Committee.

# # # # #

Along with founding the Resilient Design Institute in 2012, Alex is founder of BuildingGreen, Inc. To keep up with his latest articles and musings, you can sign up for his Twitter feed. To receive e-mail notices of new blogs, sign up at the top of the page.

David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.