Day 7: Built Environment

Today you will learn from expert guest Eric Corey Freed about the built environment, why it exists, and how we might positively influence this system to solve climate change.

Summary

Guest: Eric Corey Freed

Eric Corey Freed is Founding Principal of organicARCHITECT, a visionary design leader in biophilic and regenerative design.  As a licensed architect, Eric brings over 20 years of experience in helping architects, builders and homeowners use sustainability to improve the design and operational savings for thousands of buildings around the country.  Eric has helped thousands of companies monetize sustainability by showing them how to cut their real estate operations costs in half.

Eric co-developed the Sustainable Design programs at the Academy of Art University and University of California Berkeley Extension, and currently teaches at Boston Architectural College.  He has served on the boards of the Inland Empire Chapter of the USGBC, Architects/Designers & Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), as well as the advisory boards of over a dozen other organizations.  Companies like Autodesk, Pixar, Apple and Lowe’s have hired Eric to help them incorporate deeper sustainability into their businesses.

Eric is the author of 11 books, including "Green Building & Remodeling for Dummies", a bestseller with over 200,000 copies in print, and "Sustainable School Architecture."  His how-to book, “Green$ense for your Home” won the 2011 Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors.  He is also co-founder of Architect Exam Prep, providing innovative study guides for young architects.

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Explain succinctly what the built environment is from first principles.

At its essence, the built environment is theoretically any sort of habitat enclosure touched by humanity.

Why the separation between the built environment and nature? What role is it playing in our lives?    

We have binary thinking: we think, okay, if that's nature, this must be the building. And if this is the building that must be nature. And so I think we're kind of wired for binary thinking in a way.

We have decades of studies showing us that if you connect people back to nature:

• it can improve patient recovery times
• it can boost student performance and test scores
• it can boost reading comprehension
• it could increase collaboration in workspaces aid to employee retention.

How does the built environment interact with the problem of climate change?

To create our buildings we go through a process of excavating, mining, and harvesting all these raw materials and resources, then processing them and filtering them and heating them up and cooling them down and molding them.

The process of of constructing building and then operate our buildings Is responsible for about half of all the climate change emissions, mostly because we use immense amounts of electricity and natural gas to heat and cool our buildings and light them and everything else, but also just the sheer amount of effort that goes into making concrete or steel.

A lot of the assumptions that we had around buildings are no longer true. Fundamentally, we haven't really changed the technology that much. And so a lot of the assumptions that we used 20th century around heating and cooling and storms is now completely out of date.  

How might we positively influence this system to help solve climate change?

We must address 5 buckets:

• Embodied Carbon in Materials: Finding materials that don't admit as much carbon and making of them. So that's why you've seen a lot of pushing for engineered wood, like mass timber, because they zero carbon.
• Operational Carbon: Once the building's built, how much energy is it going to use? Is that energy made from electricity? Is that electricity coming from renewable places like the sun and the wind, or is it burning coal to make it?
• Building Health: Not putting any cancer causing chemicals in a building at all, what we call chemicals of concern.
• Water: It takes a lot of energy to process, pump, filter, and deliver the water that we take for granted every day, right. But also, the way the Earth is designed, all the fresh water on the Earth is all the fresh water that's ever been on the Earth.
• Waste: 25% of all landfills are made of construction waste, so buildings are really largely responsible. Changing that take make waste approach to what I call a harvest make and remake over and over and over again, kind of bending those loops into what we call a circular economy.

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Additional Resources

• Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming by Paul Hawken
• Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken
• Project Drawdown
• Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise: The Interface Model by Ray Anderson
• Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart

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Top Skills To Learn

Our guest recommends learning the following skills:

• Gumption to get started.
• Presenting ideas:  however you can present yourself or present your ideas, whether it's through writing or speaking or singing or dance or whatever, whatever your format is, doesn't matter.
• Filtering:  taking complex ideas and making them very understandable to a wider audience.

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Activity

Activity: Home Energy Assessment

Conduct a simple energy assessment of your living space. Identify areas where energy may be wasted, such as drafty windows or outdated appliances. Create a checklist of potential energy-saving upgrades and research ways to make your living space more energy-efficient.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.