Millennium Seminars

Individuals Can Enact Change, Panelists Say

By Lauren Gregg, News Services

Society as a whole needs to change its thinking about the environment, but as we wait for that movement to begin, each individual can do something to make his or her home and the environment more sustainable.

That was the consensus among the panelists at October 16’s ‘Green Millennium’ Seminar, where North Carolina native and Emmy Award winning journalist Charlie Rose moderated a panel discussion on sustainable design.

“Anybody can make a residence efficient,” architect Thom Mayne said, “and there’s absolutely zero reason not to.”

The standing-room-only event featured Mayne – affectionately known as the “bad boy” of architecture - public health expert Dr. Dick Jackson and Marvin J. Malecha, dean of the NC State University College of Design.

“In this country, [we] have the development mentality which causes energy costs to not be factored in[to design and construction],” Malecha said. “The European mentality of building a building isn’t a 10-year flip or even a month flip.

“The [environmental] message is not going out to builders who want to flip a house in as short a time as possible,” he said, “and when homebuyers purchase a home, they are not asking what the energy costs are going to be in that home.”

Mayne, the first American architect in 14 years to be awarded the Pritzker Prize - regarded as the world’s highest architectural honor - said that individuals may not be embracing sustainable architecture simply because our leaders aren’t.

“The current administration has no interest in this problem, and little desire to make it a high priority,” he said.

Malecha - president-elect of the American Institute of Architects - agreed.

“In the 1980’s we shoved energy to the back burner, and that has caught up with us,” he said. “I hope our new president has a respect for science.

“It’s unbelievable to me to have scientists’ work be turned and twisted,” Malecha said. “When you fill the regulator positions with people who ought to be regulated, you lose the balance of your government.”

Jackson brought a health expert’s perspective to the discussion of sustainable architecture, offering ways to help combat our nation’s obesity problem in the process.

“We need to build communities that entice us to exercise and buildings that entice us to walk up stairs instead of using the elevator,” he said.

Jackson, the former director of the Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control, said in order for us to affect significant change in our environment, said change should begin with our children and within our education system.

“Build schools so kids can cycle or walk to school,” he said. “Build them the way we did back in the 1920’s. Stop paving over the best farmland in the world.”

The Millennium Seminars series continues on Jan. 31, 2008, when former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich discusses “China, India and the Future of Everything.” Reich is currently a professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and is a celebrated author and editor.