The holiday weekend is now over and the month of June is upon us. Pretty soon the summer season will officially start, and we can continue to focus our efforts on the landscape around us. The Green Building Journal this month will focus on sustainable landscape design, which goes along very well with the start of the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) Pilot Program.

This program first started as separate projects within the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, and then in 2005 both groups joined together at a Sustainable Sites Summet in Austin Texas. By 2006 the United States Botanical Garden joined as a major player, and now over 11 other stakeholder groups are involved including the US Green Building Council. SITES is the first rating system for sustainable landscapes, and as I mentioned this month marks the start of the Pilot Program with over 175 projects involved. For the next two years a Super Bowl village, industrial park, and power plant among other locations will be participating in environmentally friendly land development.

Similar to other rating systems, the Initiative's goals will be to go beyond conservation and replenish the natural environment around built spaces. The diversity of building and land types will ensure ample feedback and data to fine tune rating system specifics. Currently the rating system consists of a four-star rating guide with a 250-point scale. Each pilot project must achieve all 15 of the prerequisites and earn at least 100 credit points to then be labeled Pilot Certified. After the two-year pilot program the group will revise the final rating system and put together a reference guide containing best practices, to be released sometime in 2013.

There are those that say we have too many environmental certifications on the books, and to some degree they're right. Many already touch the landscape in one way or another, including LEED with its Sustainable Sites category. This system steers its commitment not towards the built environment however, but land development in general, and applies to sites with or without buildings. I believe this overall direction will help it stand out against the likes of other systems, and will hopefully shed new light on issues we may have forgotten or neglected to attend to.

If anyone is involved with one of these projects or is more familiar, I would love to hear back in the comments. 

Addition - As soon as I wrote the above I realized that at least three projects are located in Santa Barbara. Hopefully we'll get some time soon to check them out and report on how people feel about this new system.