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.