Welcome to the June edition of the Green Building Journal. It is officially summer and the team at Green Building Pro welcomes the long, warm days that draw us outdoors for time with friends, family and participating in all of our favorite outdoor summer activities.

Sustainability outdoors is as important as indoors, especially while we spend an increasing amount of time in our outside environment over the next few months. Since our outdoor living areas change more frequently than our indoors, due to seasonal variations, we have more options to introduce sustainability projects and the perfect amount of time to rethink our outdoor spaces. With our longer days and some inspiration we can implement change, growth, and creativity in both our clients' and personal outdoor landscape projects.

With all this in mind, this month’s journal is dedicated to sustainable landscape design which involves many aspects ranging from creating a home garden, permaculture, hardscape design, sustainable sites, and neighborhood planning.

We welcome our contributing writers this month. While they come from an array of backgrounds, we embrace their willingness to share their expertise and experience with the landscape.

First up in the article The Sustainable Sites Initiative, April Philips and Keven L. Graham explain and answer questions about how to establish a program that can effectively evaluate a landscape for its level of sustainability as well as quantify its value environmentally, socially, and economically.

While rain might not be in our forecast for a while, landscape designer Craig Stark writes about rain gardens and the environmentally sound principles for collecting and utilizing storm-water runoff to work for us and our landscape rather than sending this precious resource down the storm drain.

Caitilin Pope-Daum, landscape designer from Portland, Oregon is a team member of an innovative, forward thinking, mixed-use project that includes 350 residential units and ground floor retail. This LEED project includes landscape design that is a defining element utilizing a 7,200 square foot ecoroof, edible demonstration garden, and natural stormwater catchment systems.

While this is a snapshot of what you can find in the journal, dive in and enjoy the articles, blogs, videos, and news. Explore the Green Building Pro social media community, engage with other members, and contribute your expertise to collaborate and communicate with other green building professionals.

I welcome you to join us in our community and share stories and photos of your landscape successes and failures. I look forward to chatting with you online and in the Green Building Pro community.

Jenica Egan
Editor in Chief
Green Building Journal
Follow us on Twitter @buildgreenpro

In 2001 a group of landscape architects, on the behalf of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), began discussions with the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) regarding the question of why LEED ^TM did not go further in recognizing the benefits of a sites landscape in the sustainable market place. This discussion quickly turned to “How?” How can we evaluate a site landscape, or a landscape that has differing regional values, purpose, and is vastly different in function? How do we evaluate a landscape that is constantly changing? With these questions and challenges, work began to look at how a program could be established that does evaluate the landscape for its level of sustainability and began to quantify its value environmentally, socially and the economics associated with it. Landscape Architects have been providing a range of these services for many years and have been creating landscapes that are environmentally based. Historically, there have been good examples of developments based on what we now look at as sustainable or green design. Yet, there was no recognized program that determined or established benchmarks for the outdoor site and its functions like LEED does for the building.
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My name is Craig Stark, Owner, Landscape Designer, and Consultant of Ecoscapes Sustainable Landscaping. I graduated from the University of Minnesota, with a degree in environmental design in 2004. Since then I have immersed myself in rain gardens and native plants as a solution to stormwater problems and loss of habitat for native fauna.

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The grand opening of Green Building Expo was a great success, with over 2000 attendees participating in 18 hours of conference sessions over the two-day kickoff. And even though it was just last month, we are already planning for the next event. If you missed the expo or didn’t get a chance to see all of the presentations, all of the sessions are now available online and accessible at any time.

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The Cyan is a mixed-use residential building located in downtown Portland, Oregon. Sixteen stories tall, it includes 350 residential units and ground floor retail. The Cyan has just been certified LEED Gold. Landscape design is a defining element of the project, as over half of the building footprint is either vegetated ecoroof or pedestrian-oriented open space. This landscape is a case study in how both thoughtful design and a guiding agenda of sustainability can receive equal attention in one project, and how this process can lead to expressions of sustainability as high design features in themselves.
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Within the context of sustainable landscape architecture, water efficiency serves a pivotal role. Many of these water efficiency ideas are not new, merely recycled from an earlier era – a time before satellite irrigation controllers, a time before PVC irrigation and a time before the irrigation we know today. Once upon a time, professionals practiced a holistic approach to landscape, architecture and horticulture. Those “ancient” approaches can still be found in the third world and in esoteric books and periodicals that are themselves recycling ideas for a new generation of thinkers – sustainably-minded thinkers. Together, these age-old sustainable methodologies and new emerging technologies result in life-cycle cost savings, a better and healthier environment, and enhance the very social fabric of those places where they are utilized.
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My office has a nice view, at first glance.

Sitting and searching for inspiration, I look deeper into the landscape outside. Its beauty slowly begins to lose appeal. Maybe it’s because of the heavily rectilinear environment that my mind is currently encased by; the box of a room I’m sitting in, the rectangular piece of wood I’ve spread my things out on, the square paneling on the walls or the two square windows I peer out of. Or maybe it is because my view looks out to a bunch of bad design decisions. This “lovely vista” encompasses an overgrazed/under-managed parcel of land with an inefficient water storage system and a fully exposed McMansion straight out of the movie Beetle Juice. I’ve got to get out of here.
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Owens Corning is one of the leading providers of building materials systems and composite solutions. By initiating sustainable practices they have improved their operations, increased the recycled content in their products and accelerated energy efficiency adoption in the built environment. Watch as Gale Tedhams covers Owens' updated fiberglass offering, the need for green jobs, and the current rise in green product coverage.

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Sustainability and landscape go hand in hand, but to understand sustainability from a livable principal you must put form in the background and set the focus on function. The two do not have to live entirely separate, but the thing that has driven landscape design for centuries must become secondary to the primary purpose of function. A sustainable landscape does not have to leave beauty out of the picture, but it is there for many more reasons than just aesthetics.
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Sustainable Site Design by Claudia Dinep and Kristin Schwab is an excellent resource for those involved or interested in practicing sustainable landscape architecture. Within it the authors outline how sustainability in landscape has evolved over generations and the existing frameworks available for creating and evaluating sustainable design.

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