When I first saw images like the one below, from this website I thought the marketing ploy was good and that the intent was strong. It turns out they may be even more accurate than they realized.

The things hindering the green movement and specifically the green building movement, may be more social and psychological than technological or financial at this point. You know those times when you’re talking to someone and they just don’t seem to agree with you and not even for good reasons? (Just for the record, I’m all for disagreeing if you have good reasons.) This just might be the reason.

This was brought to my attention by Andrew John Hoffman and Rebecca Henn, both from the University of Michigan, who have published a paper that was so interesting to me, I had to read it just for fun.

Nerdy? Yes. Still a great paper? Yes.

Overcoming the Social and Psychological Barriers to Green Building

Abstract:      
The green building movement has made tremendous achievements in the past decade. Technological advances in building systems and materials have made revolutionary possibilities in reducing the environmental impact of buildings. Economic achievements in price reductions have made these advances more feasible. And yet, adoption of green buildings within the construction and design fields remains low. The strongest barriers to a more rapid deployment of green buildings are now psychological and social. This paper surveys the form of these barriers, discussing them on three levels - individual, organizational, and institutional. The paper concludes with two categories of strategies for overcoming them: as entrepreneurial opportunities and a challenge for change. In this latter category, seven specific strategies are elaborated: issue framing, targeting the right demographic, education, structural and incentive change, indemnifing the risk, green building standard improvements, and tax reform.

I’ve copied the Abstract here, but I hope that you are nerdy enough to want to go read it. Click here for the Abstract, which has a link to download it from the Social Science Research Network for free. They have an entire section on sustainability, and as of this writing, this was the 4th most downloaded paper.

My last post about sustainability science described the new science that has a focus on sustainability, as is evidenced by the name. It’s an incredibly new field, especially when consideration how long some sciences have existed. I was speaking to a friend who defended his dissertation in biology to receive his PHD last week.

He told me how hard it was for scientists to do research on sustainability. “There’s no data,” he said in reference. Scientists, or students for that matter, have very little information on sustainability in general. If somebody wants to figure out how to create a new cleaner form of energy, they’re starting from scratch. Innovation and ingenuity and time are all required for these changes to take shape. There is no “magic switch” as one teacher put it, that will suddenly turn off everyone’s CO2 emissions or convince everyone to recycle. 

Turns out hybrids are bad and release a lot of CO2 during production and have some other issues, according to some people. And then people tell me how bad hybrids now really are when I talk to them in real life. WHAT?! Scientists didn’t get it completely right the first time? That’s never happened before! I thought everything in life would be as instantaneous as my iPhone. 

Can’t we just give the guys a break? Even a small break? It’s a step. And it’s a step in the right direction. Science, like medicine or art, doesn’t always work they way we think it does. Medicine has taken literally 1000s of years to get this far, and we still have so far to go. Can we be a little patient, and be glad that somebody cares and is trying to make a difference and support their efforts rather than tell them how they failed and should have been perfect the first time? That’s all I ask today.