Earth Day and the New Pragmatic Environmentalism

By Timothy Beatley

Few individuals hold a more iconic status in American environmental activism than Denis Hayes. An idealistic 25-year-old who dropped out of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard when he was tapped by Sen. Gaylord Nelson to run the nation's first Earth Day in 1970, he has remained an important figure ever since.

Hayes's approach to the first event was to reach out to high schools and colleges and to tap into the outrage resulting from the Vietnam War. Those were heady times, when protest seemed meaningful and there was optimism about the power of forcing political action on the environment. While much was accomplished in that era (the Clean Air and Water acts and the Endangered Species Act, among others), environmental problems today are more global and seem more daunting in scale and impact, with climate change most intractable.

Hayes is now almost 70, and in a recent interview with me in Seattle, it was clear that he is still an optimist. He wants to see the kids take over Earth Day again and believes in the potential offered by the growing interconnectedness among people, especially in younger generations. "We have now almost free communication with everybody around the world," he says, noting that U.S. students may have close friends in Pakistan or Australia. "There may be an opportunity now," Hayes tells me, "to build that global consciousness that we've always sort of dreamed of."

While Denis Hayes still actively plans Earth Day events, he spends much of his daily energy on local change as director of the Bullitt Foundation, which provides funding for organizations working on the environment and sustainability in the Pacific Northwest.

The latest chapter in Hayes's life demonstrates the value of tangible, on-the-ground results and the importance of community planning and design in tackling many of the problems we face. The foundation's new headquarters building, the Bullitt Center in Seattle, is emblematic of that shift. It is an exercise in pushing the envelope, in setting new standards and aspirations for what we design and build. It also shows that small, incremental improvements in energy efficiency and carbon reduction just won't cut it today.

A transformative, living building

Last year the online forum World Architecture News hailed the Bullitt Center as the "sustainable building of the year." And no wonder — it takes green building to a new level by setting a higher standard for urban office buildings.

It is designed to be one of the first to receive Net Zero Energy Building Certification under the Living Building Challenge. In the words of that ambitious and rigorous green building standard, "Imagine a building designed and constructed to function as elegantly and efficiently as a flower: a building informed by its bioregion's characteristics, and that generates all of its own energy with renewable resources, captures and treats all of its water, and operates efficiently and for maximum beauty."

The Bullitt Center is the physical manifestation of these lofty goals. It is awash in daylight. Tall exterior triple-gazed windows open out, allowing natural ventilation, and are designed to take advantage of the stack effect. The structure is unique looking, in part because of the extensive overhang of the rooftop, designed to accommodate photovoltaic panels that meet all of the building's energy needs.

Hayes calls the Bullitt Center a structure that functions like a living, natural system. This is most evident in its comprehensive approach to water. The building collects and treats its stormwater (through a roof-integrated wetland). All the water falling on the building and its site will eventually make its way back into the ground; it functions, Hayes says, "just as if it were a Douglas fir forest."

The building also collects and reuses its gray water and black water — the latter through a series of aerobic digesters in the basement of the building. It is the first commercial office building to fully use composting foam flush toilets, which dramatically reduce water use.

The six-story, 52,000-square-foot building is located in an urban, walkable neighborhood. While it has elevators, what Hayes dubbed the "irresistible stairwell" — a beautiful Douglas fir staircase with enviable views of downtown Seattle — was designed to encourage the occupants to take the stairs as often as possible.

Many design elements were excluded by existing codes and required the active involvement and support of the city. This has resulted Seattle's adoption of a Living Building Ordinance, and many more localities in the Northwest are embracing this idea. "You come up with independently verified models that show that you will perform better than a building that is built to code and they give you an exemption from the prescriptive standards," says Hayes. The Bullitt Center uses one-fifth the energy of a building built to code, Hayes points out.

The ethical and value positions of the building's design are equally impressive. All the wood is FSC-certified and sourced from forests within 500 miles. "We paid 10 percent more for it," he says, in part because it was sourced in a way that helped protect salmon, preserved old growth wood, and used no herbicides — "a bunch of things you ought to be doing because the forest will still be producing wood 2,000 years from now." Further, Hayes stipulated a 250-year design life for the structure.

For Hayes the Bullitt Center has clearly been a labor of love and in some ways a tangible counterbalance to his political activism of the 1970s. It is a new kind of environmental activism — one that articulates ethical obligations and value commitments in ways equally tangible and perhaps more convincingly than any Earth Day speech.

Timothy Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities at the University of Virginia, where he directs the Biophilic Cities Project.

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Image: As director of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, Denis Hayes oversaw construction of the Bullitt Center. He says the sustainable building 'functions as elegantly and efficiently as a flower,' and its central stairwell — designed to encourage occupants to take the stairs — is a thing of beauty. photo by Ben Schneider.