Can We Design Buildings That Give Back?

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Avi: [00:00:00] Welcome to Deep Green. I'm your host, Avi Rajagopal, the editor in chief of the Architecture and Interior Design magazine. Metropolis Metropolis recently released our first US Sustainable Design report, a deep dive into the state of sustainability in American architecture and design. So this month and next I'm going to be talking to people who have a bird's eye view of how we can build sustainably here in the United States, what wins we've had, what challenges remain, and where we should focus our efforts.

My guest today is Lindsay Baker, the CEO of Living Future, a nonprofit that represents, I think, the most progressive and comprehensive vision for the built environment where buildings are created in harmony with life itself. Through the Living Building Challenge, living future certifies buildings that are regenerative in that they give back more to nature than they take from nature.[00:01:00]

It also runs declare the premier transparency label that discloses the ingredients and chemicals in the products we use in buildings. Lindsay herself has had a career encompassing every role possible in sustainable design and construction, whether as a program manager for the Lead certification program in the early two thousands, or more recently as WeWork's first ever head of global Sustainability and impact.

Lindsay is also co-host of a podcast designed the Future, so that should be our next listen after this episode of Deep Green. And I should say that I work with Lindsay in my capacity as a board member of Living Future. It's such a pleasure to have you here with me today.

Lindsay: I am so happy to be here.

I'm such a fan of the podcast of your podcast and of you personally, and, totally not surprised that your introduction of me was just like entirely humbling. and like you said, it so well. I'm looking forward to going back to this recording about what it is that we do at Living Future, so we can use that.

Thanks Avi.

Avi: I'm only saying what you do, you [00:02:00] know? and I think actually maybe that's a good place for us to start here. Can you explain maybe in a little more detail than I did, what Living Future's Vision is for the Built Environment? What's the big goal that you think we should be working towards?

Lindsay: Yeah. So I, I guess I'll, um, I like a story and so I will say how I think how it came to be that we focus on what we focus on. But I do believe that it, it does start with a, a vision idea. And, and I guess the, the context of that vision was that living future. Emerged out of having been the Cascadia Green Building Council at a time back the, in the early two thousands actually.

And then, um, the Living Building Challenge was launched and it has evolved into this nonprofit that focuses on things that all sort of relate to each other within this ecosystem that the Living Building Challenge kind of birthed. And, um, all of it came out of this idea from those years when the Green [00:03:00] building community was just getting started.

I was there, you know, thinking about these questions from this philosophical standpoint that the green building movement started with, which was how do we get people to start on a path? Um, you know, 95% of our energy at that time was spent on getting people on a path towards sustainability, towards, um.

You know, better ecological and human health impacts for the built environment. But the questions were the first steps. How do you get them to think about and know that there are volatile organic compounds in paints and that we should really do something about that? You know? Or that energy efficiency is.

You know, cost saving measure, all those kinds of things. That was the focus at that time. And I'll say like for me personally, that was, that res really resonated to sort of imagine like the, you know, I mean the metaphor I've gotten most sick of, and probably most of us have over these past 20 or so 30 [00:04:00] years is low hanging fruit.

But that was like, that's the reason we talk about it so much is because that was sort of how we started the green building movement. Like let's do the easy stuff first. So meanwhile out there in the Pacific Northwest, a group of folks was starting to think not about the low hanging fruit, but about the end goal of where we were trying to get to in the building industry and starting more from that perspective.

That now is pretty common for us. Like we think about that a lot when we think about things like the Paris Agreement for climate change. That's an end goal thing. It's about where we need to get to as a. Plan it, you know, by 20 50, 20 30, et cetera. Um, but back in the early two thousands, it was a group of folks who were really starting to think about, what the end goal might feel like, and then therefore how we, how do we get there?

Um, so it was really, you know, planning backwards, go back, casting into what we needed to get done. And those ambitions were climate ambitions, they were water ambitions, they were equity ambitions, [00:05:00] health ambitions. So really multi attributes. That's one of the things that I, I find people don't understand about the Living, living Future Living Building challenge in general is that like, you know, since groups like well took a specific facet of things, that that being a focus on health, people are always like, what's your.

Niche. And if anything, our niche is figuring out and trying to help people get to that end goal faster, which is super cool and I love it. 'cause it means that we get to work on, you know, those ambitious questions and we get to work with the kind of people who are ready to say, we have to realize this regenerative future as soon as possible.

Like, there's like a little bit of impatience there and a little bit of, yeah. Um, the belief that if you actually can envision that future really clearly now, you'll get there faster than if you're just saying to yourself, okay, well we should really get these VOCs out of the paint. Um, so it's a, it's a community that, uh, of folks that really believes that we need to, we [00:06:00] need to push faster, we need to push harder.

We need to make these transitions, um, away from the way that we build, um, as fast as possible. And that we have to do that sometimes in really deep and structural ways. So, I don't know, that's real heady, but that's, that's the start of like. Conceptually who we are and what the vision is so that our ultimate vision is a world.

well, our, our mission, let's say is to transform, um, the building industry to a world that is socially just culturally rich and ecologically restorative. and that's let's just like a little bit of our la language there about what we're trying to get to. So it does really involve the active.

Enabling buildings to heal and to regenerate ecologically, but I would also add, you know, our health and our community's health.

Avi: I wanna underscore something you said about this idea that focusing on the end goal, right? Like. What what it is that we're trying to do here is such a reframing of the problem of sustainability [00:07:00] in buildings, as in everything else, because there are some decisions, honestly, that have to be taken at that high level, right?

Otherwise one ends up in all kinds of dead ends and conflicts, and you've seen that over the years through living building Challenge projects too. One has to start out with a big ambition sometimes in order to understand how the pieces fit together. If you focus on one small piece. You get that piece right sometimes maybe at the cost of other pieces.

So, you know, it's, it was such a reframing of the movement at the time and it continues to be pretty much the only organization that's able to encapsulate sort of that larger goal for the built environment. But we'll come to that in a second. You mentioned the Living Building Challenge, metropolis has said, and others have said that it's maybe the most rigorous standard there is for buildings that are, you know, in harmony with life, with nature, with community.

And I think, you know, that's definitely that big goal. But as you said, it birthed a lot of different things, the ideas that we, we recognize the goal, but we also give people. [00:08:00] Tools, incremental tools along the way. Can you talk about some of the big programs at Living Future, especially some of the relatively new ones.

Give us a taste of the kinds of things you have for the broader built environment community.

Lindsay: Yeah, well, honestly, that thinking about the end goal, has been the mindset that we've been in that has helped us create these new programs because we started to realize pretty quickly when the Living Building Challenge came out that there were structural reasons why it was really hard for people to build buildings in the way that we had imagined them.

And one of the biggest. Hard parts of building a genuinely good building in this world that we live in today, and I sort of generally mean like in America or other developed countries, is the stuff you put in the building and your relative knowledge of what it is, what's in it from a chemical perspective, et cetera.

So the very, one of the very first things we did was to launch the Declare program, which is a product labeling program that [00:09:00] helps folks understand its transparency. I'm sure you, you talk about it some on the. Podcast and probably a lot of folks that listen are familiar, but it's basically a nutrition label for products that tells you what's in the product, especially from a materials sort of health and toxicity standpoint.

Um, and it's, it's, it's grown an incredible amount. It's a very popular program and it's a big part of what we do here. So a lot of the work that we've been doing. It's not just on declare as a label, but also in pushing the industry more broadly to adopt and demand transparency on, on what's in their products.

So you see that in a lot of facets of the world today. A i a materials pledge and mindful materials and all these kinds of programs that are really designed to. To help, uh, build that momentum that a lot of that really came out of the Living building challenge. Sort of demanding that people make sure that what they put into these really good regenerative buildings didn't have anything [00:10:00] that was gonna poison humans, humans in it.

That that was the basic premise. It seemed simple and straightforward, and yet it's hard to do. Here we are. Yeah. Like almost 20 years later She'll trying to figure out how to get all that data and it's, and that's because we found that, you know, so a lot of people have to work on that to make it possible.

So that is, is one of our biggest ones, is declare. I also wanna give us special shout out to our just program, which was also created around the sort of, you know, how do we get really good regenerative buildings? One of the things we found was that you need people who are committed to social impact.

Basically, you need people who are committed to diverse teams, to inclusive hiring practices and inclusive sort of, you know, Purchasing, et cetera, that kind of stuff. And so we [00:11:00] created the just program, which, um, is, it's essentially a community of practice for a EC firms and manufacturers of people across the building industry, um, to commit to transparency around, um, their social impacts.

And, um, and to they, we have a label that we, that we use. So they submit information about their firm and then we give them a label. That talks about how they're doing along that journey towards really positive social impact. But it's really more than anything, I would say away for, for firms to find each other that are committed to making a better world from a social impact perspective.

So that's been a wonderful one and it's growing a ton and and we are really happy to have all of those folks working with us. We've just, let's see, we have 556 just labels since the program first launched and somewhere around a hundred thousand people that are now sort of a part of the, the just community.

So it's, it's a really [00:12:00] thriving group and it's, it's really wonderful to watch. Um. So those probably the ones that we know, that people know best in terms of just like the pro the programs and like the, the logos that we have out there. But we also run a membership program. We have online education. We have a big conference every year that's coming up in April.

Um, and, uh, living Future, we just call a living future. Um, it'll be in Seattle this year. Um, so these are all. Facets of what we do. You know, philosophically, one of the things I love about living future is that, yes, we certify buildings, but we see that as just one of the many tactics that we deploy to try to transform the industry, and we really believe that.

The other tactics are so important, including just bringing people together to learn from each other and to talk to each other about what works and what doesn't. And then these are the things like, you know, having, having product labeling programs, having building out all the databases that we need to help people get the right kinds of tools they need to make good [00:13:00] decisions.

All that stuff, that all goes into it. And yeah, if there's one thing I wish, looking back on all this time that we could change, it's that I think people conflate green building nonprofits with certification and like, and I get that that's like the most visible thing for a lot of people, but there's a lot more that we do.

And in essence, I think, uh, some days depending on, on the day, I, I would argue some of those things are even more impactful than certifying a building.

Avi: absolutely. Not to put a damper or anything, but as part of our report, we did a rough analysis of what percentage of like built area in the United States is actually certified by green building organizations, and it stands at about 5% or less.

Um, yeah, but that 5% is basically the, the tip of the spear, right? That's going to open up the pathways for so many more. And we've seen that's been proven right in terms of how green building in the US has progressed is setting those [00:14:00] standards, has influenced building codes, has influenced organizations' own standards for their real estate.

Like there's just been so much change that's happened. I'm going to come, I'm gonna ask you about, you know, your ideas of a theory of change in a second, but before we do that, can I pick up on one thread that you just opened up? One of the remarkable things I think. As part of your leadership and your counterparts at other green building organizations is the amount of collaboration we've seen in the US among the green building organizations, and especially I think in the last year, year and a half, you know, uh, is just been remarkable.

Can you talk about that, that like alignment linking of arms kind of approach to how various bodies working on sustainability in the built environment are starting to come together?

Lindsay: so this is very much, um, um, been a passion of mine to help, I, I guess maybe for me personally, I've always been a bit of a mediator.

I have two older brothers and like, um, and, and, uh, I'm the [00:15:00] youngest and so I've always sort of been that type of person in the community to really say like, I think we're all actually going after the same thing. Let, let's figure this out. Um, and um, and I think that the. As the movement, the green building movement has evolved and matured.

We've heard a lot of people saying, Hey, why? Why does it feel like there's friction here for all of us in the market transformation we're trying to achieve? That comes out of the nonprofits not necessarily working together or aligning, pointing that out and saying, can you, can you work on that? And so, so, so that wasn't new, right?

Like that's, that's been evolving. I think a lot of people feel that, whether it's when you're certifying the building and there's all this different paperwork you have to fill out or whatever, but. I think the thing that I started to ask myself more recently, and I think a, a number of people did too, is we, the movement has gotten to a certain maturity that you're starting to ask [00:16:00] yourself, what, what does success look like?

And when you really look at the, the aims that we have to transform the building industry and work your way back, you do really start to see that there's a place for everybody in that, that in the ecosystem of, you know, not just the nonprofits, but the, the, what the role is of the architect, what the role is of the product manufacturer, what the role is of the construction manager.

So there's no. Real purpose or utility in infighting or sort of saying I'm more important or I, you know, whatever that is, we have to all figure out the right ways to work together. And I think if you see from a lot of successful other social movements or movements of different kinds that groups like Living Future that sort of represent that Vanguard are usually, you know.

A piece of it. You, you want, you wanna have those folks who are gonna say it, like it, you know, real, real straightforward. This is where we have to get to. We understand that it's uncomfortable, but that's the goal at the end of the day. Um, someone [00:17:00] joked with me at some point that like Living Future is like the Bernie Sanders of, uh, of the Green Building Movement.

And I was like, yes. That is, I'm okay with that because no one always thinks of what he's proposing, you know, is necessarily like easy, but, but he's, that he's that guy in the room and he's in the room, right? He is still like a part of that dialogue with other politicians. And so that's kind of what we are a little bit is, um, and, and, and I think that, so in any case, it's trying to say to ourselves, okay, the Democratic party figures out how to ha have everybody in a room.

Let's, let's all do that too. And so, so we've, um. You know, many of us have known each other now for 20 years or, or more. And so we have a respect for each other and we can, you know, can sort of figure out how to work together as nonprofits. So the Echo project was probably the first one that was a real success there, where we all came together and agreed just to do metrics and sort of accounting and data around embodied carbon in the same way.

And then we just, this past fall announced [00:18:00] that we're gonna do some alignment work around our materials, um, requirements in our, in our various certifications. So Brim and Lead and the Living Building Challenge and well. We'll probably have more folks involved in that too. So that's the kind of work that we're doing now.

And I guess the last thing about it that I wanna mention, 'cause I think this is really important for people to hear, is this work takes time and money. So one of the reasons that we haven't always been, we haven't always had the same spreadsheets or whatever it is, is because that. Somebody has to go in and compare all the spreadsheets and then update them all in whatever data platform we have, and really be careful and meticulous about it.

And so it's not just intention, it's not just, or it's, or like laziness. It's it's actual work, you know, to keep in alignment and to talk to each other, especially as these, this industry in this market and all of the different data platforms and metrics and things constantly evolve. So that's our job as building certifiers is to keep up with all of that.[00:19:00]

And some of us keep up with different little corners of the universe. More frequently than others do. And so it just, it just happens. It's kind of a natural human thing to some degree. Like we're all just, it's the same thing as it is with any group of companies. You know, like you're all working in slightly different ways and then you, you know, you have a, a new materials health expert and then you and that person goes to work for some other firm, and then you don't have that person, you don't keep up as much.

So it's just, I just like people to understand like it's a little bit of a human thing when we're not in alignment. I've often heard you talk about, uh, the importance of having a theory of change, you know? Yeah. It's important to know where we need to get to and, you know, obviously living Future and the Living Building challenge, hold that for us in the built environment, but also, uh, how we're gonna get there.

Avi: And you clearly have an [00:20:00] idea of that. Would you, would you want to take a pass at kind of sharing with us. what do you think the successful pathways are today?

Lindsay: I think a successful pathway is, we who believe and understand and have put a little bit of time and energy or a lot of time and energy into showing that buildings, um, can.

Should be built in ways that are positive for our planet, positive for our, our health, positive for our communities. That these, these buildings can be built and that they can be built at an affordable price and that they can be built within code and all of these things today. Um, or that they're, you know, they're safe.

All of us who have already gotten. To understand how that works, have to do a really good job of showing that to the rest of the world and showing that it's, you know, that there's a difference between saying that you wanna do it and actually doing it. There's a, there's a difference between doing it halfway and doing it the whole way and really like [00:21:00] making that clear out there in the world.

But once that becomes clear, clearer, then there's a couple things that have to happen after that. The first thing is that there's still a lot of parts of the world where it's illegal to build the ways that we know are fundamentally good. And so we have to knock down all of those legal barriers to being able to build the way that we, we know we can.

Um, and the other way is that we need to sort of, generally speaking, encourage the regulations. The culture, the arch, you know, education for the professions to tell people that this, that this is, um, good and this is, you know, we should be building in these ways as much as we can. So all of that, um, those are all the.

There's all the follow on effects. Um, you know, there's these sort of theories about movement, um, momentum that, uh, if you can get 3.5% of the population to be actively participating to change. A [00:22:00] community or to change a population stance on a thing, then you can, then, you can change a pop, you can change a population stance on a thing.

And so like, hey, if we have 5% of the buildings in the country, or you know, was it the country getting certified in, in the us? Then it, then we're like, we're we're there. We should be able to use that 5% and leverage that 5% to change. Every other building, but it's that leveraging that we don't always do.

Sometimes those of us that work on those 5% can just say like, all right, we got our 5% done. Good for us high fives, we're going home. And in fact, we kind of forget that the theory of change really is that those 5% are supposed to change every building around them. Yeah. And that doesn't have to do with certification.

Not really. You know, it has to do with like inviting people into those 5% of the buildings and talking about how. Great they are, and figuring out how to make it affordable for everybody else to do the same thing if it's not already been, you [00:23:00] know, if that path hasn't been blazed. So yeah. That's, that's how that works.

Yeah. And yeah. Yeah. I don't know. That's, I guess it's not, it's not like the. A grand theory of change. I guess what it is, is just saying, you know, you have to sort of start asking yourself like, okay, are we ever actually gonna certify every single building on the planet? No, of course not. Like, you know, like, go down to your local, like whatever it is, nail salon or something, and ask yourself like, is that how this is gonna go?

It's not really gonna go that way. And yet all of the, you know, every little building needs to be built in a way that. Now it isn't, isn't killing us in some way. And, and that's, that's a, when I think about it that way, it's pretty low bar. Like, let's just make sure all the buildings aren't killing us either slowly or quickly and work our way back from that.

And so, yeah, it's a fun thought exercise. I highly recommend it. Start imagining what does the world look like when we have figured this out? And then start [00:24:00] imagining. Okay, well how can we get there from here? You know, it's possible. Absolutely.

Avi: Given this understanding, what are some bright spots that you see here in the us uh, and let's keep it to the US for now because of, obviously we're in a, we're definitely in a, in an interesting time, um, for the building movement here.

So, you know, just what are some of the bright spots? What are some of the things that I, you think are going well?

Lindsay: I mean, my brightest spot at the moment. Is that I think thanks to a a lot of people there is a big rise of interest in bio-based materials and that specific interest seems to arise from a little bit of that end goal thinking, which is that more and more people are getting a little frustrated with how slow.

Change can feel when you're trying to work some toxics out of or, or lower the embodied carbon incrementally from a more sort of [00:25:00] petrochemical based product or something like that. And so it's really nice to see that people are sort of saying, well, what if we just start with something good and work hard, you know?

You know, has a really positive impact from a carbon perspective and from a health perspective. And you don't, you're not kind of always saying, okay, what's the, what's the best way to substitute this material? So that's been refreshing, and I think it comes from a little bit of like a, okay. We've been taking baby steps, but we feel like we're still kind of a, a long way from the end, from the, from the finish line.

So let's try something kind of different. So, so that's, that's probably one big one is for me, is just that it, it feels exciting that people are. Taking that up. But I mean, you know, that is related to the real fervor and like sort of an, an incredible amount of energy that's come out around people figuring out how to buy low embodied carbon materials.

Um, [00:26:00] I think it's a pretty. Great community that's built up, you know, carbon Leadership Forum has all these wonderful regional hubs and people really go to just show up with each other in their cities and talk about how to do this. It's a lot of younger folks who are just getting into the industry, which feels really promising to me because they're asking hard and interesting and technical questions, but they're also talking.

And building relationships with each other that allow us to build good supply chains of materials that need to get into our building industry. And I've, I've definitely come to, to really believe this is the thing our, our friend James Kitchen has said recently. To me that's really resonated is that a lot of this work.

Is about building relationships and you know, especially when you're trying to get supply chains going, that didn't happen before. What that is is building, building markets. You could say like that's a, that's I think the way James talks about it and the way I think about it is probably a little bit less oriented towards that piece of it.

But like, [00:27:00] you have to know who's gonna buy the thing that you wanna make. And you have to know if you've decided you wanna source a specific thing, that there's somebody out there who can get it for you. And so yeah, people are making friends and they're figuring out, oh, this person's making this thing.

We can spec it in this project. this person has a piece of software that's gonna help make my job easier. So there's a lot of connections being made right now, it feels like in, in the embodied carbon world. And that is just really nice to see. It's nice to see people like making friends.

Avi: Absolutely. Is there a, a living future initiative at the moment that you're most excited about?

Lindsay: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, so my, my answer will probably always be our conference and it's the, so it's April 14th, 15, 16, 17th, Seattle. You can still come. if you're hearing this now, please check it out. we've always taken convening really seriously as a tactic. For building momentum, [00:28:00] but even, it's not even about building momentum. It's like the depth of the relationships that we are able to build there. This past year in Portland, I think was a pretty special moment.

It was a difficult time, I think, for a lot of folks because of the changes in the federal administration and funding of different programs and things. And so it was just this very like, like we, we like people cry, you know, a lot of hugs and, and, and a lot of. Really thoughtful conversation about movement strategy.

I was just talking with one of the folks who's gonna be on the main stage. I was talking with her yesterday and she's really planning to bring, um. Talk, uh, to this group because she wants, because she believes this is the group that, that understands and thinks about where the green building movement is headed and that this is where those conversations take place every year.

Um, we really, we, we, um, we curate that. We try to make sure that that is the, the room that these conversations are happening in. And it's not an [00:29:00] exclusive room, it's a room anybody can, can show up for. There are lots of. Discounts if you needed to, you know, check out the website to see if there's some way that you need to get there, um, more affordably, but it's, it's really meant to be a pause and an opportunity for us to reflect on how the movement's going.

So it's just, uh, I don't know. We always come out of it feeling like we've given a gift to the community. So that is probably my favorite one is. Is, is the ability to, to lift up some voices, to give people a chance to see their folks and to, you know, reflect on the progress of our collective work. So please join us.

It's super fun. Um, and yeah, it'll be nice to be back in Seattle after a few years of, of not being there. We've got a lot of chores and things planned and cool stuff to be in that city. See how that city is doing on, on its journey. Um, it's a, it's a cool one. There's a lot to learn.

Avi: I love that That's the one you picked, uh, the conference, because I think it also touches [00:30:00] on, All the different pieces of your theory of change. You know, it's like we need to know why we're doing this work. And it's good to be around people and reinforce that and define that and hone that and sharpen that, the how it's done. And there's plenty of great like, educational stuff at the conference of course.

Um, and then there's that piece of, you know, the people who've who have done it. being able to share out and kind of influence others there and for people to come and be influenced. And I think there's, uh, there's all those pieces at the conference, which is Yeah. Is wonderful. Yeah.

Lindsay: I mean, it is, and also I'll say it's the, it's the funnest thing in some ways to get, to be somebody that curates this kind of thing, because we, we really try, like, especially with the folks who've gone through the process of really building a really good, you know.

A fully certified living building or even some of these buildings that didn't go through certification, but we know are really good examples out there. We really encourage people to, to tell the stories of what they learned didn't work well, and, and just be vulnerable with each other. And so to [00:31:00] say, what, what are we missing?

Or how do we get this to be cheaper? Right? Like those kinds of questions or what is the pain in the butt kind of like technology thing that we need to solve for next. So it's really. And we'd like, we full on reject session proposals. That sound too, too celebratory. We will. We really want people to be willing to say, here's project, here's what we're proud of.

Here's what we wish we could have done, and here's why we couldn't do it, and here's how we plan to tackle being able to do that thing next time. And like that, you know? Or does anyone have any ideas for us? Kind of stuff. That's all really important to us. And that's, and that's I think, what it looks like to really, I don't know.

There are a lot of conferences out there. Um, I don't mean this to be like a hard pitch or anything, but, um, there are a lot of conferences out there who's, who's, whose explicit sort of purpose is to get you to be able to, um, market yourself. Like that's their reason. You know, like they, they're making money off of that and that's [00:32:00] cool.

Um, but our mission is to transform the building industry. And so we get together. You get to celebrate some of what you're doing. But to be clear, you're in this with everybody and we're trying to figure it. We, we have a collective mission that we're on, and the conference is meant to help with that. So we, we love that people show up with that mentality and we try to make sure that everybody really does understand, like this is, this is not just for you to say that we're great at this.

This is for us to say we collectively need to be great at this. So let's talk and sit down together and figure out how.

Avi: Yeah. I love, I love that because I think what it also acknowledges at its base is that this is a work that's always going to be in progress, right. And, and necessarily should be so, right.

Just as you said, you know, we can't pat ourselves on the back for building certification and think that the goal of building a sustainable built environment is done. It's really about. Constantly bringing our work [00:33:00] in line with the way the systems of this planet work in line with the way societies work, or we would like societies to work, right?

It's about kind of really. Thinking about how do we continually harmonize. And as our understanding of how people change and our relationship to nature changes, buildings must change as well. And we must find new tools and new frameworks. And really it's just ongoing work and it's really important work.

And we thank all of you who are engaged in this work. Thank you so much, Lindsay. Thank you for being my guest today on Deep Green. It's such a pleasure talking to you.

Lindsay: I mean, it's just a delight to be, in conversation here, so thank you for, for having me.

Avi: Thank you. Thank you so much And thanks to all of you for listening to us today. You can find links to Laden's Podcast Design the Future as well as a link to register for the Living Future Conference, and a link to download the 2026 Metropolis Interface sustainable Design Report in our show notes. Also, if you're listening to this in the first half of [00:34:00] 2026 and you work in sustainable architecture, design, or manufacturing in the building industry, our planet positive awards are open for submission.

So if you do work that you believe makes a positive impact on people and the planet, please get us your submissions, and we would love to celebrate the work that you do. Deep Green is produced by the Surround Podcast Network. This episode was produced and edited by Rob Schulte, with support from Rachel, Senator Lauren Volker and T Lister.

We're talking about the state of sustainable design in the United States over the next couple of months on Deep Green. So catch our next episode soon, wherever you get your podcasts.