By Dean James Gustave Speth, from the Fall 2007 issue of Environment: Yale magazine.

All of us concerned about the environment’s future have known for a long time that we should be doing more in the area of designing positive solutions. Stopping destructive projects requires lawyers and lobbyists and, most of all, irate citizens. But designing the elements of a sustainable future requires, among others, chemists, engineers, planners and, most of all, visionaries. Both are important, but we American environmentalists have done much more on the negative front than the positive.

One of my great pleasures as dean has been to help rectify this situation through the steady strengthening of the school’s capacities in the emerging field of sustainable design. From the green chemist’s design of new molecules to replace the toxic ones of yesterday, to the design of new transportation and water systems for great cities, F&ES is increasingly in the business of designing the future we want to see. That requires creativity and inventiveness, backed by hard science and engineering and by an awareness of economic constraints. The good news is that the school is building enormous faculty strength – top people who can bring all these considerations together. I hope our school will gain increasing recognition as a major center for designing a sustainable future. Let me relate to you why I believe we are on our way to that goal.

Here are some of the exciting fields now developing at F&ES. One of our newest faculty members, Paul Anastas, is recognized globally as a founder of the new field of green chemistry. As Paul is working on the design of new, safer molecules and chemical processes, Julie Zimmerman, who is also on our faculty, is working on the design of new green products. Julie is a pioneer in the new field of green engineering, and has a joint appointment with Yale’s engineering school.

Moving up to a larger scale, industrial ecology founder Thomas Graedel focuses on the design of industrial processes, while his colleague Marian Chertow is researching the ways in which industrial facilities can be designed to interact symbiotically with one another. And moving out onto the landscape, Gaboury Benoit has focused on how large-scale development projects can be designed to integrate successfully with the environment, while Stephen Kellert has pioneered efforts to bring environmental sensibility to the design of the built environment and to show how architecture can capture what he calls biophilic design. Finally, on a still-larger scale, Ellen Brennan-Galvin is studying innovative design in urban transportation and other aspects of cities.

Here then, in a nutshell, are a few of the ways that F&ES faculty are helping to design positive, sustainable solutions to our environmental challenges. The very able writer Heather Millar has interviewed each of these faculty members and helped me bring a little objectivity to descriptions of these remarkable people.

For Paul Anastas, professor in the practice of green chemistry, a green future starts with the most basic building blocks – green molecules. Anastas spent 16 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the White House before coming to New Haven in January to direct the new Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale.

“In the same way that we can design a material so that it’s red or it’s blue or it’s rubbery or brittle, we can design it so that it’s toxic or not toxic. This is the design framework for the center,” he says.

The center has started a large initiative to design safer chemicals and compounds that don’t persist for long periods or, for instance, that avoid disrupting the human endocrine system. Building on his Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry, Anastas says, “We’d like to come up with a green framework of design – a toolbox that could be used for whatever you’re trying to make, whether it’s a dye or an adhesive or a flame retardant.”

The center has reached out to industry, showing business leaders how green chemistry can benefit them, and is spreading the word through conferences to partners in South Africa and China, as well as through a Pan- Africa Green Chemistry Network, to promote the field on the African continent. The center also is launching an interactive website, where researchers can exchange ideas about green chemistry.

Julie Zimmerman, assistant professor of chemical engineering and of green engineering and product design and the assistant director for research at the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering, specializes in making things that don’t pollute. For her doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan, she developed vegetable oil-based metalworking fluids that were recyclable, long-lasting and decreased occupational health concerns for the workers. While at the Office of Research and Development at the EPA, she developed an analog to Anastas’ green chemistry commandments – Twelve Principles of Green Engineering – which include proactive steps such as “preventing rather than treating” (avoiding pollution rather than cleaning it up) and “designing for separation” (to ease reuse and recycling).

The Army has asked Zimmerman’s team to investigate ways to build environmental considerations into the design and engineering of processes like cleaning, painting, transportation and manufacturing munitions. “Our recommendations will be written into the Army’s specs,” Zimmerman explains.

Through the Center for Industrial Ecology, F&ES has taken the lead in an emerging field that examines the environmental impacts of industrial production and consumer economies. Industrial ecologists go beyond the usual bromides, such as “waste less, consume less,” and try to attach numbers and strategies to those notions. The tools of the trade include materials flow analysis, an examination of how resources like copper and oil move through the global economy; life cycle assessment, an evaluation of the full environmental impact of how products are created and eventually discarded; and industrial symbiosis analysis, an examination of how one business’ waste might become another’s feedstock. Industrial ecologists look at the global picture, and take the long view, perhaps 50 years into the future, rather than the 5- or 10-year planning horizon common in traditional business.

Leading the effort is Thomas Graedel, Clifton R. Musser Professor of Industrial Ecology. “I look at a sustainable future from the perspective of materials,” says Graedel, who co-authored the field’s first textbook, Industrial Ecology. “We are trying to understand in detail how we, as a planetary society, use metals. How much of them are getting lost? What’s the potential for recycling, the potential for damage to the environment? We’re researching and constructing complete life cycles.”

Graedel’s team has mapped the flow of many metals, including zinc, iron and nickel, and he has developed an environmental assessment matrix, now a standard tool used by companies trying to gauge the environmental impact of their products. As consultants, he and some of his students recently tracked the complete industrial life cycle of every helicopter made by Sikorsky, the Connecticut manufacturer.

“We try to look at the long-term fate of a product,” says Graedel. “A couple of things come out of looking at things that way: first, you’re proactive, and second, you begin to think of what you would do with a product if you got it back. How would you give that material a second chance? That really revises and transforms the design process.”

Marian Chertow, associate professor of industrial environmental management, studies how businesses cluster together in places as varied as Hawaii, Puerto Rico and mainland China. She has recently proposed a new approach to encouraging corporate greening: Map the symbioses – the waste, water, and power exchanges and other beneficial relationships – that exist among businesses. Show companies that they have already begun to build industrial ecosystems. Then help them to do more of the same. “Business people just want to know the rules of the game so that they can go out and play hard,” said Chertow. “If we have green rules, then they can go play the green game hard.”

While researching the Campbell Industrial Park near Honolulu, Chertow’s team found that eight companies were trading seven different kinds of materials among themselves. Yet companies remained oblivious to the big picture: they weren’t aware of what their neighbors were doing or how they might benefit even more from sharing resources. She found similar exchanges taking place in a very different context, a large industrial complex in China, and now leads Yale’s new Program on Industrial Ecology in Developing Countries.

Chertow’s team is researching the social norms and networks that create and facilitate environmentally beneficial trading. Who knows whom? What are the ties between the executives of various firms? How do business leaders identify the needs of their companies and use relationships to help meet those needs? Could this process be more efficient? “Analyzing industrial ecosystems as social networks reveals why they are difficult to plan but can still be highly effective in creating environmental benefits along with the economic ones.”

Gaboury Benoit, associate dean for research and co-director of the Hixon Center for Urban Ecology, has tried to lay out a framework that would allow businesses to thrive in a landscape that better integrates human development with nature. “Land development is exploding. The number of people is growing, and the amount of space each person uses is also growing,” Benoit explains. “A lot of people want to develop land in environmentally appropriate ways, but they don’t know exactly what that means. They don’t know what steps to take. We’ve outlined a very straightforward, step-by-step way to do it. We try to get down to brass tacks.”

With Diana Balmori, a landscape architect who teaches at the Yale School of Architecture, Benoit co-authored the book Land and Natural Development (LAND) Code: Guidelines for Sustainable Land
Development. Benoit says the goal is to provide a method of sustainable development that’s practical and not so radical that it will alienate developers.

The LAND Code rating system awards positive and negative points based on how businesses address various development challenges. The builder of a mall, for instance, would earn points for clustering buildings, minimizing impervious surfaces and installing a rain garden to filter water on-site, but would lose points for developing near a wetland or some other sensitive ecosystem.

“Existing codes cover bits and pieces of what we’re calling for,” Benoit says. “What we’re trying to do is codify comprehensive guidelines for developing land in a sustainable way. We’re moving in that direction. Even 10 years ago, something like a rain garden or a mall with a constructed wetland was considered radical. Now, they’re common.”

Stephen Kellert, Tweedy Ordway Professor of Social Ecology, has long argued that we need a fundamental re-evaluation of how we design and construct our buildings, towns and cities. Kellert insists that we must go beyond simple green building. However wonderful highefficiency water and heating systems and recycled materials may be, they’re not enough. “What we need is restorative design, design that mimics the natural cycles of light and air and the views and experience of nature that have been lost in most modern buildings and cities,” he says.

Last year, a new joint master’s degree program in environmental management and architecture was launched at Yale. Students are now in the second year of a four-year program that emphasizes restorative design. The two host schools, the School of Architecture and F&ES, are also establishing a joint tenure-track position in sustainable design and development, to educate a new generation of interdisciplinary thinkers. F&ES has pioneered the development of joint master’s degree programs with six other schools at Yale, including the Law School, the Divinity School and the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health.

A growing cadre of scholars, architects and designers has joined Kellert in concluding that restoring nature to humanity’s home is not only good for nature, it’s good for people (see environment: Yale, “Nature in Humanity’s Habitat,” Fall 2006). Various studies on what’s formally called biophilia, or “love of nature,” have shown that patients heal faster, students learn better and workers are more productive when they have access to natural light, outside air and views of the environment.

Hoping to further build this case, Kellert’s team is now collecting data about the current health, well-being and productivity of Bank of America employees, who soon will move into Manhattan’s One Bryant Park, which aspires to be the first office tower to achieve LEED Platinum, the highest rating awarded by the U.S. Green Buidling Council. In addition to incorporating sustainable design, the new skyscraper also incorporates biophilic elements, such as natural light, fresh air circulation and views of roof gardens and parks. Kellert’s team will collect data before and after the move, as well as monitor a control group of Bank of America employees who work in more conventional settings.

Ellen Brennan-Galvin, a lecturer and senior research scholar, spent 25 years at the United Nations Population Division, working on urban transit and environmental issues in more than 20 cities in the developing world. She now teaches two courses – one on urban sustainability and another on transportation and urban land use planning in the developing world – to a mixture of students from F&ES and the School of Architecture in the joint degree program. Each semester, she takes some 20 students to places like Beijing, Bogota, Curitiba, Delhi, Dubai, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Sao Paolo and Shanghai to study various local transportation methods. “There are incredibly interesting innovations and possibilities in urban planning and transportation evident in the developing world,” she said. “The challenge is how we scale up and apply these innovations on a much broader basis.”

In the end, the future is ours to build, and putting sustainability front and center in that future requires the careful integration of environmental values into all its aspects. That’s the work of sustainable design, and our goal here at F&ES is to place the school at the forefront of this work. As you can see, we have made a strong beginning.