Hear how your own backyard can become a place of your own desires while staying in balance with the surrounding ecology and costing you less time and energy.
The Sustainable Sites Initiative™ (SITES™) promotes sustainable land development and management practices that apply to sites both with and without buildings. Sustainable Sites will provide tools for those who influence land development and management practices and addresses increasingly urgent global concerns including climate change, loss of biodiversity, and resource depletion.
To bring it down to the importance for individuals, by viewing our own backyards, our own communities as our personal source for enjoyment, beauty and relaxation, wouldn’t you like the maintenance of that space be as simple as possible? By viewing our immediate surroundings as a slice of the larger ecology and understanding our own role within that ecology, we can reach a sustainable and balanced solution.
According to Margie Grace, founder of Grace Design Associates and award-winning landscape designer and contractor, sustainable landscape design addresses many of the larger issues that plague our cities and rural developed areas. Water pollution, water run-off, erosion, air pollution, biodiversity, energy, land fill, even crime, are all positively impacted by green design systems for both buildings and landscapes.
Margie gives an example of one of the SITES projects in action, a LEED certified Platinum development, Village Victoria, also called Victoria Garden Mews. This project combines personal living on a historical site originally for a single family and now for four families. The site was designed to allow the owners to age while continuing to enjoy their privacy. It is located close to town reducing the reliance on cars for transportation. They share garden and BBQ facilities along with 30 fruit trees, and due to the proximity of the four private homes, if health care ultimately becomes necessary, they can share those services.
Measurements of water run-off, water collection for irrigation, the number of returning species of flora and fauna, as well as other standards set by SITES will be analyzed to determine its overall success. This project, upon completion, will become a model for green residential building in southern California. It may even become the “greenest” residential development in the state of California and possibly the nation.
The American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin and the United States Botanic Garden came together to create voluntary national guidelines and performance benchmarks for sustainable land design, construction and maintenance practices, the Sustainable SITES Initiative (SITES). Any landscape, whether the site of a large subdivision, a shopping mall, a park, an abandoned rail yard or a home, can be designed to improve and to regenerate the natural benefits and services provided by ecosystems in their undeveloped state.
The USBGC, US Green Building Council, is an important part of the initiative by supporting the integration of sustainable benchmarks for soils, hydrology, vegetation, human health and well-being and materials selection developed by SITES. Buildings use more energy than any other energy user as we discovered in our interview with Dennis Allen of Allen Associates. By integrating sustainable landscape design with green building, systems that are balanced with the surrounding ecology result in lower cost and simpler maintenance.
Our conversation with Ed Snodgrass of Emory Knolls Farm and Green Roof Plants covered some of these issues as well, as did our interview with Adam Hall of Earthkeeper Alliance and with permaculture expert Warren Brush.
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