"green" design becomes more mainstream - finally!!!

Nice article in the local newspaper, on a local architectural design firm, RRM, is finding that "green" design is becoming more mainstream.
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/102/story/36747.html

Finally, the mainstream is waking up!!! Polly Cooper and Ken Haggard, of SLO Sustainability Group http://www.slosustainability.com/ have been doing "green" design for 30 years. My church, the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of SLO County, http://www.uufsloc.org/
selected them to design our new sanctuary; we are going for LEED certification. Ken Haggard has long been preaching the virtues of efficiency through superior design. But for so long, most property owners and business people turned a deaf ear.

I am proud of the SLO City Planning Commission, on which I led the effort in 2003 to update the Conservation Element of the General Plan. Now it has strong policies supporting "green" building and other energy conservation measures. Plus, the policies were worked out in collaboration with business leaders, property owners, architects, as well as environmentalists. (Let us recognize that these categories can be overlapping!). It was clear to me that the mainstream had come around.

However, RRM Design is also involved in some terrible projects. Comments on the Tribune's web site blast them for designing the sprawling, ag land-eating San Miguel "Ranch." Ditto for Dalidio's "Ranch." (The "Ranch" names remind me of the fashion of chopping down all the trees to make way for suburbs, then naming the streets after the former trees, birds, etc, who once lived there.) So, citizens cannot simplistically put a "good" or "bad" sticker on a company like RRM. We must consider each project for its own merits. The mainstream still has a ways to go!