Although my sensibilities aren't fully in tune with the good Dr. Leary, I definitely resonate with much of the creative ferment -- the music in particular -- of the '60s.  Since I'm celebrating the last birthday in my 40s on Saturday, I guess blasts from the past are on my mind right now.

I also thought it provided fodder for an interesting theme this week. "Turning off'" is about behavior, "tuning up" is about better design and operations, and "zeroing out" is the goal we hope to achieve for the undesirable side effects of providing goods and services for our daily lives.

I decided to turn the broader social commentary context of Leary's original quote, "Turn on, tune in, drop out" on its head because more than ever we need to pay attention to something other than our own personal needs. Ironically, by paying attention to the larger context in which we live, we can achieve our goals without taking down the planet.

While Leary's statement was about disengagement or disintegration, the theme of this piece offers a 21st-century take on solutions that are about engagement and integration. While the 20th century was about taking things apart and understanding how the parts work, this new century is about putting things back together and understanding how the whole thing works so that the whole exceeds the sum of its parts.

Not only do our design and engineering practices need tuning up but also our regulatory, economic and contractual frameworks. Two GreenerBuildings.com articles in the past week deal with the latter:

Shari Shapiro writes about the new Sustainable Design and Green Building Toolkit for Local Governments from the U.S. EPA and the recently issued draft model Municipal Green Building Ordinance by the Center For Climate Change at Columbia Law School. The model ordinance is more of a framework that can be tailored to the individual requirements of the jurisdiction, rather than a detailed technical or policy prescription.

On the private sector contractual front, the Greenprint Foundation and Jones Lang LaSalle have brought together leading building owners and large corporate tenants to develop a Green Lease Action Plan that will help overcome some of the structural barriers preventing cost-effective sustainability measures in energy and water from being implemented in commercial office space. Together, the organizations convened in this process own or lease in excess of 350 million square feet of office space. This new effort adds another option to the Model Green Lease developed in 2009 by The Model Green Lease Task Force, which can be found here.

On the green design front, Office Depot just achieved another landmark, opening its first LEED CI registered store, which is part of its commitment to certify its entire portfolio of projects, both new and existing.

Next Page: How the U.S. Postal Service saved $400 million.