NEWS FLASH: Greenerbuildings.com readers in the San Francisco Bay Area should zip out to 610 Lancaster Street in Oakland to check out the super-cool wave of the precision-built future at ZETA Communities' open house from 3 to 6 p.m. PST (sorry for the late notice!). This LEED-Platinum zero net energy building won the Green Builder magazine's Green Builder of the Year award.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

There's a reason there's a huge diversity of life on this planet: It works. Diversity promotes a wide array of adaptive responses to changing conditions and the ones that work best are the ones that stay around a bit longer.

Monocultures may be highly productive in the short run, but are easily wiped out if conditions change. They also can be highly damaging environmentally to develop and maintain. From the 1940s to the 1960s, as the Panama Fungus was wiping out the Gros Michel (Big Mike) banana, the ubiquitous forerunner of today's yellow Cavendish, millions of acres of rainforest were wiped out as farmers frantically tried to stay ahead of the disease.

Once again, we could hear the classic refrain: "Yes, we have no more bananas . . ." as the same scenario is playing out today with the Cavendish banana and a new strain of the fungus, which is ravaging bananas in Asia and probably will work its way to the New World before too long. So enjoy your bananas while they last, they could be replaced before too long with something genetically altered to resist the disease or a new variety.

Lighting and typical HVAC systems are the buildings version of monoculture.

Twentieth century "design" and "engineering" has doomed most office workers to bland uniformity of temperature and illumination when the ample and growing literature demonstrates that people are more alert, productive and happier when there is some variation in lighting, temperature and air speed.

There are a growing number of businesses that are making truly intelligent buildings, and the controlled diversity of indoor conditions that become possible, a near-term reality. ArchRock systems uses wireless sensors to allow users to see what's going on anywhere in real time, Lumenergi uses thinking ballasts that can talk to the BMS as well as the power grid, SCIwatch software products adds higher brain function to the reptile brain of conventional BMS software and now Redwood Systems is bringing a networked approach to LED lighting and building performance systems for commercial structures.

Only the tip of the iceberg, this intelligent technology has the ability to leverage the highest value proposition of green buildings: enhanced productivity and public brand value. Currently, as the new Allen Matkins survey reveals, most of the market is still mired in the 90/10 syndrome, in which 90 percent of the attention is focused on only 10 percent of the value-operational savings.

To readers of the Green Building Market & Impact Report (I wonder how many consecutive weeks I can shill this . . .) the continued strong market performance of green buildings described by the survey should come as no surprise. And I thought it was interesting to see some minor softening of support for LEED in the profession, most likely due to the growing and transition to GBCI pains experienced over the last 18 months that resulted in spotty quality in its customer and certification service.

As NRDC's Lane Burt opines this week in the context of the "slow" release of stimulus funds for green buildings: "You can't attach a garden hose to a fire hydrant." In the case of USGBC, doubling an already big flow of projects produced growing pains, so imagine the complexity of ramping up the weatherization and other stimulus targeted industries by tenfold. Maybe we should convert one of the old military bases to a caulking bootcamp.

This week's Look-Grandpa-I-picked-up-the-$20-bill-you said-was-fake-but-it's-real! award goes to the NASA Launch program, which seeks to incubate and accelerate 21st Century green technologies. This year the LAUNCH program is looking at water technologies, which range from Aquacue's leak detection technology that brings a Smart Grid sensibility to water to VertiCrop, a high-density vertical crop production system that produces up to 20 times the yields per horizontal square foot and that might make urban farming a viable proposition.

Rob Watson
Executive Editor, GreenerBuildings.com
You can reach Rob at rob.watson@greenerworldmedia.com or follow him on Twitter @KilrWat.

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Ready, Set, Revitalize: New Energy for Brownfields! This is the theme of The Big Deal: Atlanta 2010, the National Brownfield Associations’ flagship summit, on Tuesday and Wednesday, March 23 and 24. Join the association’s unparalleled network of public and private sector practitioners in Atlanta and be inspired by a living laboratory for sustainable development.