I'm afraid we are currently suffering from DRM Syndrome, a nonfatal but almost always non-curative disorder that inevitably follows a calamity. Disaster-Recovery Mentality Syndrome is a natural, and completely understandable, reaction to severe dislocation that serves to filter out any activity or thinking that does not get things Back To Normal as quickly as possible. DRM is a handy excuse to suspend critical thought and almost always results in lost opportunities. If suffered on a sufficiently large scale, DRM Syndrome actually might invite a relapse of the conditions that triggered the disaster in the first place.
My first run-in with DRM was after the Hanshin earthquake in Kobe in 1995. Architect Margaret Howard (now my wife) and I went to Kobe with the support of the U.S. Department of Energy to prepare the way for a team of green architects that had volunteered their time to develop a green post-earthquake rebuilding program. Everyone in Japan was exceedingly gracious and delighted that the Americans would come to Japan on their own dime with this new idea. But, they explained, with thousands of people living in plastic tents there really wasn't time to figure out things like how to build more green.
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is perhaps the best example of acute DRM Syndrome. While FEMA was wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on 11,000 unused and unwanted trailers, homegrown efforts to craft sustainable rebuilding plans were almost purely volunteer or private efforts led by the likes of Global Green, Congress for a New Urbanism and the U.S. Green Building Council. With essentially zero resources, these volunteer groups engaged the local community to come up with a series of affordable and green alternative housing designs and sustainable urban planning principles and models. Imagine if those hundreds of millions of FEMA dollars had instead been used to support these resource-starved efforts? A new model of disaster recovery might have been born and New Orleans might have regained its original vitality. Sadly, we'll never know.
There are exceptions to DRM Syndrome where the scale and scope of the disaster is such that "normal" is so far off that those in charge actually look for ways to do things completely differently.
The best two counter examples that I can think of are Greensburg, Kansas and the Chinese Sichuan earthquake. In Greensburg, the town was literally wiped off the map by an F-5 tornado. Rather than give up or put things back exactly the way they were, the town decided to rebuild sustainably. You can follow the exploits of the town step by step on Discovery's Planet Green series.
After the Sichuan earthquake, in which almost 70,000 people lost their lives (think 25 World Trade Centers), Chinese officials are integrating new ideas, such as energy efficiency and renewable energy into things such as school rebuilding (not to mention "old" ideas, such as structural integrity…). My company, EcoTech International, was privileged to be selected by the Energy Foundation and Ministry of Housing and Urban Development to work with one of the local design institutes to develop green prototypes for school rebuilding and we are seeing a significant impetus to try and avoid green "lost opportunities" in energy and water savings as rebuilding occurs for the more than five million left homeless.
The lesson from most post-recovery experiences is that if new ideas are to sprout from disaster, they must have already been thought of and the blueprint for implementing them already in place. The exception seems to be in cases where the scope and scale of the catastrophe is such that "new normal" becomes the operative concept. It begs the question then, at what point is a "new beginning" possible after a disaster?
Sadly, DRM Syndrome is alive and well today in our "stimulus" package as we try and confront our financial system meltdown. Housing bubble bursts? Subsidize housing purchases in over-built suburbs! American unemployment rises? Keep out smart foreigners! "Stimulus" bill too expensive? Cut the green stuff and anything we don't think will get us reelected!
Just like the proverbial generals who perennially fight the last war only to lose the next, we are pulling out threadbare but comfortable short-term fixes to the detriment of lasting solutions. As attorney and greenerbuildings.com blogger Shari Shapiro succinctly puts it, we're "proposing a Band-Aid when a transplant is required." I'm afraid that most of the solutions being proposed legislatively not only will not solve our problems, but may actually lead to a repeat down the road.
Something has failed on a grand scale here. Something structural. If a building fails structurally, forensic engineers don't just come in and nail some 2x4s over the cracks. They come in, figure out what went wrong and redesign it so that the failure will not repeat. Then they burn the old drawings.
Once short-term expediency is out of the way, longer term thinking that examines the structural nature of problem (including way we think) must move to the top of the agenda. It's pretty clear that the president is thinking that way and we earnestly hope his colleagues up on the Hill follow suit.
Rob Watson is the Executive Editor of GreenerBuildings.com, and the chairman, CEO and Chief Scientist of the EcoTech International Group.