Alex Wilson

Summary: Alex Wilson is the founder and executive editor of Environmental Building News and president of BuildingGreen Inc. Wilson has written extensively on energy-efficient and sustainable design and construction for EBN, as well as other publications including Fine Homebuilding, Architectural Record, the Construction Specifier, Landscape Architecture, and Popular Science. He also is the author of four books on quiet-water paddling in New England and New York.

Educational background: I have a degree in biology from Ithaca College.

Current reads: I am reading Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason. Excellent book. I’m reading a book called Courage for the Earth, which is a compilation of essays celebrating Rachel Carson’s life and writing. Rachel Carson was one of the pioneers of the environmental movement through her book Silent Spring in 1962. I tend to read too many books at a time. I’m also reading an interesting book Ogalalla Blue by William Ashworth. The Ogalalla aquifer, under a lot of the Midwest and Great Plains in the United States, serves a pretty significant percentage of our irrigation needs in this country and it’s a limited resource. This book looks at how water is managed in the Western United States. It’s a very complex and politically driven issue, but an interesting one.

Hobbies: I’m a pretty avid paddler. My training is in environmental biology, so in school I always imagined I would be a naturalist studying fresh water ecosystems or some forest ecology, but I maintain a very active interest in the out of doors: birding, birdwatching, hiking, and backpacking. I bicycle to work in good weather. It’s about seven miles each way.

Early career focus: While in college in the mid-’70s, I got involved with some renewable energy work through a joint program at Cornell and Ithaca College looking at energy self-sufficiency. It was organized through a design program at Cornell and funded by the National Science Foundation. I got involved initially for my focus on ecological carrying capacity of land. We looked at biomass potential on an agricultural and forested part of the property, but I ended up getting involved with the renewable energy discussions as well, looking at wind and solar potential. After graduating from college, I ended up in D.C. where I did a couple of different internships focused mostly on world food issues with the Library of Congress and the Carter administration. I then took a position working for a nonprofit organization in Santa Fe, promoting passive solar energy. I was there for about two and a half years.

Founding BuildingGreen Inc. and Environmental Building News: After Santa Fe, I took a position as executive director of a similar organization based in Brattleboro, Vt. At the time it was the New England Solar Energy Association. We subsequently changed the organization to the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association and I was there from 1980–85. Right after I started, there were a lot of changes in Washington. Reagan came into office and the funding that had been provided from the Department of Energy ended so we had to really examine our role as an organization. We dramatically shifted it, transitioning from a solar energy focus to an energy-efficient and quality construction and sustainability focus, so we broadened it quite a bit. Although we went through a rough period and had to lay some people off, ultimately it was a good transition for the organization and strengthened it. It has continued to grow and became one of the strongest regional energy organizations in the country.

During that period of time, I began doing a fair amount of writing. I had done a little bit in New Mexico, but I increased that and started a regular column for the Journal of Light Construction. In 1985, I went out on my own to launch a writing career and founded BuildingGreen, Inc. In either 1989 or ‘90, Architecture magazine did a special issue on green architecture, which I think was the first focus of a magazine on green design, and I did a number of the articles for that issue. It was quite well received and I began to wonder at that point whether there might be opportunity for a publication focusing specifically on environmentally responsible design and construction. I thought about it for a couple of years and researched what it would take to launch a publication and then launched Environmental Building News in mid-1992.

BuildingGreen grows: Subsequent to that, we’ve branched out into a lot of different directions in the green building community. We launched a directory of green building products called GreenSpec about 10 years ago. We have a very active Web site that’s now the source of the majority of our revenue, outpacing our print publications in 2004. Our BuildingGreen Suite is a subscription-based information service that includes online versions of our other resources. You can access Environmental Building News, both the current issues in PDF and the entire archives going back 15 years in HTML, so it’s a good way to access this encyclopedia of content we’ve developed. Our full product database is part of that BuildingGreen Suite. There are over 2,100 product listings and those get updated weekly online. We also have a residential edition of that called BuildingGreen Products, which includes just the residential products and instead of being in the CSI MasterFormat structure, it’s organized by building component.

Sustainability for homeowners: Most of our work as a company has been aimed at the design profession, but I did have a book come out last fall called Your Green Home which is targeted toward a consumer audience: people who are thinking about building a new home. It goes over what to think about in that process, how to find expertise and advice, where to build, whether to build rather than renovate, the structural systems in a home and what the options are, energy performance, and energy efficient construction systems, water conservation, material selection, indoor air quality—the whole gamut of issues that people thinking about building should think about. We’re finding that while it’s written for the consumer, we’re selling a lot of these books to architects, designers, and builders. Some of them are using it to get their staff expertise up to a higher level, but they’re also buying books by the case to give to potential clients. So, even though it’s targeted primarily toward consumers, it’s also part of our strategy to help the professional.

How attitudes on sustainability are changing: I think in the last few years there’s really been a dramatic tipping point that’s been reached in North America. I think the cause of that is really three-fold. First, we had Hurricane Katrina, which brought into our lives the reality of the impact of climate change down to a level that people could relate to. It wasn’t just flooding in Bangladesh thousands of miles away, but it was in the U.S. and having a devastating impact on Americans. Even though one can’t say that Katrina was inextricably linked to climate change, the connection is fairly strong that climate change causes more intense storms so there was a tie in.

Second, has been the price of energy: The cost of natural gas, gasoline, and heating oil going through the roof in the last few years. I think a third tipping point that really spurred public attention on green building has been Al Gore and his documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the book coming out associated with that. I think it was the three forces together that really made a dramatic turnaround in what architects and consumers are thinking about relative to green design.

I also think people recognize that we can’t just assume that the government is going to get us out of this one. We all need to pull together to do it ourselves. The AIA, Construction Specifications Institute, and U.S. Council of Mayors took a real leadership role in signing onto the 2030 Challenge. That took a lot of courage. It’s going to be a very difficult challenge to achieve, but I think it shows that we as a profession and a population in general increasingly feel that we need to come up with solutions ourselves. We can’t just rely on our government to make the right decisions.

Vision for environmental design in 10-15 years: It would be a pretty dramatic shift in terms of energy demand, so we would be building homes and commercial buildings that reduce the heating, cooling, and lighting loads by something like five-fold over average buildings today. Then, at the same time, I think as a nation we need a very significant active and well-funded effort to ramp up the development and implementation of renewable energy sources.

I would like to see a project on the scale of the Apollo Project or the Manhattan Project to do the R&D needed to bring down the cost of renewables, so that while the energy loads of buildings are significantly reduced they’re brought down low enough that for many buildings, we can achieve net zero energy by using renewables. We don’t have the technology yet to achieve these goals. For example, light emitting diodes for lighting are improving dramatically, but we’re still a couple of years away from LEDs doing as well as fluorescent lighting, but the projections on the horizon are that within ten or 15 years LEDs and organic LEDs, which is the next evolution beyond LEDs, may double the efficacy of the best fluorescent lighting today. Technologies like that still need to be developed. There’s very active development going on and I’m optimistic that American ingenuity can solve a lot of these problems and bring energy demand down to a point where building integrated photovoltaics and wind systems and other renewable energy systems can provide those power needs to a significant extent.

Advice for architects: I guess the advice that I would give to architects is as firms to invest in knowledge. That means setting up policies that make it feasible for particularly younger partners and architects within the firm to attend conferences to keep up to speed with new technologies and new design practices that are going to get us to the net zero energy goals that have been articulated. And, to provide paid time for architects to read resources, to surf the Internet finding information on green design, and really make knowledge a key component of each architecture firm. Architects need to educate clients as to what the opportunities are and how to achieve them and seek that buy-in from clients to be able to practice state-of-the-art green design.

Making a difference: We try to practice what we preach as a company. We do a lot of travel, but we buy carbon offsets to try to be as close to carbon neutral as we can as a business. We use 100 percent post-consumer FSC certified paper and soy-based inks. Our company buys 100 percent of our electricity through the “Cow Power” program, and we do at home as well.

I also tend to be pretty active locally. I was on the Dummerston, Vt., Planning Commission for 12 years. I’m no longer on that, but I am active currently with a couple of efforts. One is developing a Rails-to-Trails project in Brattleboro, on the old West River railroad bed. Then, too, there’s an effort by a group of us to develop a district energy project in Brattleboro to use a wood-chip fired combined heat and power plant to create both renewable electricity from sustainably harvested wood chips and waste heat from that power plant to distribute it as district heat. It’s a practice that’s widely used in Northern Europe, but outside of universities and hospital complexes in some of our largest cities, isn’t used in the U.S. as much as it should be, so we’re trying to develop this system in Brattleboro to be a model for small towns throughout the state and the country.