Planning and building a new home, workplace or gathering space is generally a long, complicated and costly endeavor involving many physical, psychological and emotional resources. Simply reaching the finish line with all our hopes and dreams intact is a feat requiring perseverance and stubborn adherence to principles.

It's not surprising that a project's environmental impact is often overlooked or seemingly too daunting to keep track of. There are however innumerable benefits to putting our environmental consciousness at the forefront of our planning and building efforts not least of which are peace of mind and helping create a world worth living in.

There is a lot of data indicating projects in the built environment are responsible for 75% of the worlds global greenhouse gas emissions. Biodiversity is declining rapidly in many parts of the globe and in particular, California. It can be hard to find the good news.

Metaphorically we are long past the point of re-arranging the deck furniture on the Titanic and are buying an ever increasing quantity of new furniture for a ship that is sinking.

Lane Goodkind has been focused on resource conservation throughout his entire 30 year career as a landscape architect. Long before sustainability and Carbon Neutral Design became buzzwords, Lane fought to find alternatives for everything from PVC irrigation pipe, reinforcing steel, cement and potentially invasive plant species in the face of much resistance from budget conscious developers and contractors resistant to change.

In light of this history and current awareness in the general public about our changing climate, Lane and his associates have implemented a set of requirements for all our projects that we hope will both educate and inspire our clients, consultants and building professionals.

The goals of our work can ultimately be reduced to the following.

1. Decrease overall carbon emissions: All projects should seek to become carbon neutral or, better, carbon negative.

2. Increase bio-diversity: Habitat conservation, restoration, and creation at all scales can have an impact in aggregate

3. Improve mental health: The co-benefits of the above are ultimately peace of mind in knowing we have agency and our actions have big impacts. Not only can we create a better future, it can also be visually beautiful and emotionally satisfying to be in a landscape well connected to our place and community.

There are multiple tools for tracking a project's performance and adherence to these three goals. The method is not as important as continually evaluating choices against the big 3 goals. However, depending on project scale it becomes necessary to use well researched metrics for gaining insight and guidance. There are 2 well researched initiatives pertaining landscape architecture that we are going to be using.

1. Climate Positive Design (CPD)

2. Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES)

Depending on the scale of a project we will be using either of the above or more limited, in-house calculations to measure the following key metrics.

1. species diversity

2. carbon sequestration capacity

3. total embodied carbon