:: aribra ::

by James Bedell

I recently had the opportunity to sit in on an Alcholics Anonymous meeting. Limited Disclosure: Who I was in the meeting for is private, hence the ‘anonymous’ but I will share that I am not in recovery, just an interested, supportive third party.

One lesson from the meeting really stuck in my mind. It’s a simple concept.

“Progress, Not Perfection”

Put simply, the idea is that a recovering alcoholic is going to falter on the road to sobriety. What AA encourages is continual effort toward becoming sober for life, because as they also acknowledge being an alcoholic is something you are not something you “have.” The concept encourages continual improvement, instead of a light-switch, where one turns off their desire for alcohol and never turns it back on.

I left the meeting and that simple phrase kept turning around and around. I wonder if the green movement in total, and the green building movement specifically, could you a dose of this thinking. I often read on professional boards and blogs about the dilemma of asking clients to take sustainability measures when they are not perfect solutions.

“How can we ask them to switch to fluorescent when there is Mercury?”
“How can we ask them to switch to solar, when the waste stream isn’t managed?”
“How can we recommend LEED accreditation when, the NY Times posts articles doubting LEED’s effectiveness?”

It’s not that each of these questions don’t have merit, they do. Solving these kinds of problems through the development of best practices is something Build2Sustain is committed to. That said, the perfect cannot continually be enemy of the good. Apply the “progress, not perfection” mantra and we’ll see forward movement when it comes to increasing efficiency and therefore the sustainability of the built environment.

Does that make a perfect a building stock? No, of course not. To create one would be the life’s work of every design/build professional, but it’s a start.

Progress, Not Perfection.

Let’s get to work. 

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