We had promised, back in 2005, that we'd bring Greenbuild, our annual conference, its 20,000+ attendees, and all its multiplier dollars to New Orleans in 2014 to help celebrate a future that, at the time, we were blindly believing might be possible.
Blind faith was all we had in November of that year, when we gathered for Greenbuild in Atlanta and began to think through how we might contribute to rebuilding the beloved city of New Orleans with a more sustainable, more resilient vision. How we might help right such a catastrophic wrong, caused in part by human hubris, human greed and human naiveté about the power of nature enraged.
So last year we made good on our promise. We gathered together architects and engineers, construction pros and product manufacturers, building owners and operators, bankers, lawyers, teachers and students in the Big Easy, and we discovered our faith hadn't been totally misplaced. True, it was happening in fits and starts, but there were new green schools, some new green housing, and a return of commerce that was beginning to feel reasonably permanent.
The haunted cemetery tours again outnumbered the disaster tours. And New Orleans' uniquely fabulous food once again graced white-linened tables from the Quarter to the Garden District.
The opening plenary stage of Greenbuild last year sat at one of the goal posts in the Superdome. The dome had been transformed into a French Quarter street scene with flickering lights and café seating sprinkled throughout the field. Once again the movement's faithful had convened for this annual rite of optimism and camaraderie, and we were proud that we knew a whole lot more than we did in 2005.
Of course in the intervening years we had learned a lot about how to design, build and operate better, healthier, higher-performing buildings and communities. In the 15 short years since LEED had its start in 2000, we had changed forever the practice of architecture, the profession of building operations, and the perspective of product manufacturers, seating a new market that did not exist previously, one that is now valued at more than half-a-trillion dollars in the U.S. alone.
But we had also learned something else, something more important and more fundamental. We learned that buildings matter, not just because they provide shelter and sanctuary, not just because they provide for safe assembly for work, for play, for learning, for healing. They matter because they are the outward manifestation of our need to settle into community, to organize for progress, to ground our humanness in place and time. And we learned that we had a better chance of permanency, of success, if our buildings and communities saved energy, water and other precious resources. If they were designed and constructed with an intention of better health and greater resiliency. If they reduced the kinds of greenhouse gas emissions that exacerbate climate change and intensify nature's cycles, be they tornados, floods, fires, or hurricanes.
That night, after an incredible speech by the amazing Mayor Landrieu, one of New Orleans' own took the stage. With a voice as sweet as the pralines the city is famous for, Ivan Neville sat down at a baby grand Steinway, and made Randy Newman's song Louisiana his own:
"What has happened down here is the winds have changed.
Clouds roll in from the north and it started to rain.
Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time,
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline.
The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline
Louisiana, Louisiana
They're tryin' to wash us away, tryin to wash us away . . ."
And in the stillness of that evening, in a place that had become the starkest of symbols of those horrible days, we were swept back in time. Like the day Kennedy was shot, and the day the astronauts landed on the moon, pretty much everyone knows where they were the day the rains came, the river rose and the levees broke.
That evening and in the days that followed, the fear in the faces you saw on TV tore at your gut. For endless days frustration and outrage punctuated every voice you heard every minute of every news cast. Everywhere you turned were images of massive destruction and a mass of humans in desperate need, and in so many ways, it laid bare the worst of us.
But the purity of Ivan's voice reminded us that we also experienced the best of us. Hundreds of thousands of acts of simple kindness were recounted. Heroic actions were everywhere. The green building movement responded from day one with thousands of volunteers, with expertise and with vision on which a new future could be built. And our success in bringing that vision to life could be seen in the faces of the kids on their first day in their brand new LEED-certified Langston Hughes Elementary School. And it could be experienced in the Lower Ninth as Tom Darden and Brad Pitt and the team at Make it Right put down early stakes to build 150 LEED Platinum affordable homes and one neighborhood began - slowly - to be reborn.
Today you see it in the city's thriving convention business and in the new "creative class" that flowed into the city as the water receded, adding its own layer of uniqueness to the crazy quilt of culture that makes New Orleans so special, bringing back jobs, and people, and hope.
Ten years ago, all we could do was blindly believe in our best selves. Ten years into a recovery that will likely take several generations, it's clear New Orleans didn't wash away after all.
And as long as there are people like the thousands of incredible volunteers who have worked alongside the proud and determined residents in a search of a more sustainable, resilient future, in defiance of all odds--it never will.