Paving Paradise: Exploring an Urban “Partnership-with-Nature” Frame

Abstract

This article explores the possibility of a “partnership-with-nature” frame as experienced through interactions with urban “green” buildings. The discussion is situated in the broader context of an emerging green building movement and the cultural role played by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification framework and its supporting networks. Examples are drawn from an ethnographic case study of a particular green building, the Heifer International headquarters in Little Rock. More broadly, the article reflects on how nature and culture are coming together in new ways in our real and imagined urban spaces.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A draft of this paper was originally presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems in Boston on July 31, 2008. I wish to thank guest editor Colin Jerolmack and the editors and anonymous reviewers at Sociological Inquiry for their comments and suggestions. Thanks to Tim Lepczyk for assistance with formatting images and Pooi Yin Chong for providing photographs from Heifer International. Thanks also to my interviewees for the time and energy that they contributed, and to my students for being part of the dialogue.

NOTES

Notes

¹ I am aware of the scholarly debate over contentious words like “nature,” “agency,” and “materiality” (Čapek 2010; Schatzki 2010). I find it useful to retain the word “nature,” to sometimes put it in quotes, and to use it interchangeably with other words like ecosystem, both to capture popular usage and to create some distance from it.

² Like the word “nature,” the term “sustainability” is fraught with much academic and other baggage, and others might prefer a different word. I am using it nevertheless, deferring to popular usage in the green design community.

³ I owe this insight to political scientist-ecologist David W. Orr, who directed Meadowcreek in the 1980s when my initial visits took place.

⁴ The exception they make is the act of walking between buildings.

⁵ It is evident that this frame, as I present it, buys into the notion that human beings and “nature” are somehow separate rather than part of the same seamless entity. This is merely one convenient way of conceptualizing that complex interaction.

⁶ I conducted follow-up interviews in 2011 to update information first collected for this project in 2008 and to incorporate new questions. Most interviews were tape recorded by permission and subsequently transcribed, although some are based on field notes. The project includes 11 interviewees to date. Archival materials and other types of documents include site photographs, pamphlets, newspaper and magazine articles, video footage, websites, books, and scholarly articles.

⁷ This quote is from notes I took at a presentation by John Urry at the American Sociological Association annual meetings, no date recorded.

⁸ This led to synergy and even a friendly rivalry for the highest LEED rating. After HI's platinum certification, the Clinton Library installed a green roof and engaged in wetland restoration along the Arkansas River, upgrading its silver ranking to platinum.

⁹ HI's commitment to sustainability and treating the earth well can be found in several of its 12 cornerstones, including one focusing on spirituality (http://www.heifer.org/ourwork/approach/heifers-cornerstone).

¹⁰ Murray was the first LEED Accredited Professional in Arkansas and founding chair of the USGBC-Arkansas Chapter.

¹¹ For example, its drainage and water recycling system became the model for all Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 federal property renovations or new construction of parking lots beginning January 1, 2012 (Swindle, interview 2011a).

¹² A number of architecture and design professionals mentioned the need to combat a cultural perception of green design as unattractive, uncomfortable, or connected with the hippie culture of the 1970s.

¹³ The completed site now includes the Murphy–Keller Global Village Educational Center, a gift shop and the green office building.