Let's Take This Outside: Sustainable Sites Initiative Unveils "LEED for Landscape" Ratings

At the most basic level -- in the way that the sky is blue and Jon Gosselin's fake-tanned skin is orange -- grass and trees and topiary and your other things-that-grow are green. It's tough to explain why all this is, so many years after seventh grade science, but chlorophyll and photosynthesis are involved and long story short plants are good for the earth and appealing looking besides. But while planting a tree is unquestionably a good thing -- PlaNYC, at least, thinks so -- there's more to a sustainable and healthy landscape than meets the eye. While it might all looks green to most of us, the new guidelines and planned rating system for green landscape development being offered by the Sustainable Sites Initiative makes it possible to get a more nuanced look at how green a specific project is.

The Sustainable Sites Initiative is the result of a collaboration between the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the United States Botanic Garden with the stated goal of creating, "voluntary national guidelines and performance benchmarks for sustainable land design, construction and maintenance practices." It's LEED for Landscapes, if you prefer. While it's obviously not an easy task ascertaining just how sustainable a given outdoor space is -- ecosystems just do so incredibly many different things, from absorbing stormwater to storing carbon, that it's tough to just take everything in and go "A-plus, kudos!" -- it's pretty easy to tell when an ecosystem isn't working, and notably more expensive to attempt to rejuvenate a compromised ecosystem than it is to preserve it in the first place. With all that in mind, the Sustainable Sites Initiative has launched a pilot program that will attempt to certify and rate as many projects of 2,000 or more square feet as register before the February 2010 deadline; a number of sites, such as the Queens Botanical Garden's Visitor and Administration Center (pictured above, and the subject of copious coverage at gbNYC), have already been the subject of SSI case studies. The goal is to make adjustments according to the results of the pilot project, allow one final public comment period, and then try to issue final standards by 2013. If you want to register a project for the SSI pilot project, go here and knock yourself out; if you'd like to read the entire 233-page guideline and benchmark document, click here.

"Any open land with a designed project -- from parking lots to backyards to corporate campuses -- will be eligible for certification under the new standards," E&E News' Noelle Straub writes. "The rating system works on a 250-point scale and awards one through four stars. The guidelines focus on site selection, conservation of water, use of native vegetation and recycled materials, inclusion of elements for the public's use, construction processes and long-term maintenance." Also, in a nice upgrade over the oft-criticized LEED paradigm, the Sustainable Sites Initiative is, Environmental Leader reports, "applicable not only after construction and landscaping have been completed, but is designed to provide a continuous cycle of assessment and evaluation."

So let's tote things up on the Sustainable Cities Initiative: it's dynamic in its application, diverse in its targets, and offers a new way of looking at something many of us see all the time but don't really know how to look at. Sounds good, right? It's hard to know what, if anything, the Sustainable Sites Initiative's impact will be on the world -- or our own urban ecosystem here in NYC -- until after the pilot program is closed, but we're going to keep an eye on the Sustainable Cities Initiative and any New York projects that enroll in the pilot program. As ever, you can help us out a lot in this, either by emailing me or Stephen or dropping a note in the comments about an SSI-registered site near you.