I am a recovering Massachusetts dweller who used to work for a mostly environmental communications firm outside of Boston, so it was under some surprise that I randomly found a documentary playing on the Sundance channel that was entitled “The Greening of Southie“, which basically followed the development of the Maccallen Building in South Boston as it attempted to get an LEED certification of being a green building.

The interesting part of this movie was that it showed the very real issues that are going into green building development – the retraining of the construction workers for materials installation, the cost of travel for green materials and the prohibitive cost of living in green spaces. The most important of all the issues in the film highlighted the cultural differences between the ideology of green development and the army of workers that it effects. From the blue collar bricklayer to the upper middle class management who are trying to collate all of the existing materials together to get LEED certification – which ironically,? it appears to take an entire tree’s worth of paper to be certified as LEED.

My one problem with the project was that instead of installing solar panels on the roof of the building which would make the building much more energy efficient and reduce the tenant’s electrical bills, they installed some sort of roof shrubbery that grows in harsh climate and with minimal effort–but in a stroke of green karma retribution by the end of the film all of the plants had died, and would need to be replanted.

One of the thoughts that I had walking away from this was, yes, I think it is important to use more renewable goods instead of plastic laminate that will spend forever in a landfill after the construction & use process. But the most important thing we can do is to repurpose our existing living spaces using greener solutions – renewable flooring, carpeting, low VOC paints. The film is definatly worth a watch, however, after you do watch it, take a stroll over to the photojournalist essay on urban decay that is happening to the city of Detroit.