Putting A Green Spin On Historic Preservation

"Americans love tearing down buildings. We rip our homes up to the studs, scrape them down to their foundations, and are riveted by the ultimate demolitions: imploding skyscrapers. It's all part of a cultural need to make way for the new and improved.

But the construction and operation of buildings sends up twice as much greenhouse gas emissions as the entire U.S. transportation sector, according to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. (Analysts with the federal Energy Information Administration say it is probably closer to even, all factors considered.)

In this, preservationists have found a new calling for their old cause. They are preaching against the evils of teardowns - not to save the past, but the future.

"It makes no sense for us to recycle newsprint and bottles and aluminum cans while we're throwing away entire buildings or even entire neighborhoods," says Richard Moe, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Moe has become a leading evangelizer of this niche-market green gospel. He spoke on a recent evening from the pulpit at the First Church of Christ, Scientist, a national historic landmark on the fringe of the University of California, Berkeley campus. The Gothic-influenced church, with its interior concrete supporting columns and muscular timber roof supports, is considered the masterwork of prominent Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck.

Moe's message: "Preservation is sustainability." "