David Eisenberg co-founded and leads the non-profit Development Center for Appropriate Technology (DCAT) in Tucson, Arizona. His three decades of building experience range from troubleshooting construction of the steel and glass cover of Biosphere 2, to building a $2 million structural concrete house, a hypoallergenic structural steel house, and masonry, wood, adobe, rammed earth, and straw bale structures. Since 1996 David has led the effort to create a sustainable context for building codes. A two-term member of the U.S. Green Building Council Board of Directors, he founded and chairs the USGBC Code Committee. He has presented workshops, seminars, keynote addresses and lectures at dozens of conferences and universities in the U.S. and abroad, including a Congressional briefing and U.S. Department of Interior-sponsored symposium on straw bale affordable, energy-efficient housing for Native American communities. He has written extensively for Building Safety Journal (magazine of the International Code Council), co-authored The Straw Bale House book, and has written dozens of published articles, forewords, book chapters and papers. David and DCAT were named 2007 International Code Council Affiliate of the Year and received a 2007 USGBC Leadership Award. Recent presentations include to numerous universities, public officials, and engineering and design organizations in Amman Jordan, Riyadh, Dammam and Jeddah Saudi Arabia, and Tel Aviv Israel, the New Zealand Institute of Architects in Auckland, the Warkworth, NZ Transition Towns Group, at City Council Chambers in Christchurch, NZ, and in Australia at the University of Ballarat, and at Sustainable Building 08 (SB08) in Melbourne.

Topic for Green Building Focus

Not Your Father's Building Codes: Creating a Regulatory SYSTEM for the Long Haul

More About the Topic

There has been an explosion of awareness and interest in green building and sustainable development - though those terms remain more malleable than ever. The building regulatory realm has begun to focus attention on this as well, which is great news. Yet the gap between the dynamic nature and scope of the emerging and interrelated risks related to the built environment and the nature of the regulatory paradigm we have relied upon in the past to safeguard the public from hazards attributable to the built environment creates enormous, often hidden risks everyone and especially to future generations. Our building codes do a good job of creating physical safety in and around buildings—protecting people from certain specified types of building hazards, as well as protecting buildings from certain specified natural and human caused hazards. However, relatively little work has been done to protect us collectively from cumulative risks, risks that occur away from the building or in longer timeframes than just the lifespan of a structure. These larger, longer-term risks are typically not regulated at all, or when they are, often by agencies or rules or standards designed to address different and narrower needs. Hazards caused by the built environment, threats to human and ecosystem health, destruction of natural habitat, climate impacts, depletion of and dependence on critical non-renewable resources including energy and water are not regulated in a coherent and comprehensive way. From this larger context, we can see that we have a dis-integrated set of regulatory structures, codes, standards, rules, laws and jurisdictional authorities created as a result of thousands of ad hoc responses to problems large, persistent and serious enough to demand official action. We've never DESIGNED an INTEGRATED, COMPREHENSIVE REGULATORY SYSTEM with system principles designed to meet larger, agreed upon societal needs and goals. This session will explore how we got here and where we might go from here to meet our needs and those of our great-great grandchildren.