As the Research & Content Project Manager at GBCSA, Abi Godsell holds a wealth of information and is deeply involved in valuable communication to stakeholders. Their background in city planning, passion for education, and love of pop culture give Abi a unique, contemporary perspective on green building. They sat down with Erin Drayton to tell the story of storytelling in green building.
Erin: Abi, few people understand what you do at GBCSA. So, without using your actual job description, how would you describe your role?
Abi: So the way I like to put it is that I’m a person who stands between. I love data. I’m very comfortable in Excel. I really like statistical analysis, but I also really like telling stories.
And the trick with telling stories is that each sentence that you use must do work. It must not be self-indulgent. It must not flaunt technical jargon. It must respect and connect with its audience.
So, I’m someone who really enjoys the technical subject matter but understands the discipline and time needed to bring it to folks in a package that makes sense for each different context, each different medium, and each different message that the hard data needs to convey.
Erin: I think for many people, green buildings can seem either somewhat intimidating or just very hard to understand. Why do you think it is that we, as a green community, have had such a hard time creating effective ways of explaining green buildings?
Abi: If I could go back in time to when a lot of these systems of green certification were founded, I would tell the founders to please call it good buildings, not green buildings.
Because that’s what certification is really doing. It’s verifying, rewarding, and incentivizing developers to create good buildings that do work along non-traditional axes. For example, think of the buildings that do the work of making health-giving spaces for their occupants, or that do the work of supporting unique urban ecosystems. Or building projects that jumpstart three or four micro-enterprises that sell sustainable construction materials.
That work is typically not easily valued on a standard business balance sheet. So, when you have a framework of assessment – that’s green building certification – for these kinds of non-traditional work, that framework allows you to demonstrate its long-term value at project conception. It allows you to speak about the value of that work to folks whose job it is to keep building projects lean and efficient and feasible. It allows you to give those folks an immediate proxy for that value, that people using that building will be benefiting daily from, 10, 20, even 50 years down the line.
Erin: In green building, there are vastly different audiences: property developers, architects, manufacturers etc. Do you find in storytelling that you have to tell the same story from different angles to speak to different audiences?
Abi: So, the way that I look at it is that the themes are always the same. We all want to make sure that we’re part of a project that can succeed, that is financially viable. We all would ideally like to be part of a project that is good. We all would like to be part of a project that is challenging and pushes us to the extremes of our competence. Those are universal human values. Those are values we can enact in a green building.
That’s one of the things I love about green buildings.
You’re encouraged to be a whole human in a green building: a human who feels the temperature, who wants to look at some plants, maybe a bird, and who really cares about the communities that are affected by your building.
There are not a lot of, you know, business models that so unashamedly centre that holistic experience of being a person who is on the planet and connected to systems and communities on it, as a building that plans to certify as green and make a profit from that sustainable identity.
Erin: Is there a story you could tell succinctly about green building in South Africa?
Abi: Green building is hard, and we’re doing it.
There are two kinds of environmentalism in my experience. There’s fear-mongering about everything we’ve lost and are still losing, and then there’s the thinking that the scariest time is the most exciting, because that’s when we get to step up. We might not actually get to doing it unless everything is on fire. But when everything is on fire, we can and we will. Green building certification is the kind of environmentalism that helps us move beyond fear to stepping up.
Green building is hard. We’re doing it. Go find those green buildings. Learn about the leaps they made, the innovation they embody. We do our future a disservice when we give up on celebrating the science-fiction that has already become our everyday.