Part One
By Rev. Gerald Zandstra
"Green Building practices promote construction of buildings that are healthier for the occupants and healthier for the environment."
I am all in favor of what is often called “green building”, at least in theory. Getting a handle on the definition of the term is a bit tricky because it is fairly new. But there are several possibilities. The city of San Jose, California, for instance, provides this as their answer to the question, “What is Green Building?”:
Green Building practices promote construction of buildings that are healthier for the occupants and healthier for the environment. The City of San José’s Green Building Policy establishes sustainability as a City priority and further demonstrates the City’s commitment to the environment. Sustainable or “green” building practices can reduce the tremendous impact that building design, construction and maintenance has on both people and nature. According to the U.S. Department of Energy's Center for Sustainable Development, buildings consume 40% of the world's total energy, 25% of its wood harvest and 16% of its water. The building industry is the nation's largest manufacturing activity, representing more than 50% of the nation's wealth and 13% of its Gross Domestic Product….Sustainable building practices go beyond energy and water conservation to incorporate environmentally sensitive site planning, resource efficient building materials and superior indoor environmental quality. Some of the key benefits are:
* lower electric and water utility costs
* environmentally effective use of building materials
* enhanced health and productivity
* long-term economic returns
* reduced environmental impact
These are all good goals. They are in line with what over 1,000 religious leaders agreed to in the Acton Institute’s “Cornwall Declaration” on sound environmental thinking. Particularly, the Cornwall Declaration states,
Men and women were created in the image of God, given a privileged place among creatures, and commanded to exercise stewardship over the earth. Human persons are moral agents for whom freedom is an essential condition of responsible action. Sound environmental stewardship must attend both to the demands of human well being and to a divine call for human beings to exercise caring dominion over the earth. It affirms that human well being and the integrity of creation are not only compatible but also dynamically interdependent realities.
Technology, improved design, and prudential use of limited resources ought to lead to improved building efficiency. Our homes, businesses, schools, and places of worship should be constantly improving their energy efficiency, strength, and durability. Using less energy, water, and wood on building means that these resources can be used for other human needs.
I also like San Jose’s site planning sensitivity. I have been on university campuses where it is evident that those who planned the site gave little thought to how their buildings were going to fit into the landscape. My own alma mater, Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a good example of thoughtful site use. The buildings fit the landscape and complement the mature trees that make the campus a thing of beauty. I recently visited the Francisco Marroquin University in Guatemala and was struck by how it planners not only didn’t destroy its natural setting but actually used it to enhance the wonder of the campus. The water flow, rocks, gentle hills, and lush greens give the campus the appearance that it naturally grew there. It, in a word, belongs.
There is, however, an unfortunate development of late in this idea of green building and it reminds me of the definition of heresy in the ecclesiastical world. St. Augustine and others point out that heresy has no existence of its own. Rather, it is a parasite. It clings on to the good, twisting and distorting it. In the developing thinking about building in the most environmentally sound manner possible, radical and unscientific environmentalists have piggy-backed on to the good thinking about solid building practices and are using it to forward their own agenda.
A side-bar. One of my colleagues at Acton often says there are certain words that he wants to take back—to recover and restore. ‘Environmentalist’ is one of these terms for me. I am an environmentalist. I love the outdoors. I hate senseless and unproductive destruction of the earth. I have a profound sense of responsibility for the land I own and respect for land owned by others. I want clean air. I hope a day comes soon when unlimited power with little or no environmental impact is possible. I want clean water. I want all these things not simply because I am self-interested but because I believe we are all called to be stewards of the earth.
The radical environmentalists need a new name. Let me suggest “eco-radicalists.” But more on this later.
Back to green building. The radicals have jumped on board the train but in a way that is skewed and ill-conceived. As with most of their strategies, they work from fear, bloated claims, and an appeal to the worst aspects of their movement. Consider this most recent example. Late last year, the Building in Good Faith (BIGF) initiative was undertaken by a group of environmental activists seeking to eliminate the use of vinyl plastics in all building materials. According to a recent BIGF press release, the initiative has gained a sympathetic hearing from both the National Religious Partnership on the Environment (NRPE) and the National Council of Churches (NCC).
The “green” building agenda claims that concerns about human health are at the root of their campaign.
The focus, however, is concentrated almost exclusively on a single element: polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Initiatives like BIGF are chock-full of sweeping and alarmist statements such as, “PVC is the worst plastic from an environmental health perspective, posing great environmental and health hazards in its manufacture, product life and disposal.” Not only is PVC the “worst plastic”; one of its byproducts is dioxin, “the most potent carcinogen known to science.”
The facts are that BIGF’s claims about the dangers associated with PVC are overblown and premature. The science simply doesn’t support such rhetoric. David Bate, onetime director of the European Science and Environment Forum, speaks of the broad scientific support for PVC, when he writes that “Professor Christopher Rappe, an adviser to the EU and World Health Organization, considers PVC ‘a safe material.’ In fact, there is no real evidence that either phthalates or PVC are harmful at all.” (According to Doug Bandow, "Phthalates are a family of chemical compounds that have a certain similarity of appearance and structure and perform many different tasks. About 80 percent of the phthalates manufactured today are used to make plastics flexible, without sacrificing strength or durability").
Why would BIGF resort to such alarmism?
A Piece of the Puzzle
The campaign to phase out vinyl building materials is just one piece of the greater anti-vinyl movement. The group behind the Building in Good Faith initiative is My House is Your House, which has joined forces with Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), a group whose stated goals include the elimination of all PVC-based products in healthcare. Health Care Without Harm maintains that it is out of concern for the health of patients that it is pursuing the ban on vinyl, just as BIGF is claiming that it is concerned with human health threats in the environment.
This would all be well and good if it were actually the case. The actions of groups like Health Care Without Harm belie their real interest in patient welfare, however. The Building in Good Faith movement is starting from a largely secular environmental philosophy, and seeking to import religious justification. In seeking to eliminate vital PVC-based products completely, such activists are actually working against the best interests of most patients and consumers.
If the alarmist claims of groups like BIGF and HCWH were valid, they would of course present a serious and important concern. But the campaign against medical vinyl, for example, based on a very small risk, would in effect create new harms by denying patients the use of products that have been proven safe in billions of treatments. What’s more, the ongoing, concerted effort to remove PVC products from hospitals diverts attention that from threats of vastly greater health risks. For example, an estimated 30,000 patients die every year in the United States from medical injuries caused during hospital stays.
“Health Care Without Harm—or Harming Health Care?” by Doug Bandow, the Fall 2003 issue of the Acton Institute’s Policy Forum, focuses on anti-vinyl activism. “Secular and religious enviro-health activists have grossly exaggerated the potential problems of vinyl products,” writes the author of the Acton Institute report. “The campaign against PVC products is an ideological crusade rather than a campaign for public health.”
The Acton Institute report also speaks about use of the precautionary principle. Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, writes, “Extreme environmentalists have increasingly succeeded in embedding this sensible-sounding principle in national policy and international agreements. In practice, however, activists define the principle as banning a product even without evidence of harm, since there is always the possibility of harm.”
There is general agreement that the use of vinyl products may theoretically be problematic for a very small, vulnerable segment of the population. So, there is wisdom in using non-vinyl products in treating pre-mature babies in hospitals. But, as with the green building concept, the radicals take this known problem and expand it to the entire population.
Bandow writes, “Even that theoretical possibility applies only to small, uniquely sensitive populations, primarily newborns.” For these patients, it is reasonable to seek safer alternatives. Anyone who would knowingly expose someone to unnecessary risk does not have the moral foundation to practice medicine. As Bandow advises, “Should health care providers have concern about DEHP [a plasticizer in PVC products] exposure to potentially vulnerable patient groups, then they should consider reducing PVC use to those patients when medically possible—where there are substitute materials that have proven safety and efficacy records at least comparable to vinyl or where changing treatments will not harm the person being served.”
But for radical environmental groups, this is not enough. HCWH explicitly states that it is on a “quest to eliminate PVC (and thus DEHP) from healthcare facilities.” I don’t see the connection. If we agree that limiting exposure for a handful of patients is good medical practice, then why the leap to the total and complete elimination of all vinyl products? It certainly seems to lack logical coherence. And for this reason, these groups don’t deserve the designation “environmentalists.” I prefer “eco-radicalists.”
Putting People at Risk
This is quite simply an ideological crusade based not on concerns for human beings, but rather on an irrational bias against all things “artificial.” This is where the secular and naturalistic agenda of these groups becomes apparent. Bandow writes, “Creating more significant risks in the attempt to eliminate very small or theoretical risks is simply bad policy and even worse moral reasoning when people’s lives are at stake.”
The fact is that PVC-based products form an important and large part of a variety of critical industries. The home-building and medical industries exemplify this. My House is Your House admits, “75% of all PVC manufactured is used in construction materials.” PVC is the second most common plastic, and its main use is in building. The areas of construction in which PVC would need to be replaced by more expensive, less reliable products is seemingly endless: piping, siding, roofing, flooring & carpet, wall coverings, furniture, electrical insulation and sheathing, windows and doors. The anti-PVC campaigners have made an industry out of their crusade, one which leaves out concerns for human dignity.
BIGF, in promoting more expensive and less reliable materials, threatens vast sectors of humanity, who are in desperate need of safe and affordable housing. While people in the developing world are working hard to reach the material affluence of richer societies, anti-PVC advocates undermine technologies critical to concerns as basic as housing and healthcare.
In health care facilities Bandow notes that “the pervasiveness of flexible vinyl products attests to their value: blood bags, catheters, connectors, cushions, dialysis equipment, drip chambers, ear protectors, gloves, goggles, health worker caps, IV bags, lab equipment, masks, mouthpieces, oxygen masks, packaging materials, seals, splints, surgical wire, thermal blankets, tubes for multiple purposes, and valves.” Think about finding alternative products for each of these valuable medical tools and then think about the added costs and potential exposure to additional infection. If these were proven to be the cause of physical damage to a wide swath of patients, then we would have no choice. But this is not the case.
The alternatives to PVC that are put forth by such groups have not been shown to be cost-effective or to have the reliability of vinyl-based products. The Building in Good Faith campaign especially favors more rustic building materials, such as adobe, earth, and strawbale. These can hardly be seen as having the same level of safety and reliability as vinyl-based building materials. Many of the substitutes for medical vinyl proposed by HCWH, according to Bandow, “have insufficient use experience and test results to pass muster under the precautionary principle as interpreted by PVC critics.”
Lest someone think that these sort of campaigns are doomed to failure because of their seemingly radical agenda, a listing of health care organizations, including those with religious ties, that have endorsed Health Care Without Harm’s position on medical vinyl should bring some needed perspective: Beth Israel Medical Center, New York, N.Y.; the Catholic Health Association of the United States, Washington; Cook County Bureau of Health Services, Chicago; and Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, Calif. Indeed, since its inception in 1996, HCWH has grown to be an international coalition of 431 organizations in 52 countries.
Truly responsible religious engagement with environmental issues would stress the importance of human health and life, and not sacrifice the safety and welfare of human beings for the purposes of an ideological crusade. Hospitals and health professionals who have supported Health Care Without Harm’s anti-vinyl campaign need to reconsider their association. Builders and construction companies need to critically question the anti-PVC lobby. We should all be putting patients and people first, rather than sacrificing their care and their dignity to ideologically-driven campaigns against phantom threats.
The tragic part is that many of the religious leaders who align themselves with such campaigns truly intend to do good. Unaware of economic or scientific realities, they fail to calculate the “unintended consequences” of the policies that they advocate. They risk being used by more sophisticated people on the hard left who cloak their agenda with religion. Religious leaders need to be more careful not to lend moral legitimacy to harmful economic and environmental policies that, if put into full effect, would have devastating consequences.
Rev. Gerald Zandstra, an ordained pastor in the Christian Reformed Church in North America, is director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Stewardship at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty (www.acton.org) in Grand Rapids, Mich.
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