ABSTRACT
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program has achieved pragmatic clarity at the expense of a more comprehensive assessment or more ambitious goals. The environment that people encounter is the material result of the many arrangements constructed over time by different species, ecosystems, and human enterprises, each dissipating its share of energy to build for their particular purposes. Alfred Lotka's great achievement was to establish natural selection as a general principle of thermodynamics, which provided a goal for self-organization and clarified the role of energy efficiency. A full account of the environment combines the ethics of the part and the whole, of the fast and the slow, in a thermodynamic analysis of the energy, materials, and information with which it is made. The principles of maximum power, production hierarchies, and material cycles of renewal situate the design of more efficient buildings in their social and environmental context.
