You hear the buzz more and more lately, including right here where I sit in Roanoke. From the Cradle to Cradle (C2C for short) green building design competition to the debate over building a restaurant atop Mill Mountain, to a recent story by Duncan Adams in The Roanoke Times about the rehabilitation of the State and City Building in downtown Roanoke, people talk more and more about environmentally sustainable building techniques.

That means methods, materials and systems that demand fewer resources and creates less waste in the construction, and use energy more efficiently once they're built.

The widely-embraced measure for whether you're doing this well is something called the
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. Maybe you've heard it before in its short-hand form: LEED certification. It's a set of standards issued by the U.S. Green Building Council.

But is anybody around here really doing it?

Well, yeah, which is a question I can answer thanks to a searchable online database from the Green Building Council. Thanks to our sometimes environmental writer Jeff Sturgeon for passing this on.

Check it out and get the details yourself, but just as a tease, I already searched a few communities around here.

Roanoke and Roanoke County, for example, have six registered LEED projects under way. There's one in Salem, five in Blacksburg, and 3 in Lynchburg. Richmond, meanwhile, has 27, while Norfolk has 14.

It's a movement that's seems to be gaining steam, which, one might argue, is an indication of what Salem-based architech Gregg Lewis, the shepherd of Roanoke's C2C campaign, preaches: that environmentally-sensitive buildings don't have to make bad business sense, and in fact can be attractive, practical, cost-effective and, of course, the smarter choice for the planet in the long-run.

But what do you think? Is it still a lot of hooey in your mind? Are you still skeptical about whether using an energy efficient hot water heater can really make a difference? Does the fact that more and more buildings are being built -- in many cases by government itself -- with the environment in mind, do anything to change your mind?

Do tell!

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