One would expect great, green things of a place like the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies. While other seventies-era holistic doings faded into red ink and obscurity, Omega grew and grew, expanding its facilities and course offerings- teaching shamanism and massage, heart-centered relating and herbal medicine.
With the creation of its Sustainable Living Center, Omega once again reaches out- to a world that may finally be beginning to listen. MGB asked executive director Skip Backus if he’d be willing to share.
How does the new Omega Center for Sustainable Living (OCSL) fit in with Omega's overall mission?
The Omega Center for Sustainable Living (OCSL) represents Omega’s 30+ year commitment to modeling an integrated way of looking at the world and our place in it. Each year more than 18,000 people visit Omega’s Rhinebeck campus and many more thousands visit our website. As an environmental steward, Omega has a real opportunity to educate the public about sustainable living – from the food that we serve, to 100% of the campus electricity coming from wind and solar technology, to the OCSL itself.
Omega holds sustainability as one of its core values. Since 1977, we've considered the impact of our actions, and managed our facilities with an acute awareness of our relationship to environmental sustainability. As an environmental steward, Omega's commitment to sustainability includes recycling and conservation; supporting sustainable agriculture; increasing the use of clean, renewable energy; using green building materials and cleaning supplies; and creating and preserving habitat for native animals and plants.
In our ongoing effort to live our value of sustainability, we have begun our most ambitious project to date, the Omega Center for Sustainable Living (OCSL). An innovative educational center, the OCSL will be the first of its kind in the United States to combine the most sophisticated green building and wastewater treatment technologies under one roof. It will serve as the heart of Omega's ongoing environmental sustainability initiatives and will include the Eco Machine™ (a water garden and constructed wetland to treat our wastewater), and a classroom for visitors—students, teachers, activists, corporate executives, elected officials—who want to learn more about green building and sustainable living.
The OCSL will protect our local ecosystem, preserve our freshwater resources, and serve as a community resource, demonstrating sustainability, ecological responsibility, and green alternatives, reminding all of us that if we take care of the Earth, the Earth will take care of us.
What's involved in creating a "living building?" How does this go beyond "green" building standards?
The OCSL is a pioneering project in the Living Building Challenge (LBC). A program of the Cascadia Region Green Building Council, the LBC invites all building owners, architects, engineers, and design professionals to build in a way that provides for a sustainable future. At the heart of the LBC is the belief that our society needs to move quickly to a state of balance between the natural and built environments.
The LBC asks us to imagine a building that is informed by its eco-region's characteristics; generates all of its own energy with renewable resources; captures and treats all of its water; and operates efficiently, and for maximum beauty. It asks us to think beyond what the green building industry has defined as possible to an integrated building process that redefines how we think of sustainability.
The LBC is comprised of six performance areas: Site, Energy, Materials, Water, Indoor Quality, and Beauty & Inspiration. Within these six areas there are 16 prerequisites that must be met for a building to be designated a Living Building.
The OCSL brings together wastewater recycling, clean energy, green architecture, and other sustainability elements that can be replicated locally and globally. The building will be self-sustaining, featuring the latest technology in the sustainability field; it will be heated and cooled by geothermal systems and use solar and photovoltaic power.
Besides Living Building status, the OCSL is being constructed to meet the highest green building standards of the trade: LEED Platinum status. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™ is a third-party certification program and the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction, and operation of high performance buildings. LEED provides building owners and operators with the tools they need to have an immediate and measurable impact on their building’s performance. It encourages and accelerates global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices through the creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria. By meeting certain criteria a project accumulates credits. The total number of credits a project finishes with determines its LEED status, Certified, Silver, Gold, or Platinum.
What's the Eco Machine all about?
The core of the OCSL will be a 4,500-square-foot greenhouse containing a water filtration system called the Eco Machine™. This living system will use plants, bacteria, algae, snails, and fungi to recycle Omega’s wastewater (approximately 5 million gallons per year) into clean water that will restore the aquifer under Omega’s property. Dr. John Todd, winner of the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge award, and his son Jonathan, are the founders of John Todd Ecological Design, Inc. – responsible for the design of the Eco Machine™, which mimics the Earth’s natural systems.
The OCSL and the Eco Machine™ will serve a very practical purpose by replacing an aging septic system and supporting the physical operations of Omega’s campus in a very important way. By witnessing natural processes in the OCSL—from lighting to heating to wastewater treatment—we understand that we are part of—not separate from—something larger than ourselves. In doing so, we experience the true potential of what nature can teach us.
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