As interest in green building, sustainable building materials and LEED standards grows by leaps and bounds, our enthusiasm can make it easy to forget that the greenest buildings are those that are not built at all.

I used to be against building new structures if at all possible. You might have called me “antigrowth." It turns out that not building anything and renovating existing buildings are still the most environmentally sound choices. All buildings -- no matter how sustainable the materials used in their construction -- still have high environmental impacts when they break virgin ground, use the energy necessary to produce new materials, and encourage sprawl.

Patrick Frey of the National Trust of Historical Preservation has said, “There's a tremendous impact to the environment whenever you construct something new."  I heard an architect who specialized in LEED certifications say that the biggest cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector are not going to be made by building new projects more sustainably, but by renovations of existing, inefficient building stock.  So as promising as green building technologies may be for sparing the environment, avoiding new construction altogether is an even more eco-conscious approach.

Chevron's New Orleans headquarters offers an interesting case study of what not to do. The company sunk a million dollars into renovating a location in downtown New Orleans, but up and left for a new, giant  gold-certified LEED building on the North Shore. Chevron argues that  the new location cuts commuting time and related impacts down for many of its workers, thereby helping the environment. As true as that may be, it doesn’t seem to me to justify the means the company took. The move smacks of following a trend rather than following the best environmental course.  "For a lot of companies, it's about image," said sustainable designer Prisca Weems in an interview with Nola.com. "They want to be associated with progressive practice."

Building extensively -- but up to LEED certification -- misses the point of green building, which is environmental protection and minimizing the harm to the environment. Environmental protection is better served by renovating and maximizing the utility of existing buildings, like redevelopment on a micro-scale, with self imposed mixed-use and dense development principals.