Greenbuild 2026: Investing in People

By Jay Fox

For those who have never been to the Greenbuild International Conference & Expo, the experience can be intimidating. It is huge. Unofficially, the 2026 event brought in over 10,000 green building professionals from over 60 countries to see more than 250 exhibiting companies and organizations on the expo floor Wednesday and Thursday (October 21–22). There were also more than 100 educational sessions, workshops, and preconference summits spread across four days (October 20–23). Though the event has been held annually since 2002, this was the first time it had ever been held in New York City.

One experience from the event stands out in particular.

I decided to attend the preconference summit on accelerating the adoption of low-carbon materials. From the schedule, I could see that the eight-hour event would cover a ton of ground, and there are always new developments in this rapidly evolving field.

The second half of the summit was a little different. The room was divided into tables representing regions or individual states of the US, and the approximately 200 people in attendance were asked to sit according to where they were based. New England had four tables, New York had two, and the state of California had one. The entire Southeast had been given two, but only one was necessary. The table was ultimately filled by eight or nine people from the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Hong Kong (why not?).

The programming in the second half of the summit also included interactive workshops—hence the assigned seating. Each table was asked to discuss local solutions for creating an environment that is more conducive to material reuse. One of the presenters who spoke prior to the groupwork, Andrew Ellsworth of Doors Unhinged, framed material reuse as largely a demand problem. Figuring out the supply chain is no easy task, as one must locate salvageable materials, move them, store them, process them, and then deliver them to site. The real challenge has been, and will continue to be, getting owners, architects, and contractors to specify these products. As Ellsworth said, policy and white papers will only go so far.

Two things became immediately clear as those at the Southeast table started talking about their experiences and challenges. First, the Southeast is a little bit behind when it comes to using reclaimed materials. Second, those at the Southeast table felt that policy was needed to create demand and incentivize the use of these materials. It should come as no surprise that there is a more robust green building movement in places like the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and California. There are more clients who are willing to experiment and spend money to try something new for the sake of advancing the green building movement—whether that’s trying Passive House for the first time, shooting for Living Building certification, or figuring out ways to create buildings that rely almost entirely on reclaimed materials. Organic growth is slow, but it is possible when there is a critical mass of concerned citizens and enough wealth. Still, opportunities are rare even in wealthy parts of the Northeast. Experience has shown that those opportunities are exceptionally rare in the Southeast.

However, this is why people from places like the Southeast should come to events like Greenbuild. We get to see what has worked in places where the green building movement is a few steps ahead. We get to build upon existing coalitions. We meet other like-minded people whom we might not otherwise meet, even if they live in the same state or city as we do. As an example, many of the most OG members of the North American Passive House movement first met while at Passive House conferences or training sessions overseas. For the homegrown movement to start, they had to first leave home.

Another distinction that makes Greenbuild so worthwhile is that it is presented by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC), but it does not solely champion its own green building rating system, LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). Instead, Greenbuild takes a big tent approach. It includes people with backgrounds in Passive House design, embodied carbon accounting, designing for deconstruction, and even financing solutions for green building. As much as we may be focused on improving building efficiency and driving down operational carbon at the Accelerator, there are loads of other dimensions to the decarbonization movement, and it is really humbling to be surrounded by so many people who have such a deep appreciation for the many niches that need to be filled in order to make the larger movement work.

As I reflect on the experience of going to Greenbuild now, almost two weeks after the fact, I keep thinking of the theme, Invest for Impact, and how the greatest impact comes when we invest in people. In a narrow economic sense, that theme can refer to upskilling so that we can actually design and build the high-performance buildings that will drive down emissions. In the broadest sense, it can refer to creating a built environment that is both human-centric and biophilic and serves to optimize health and comfort.

Of course, it can also refer to investing in a community. Once again, there is the narrow sense of community that refers to the green building community, as well as the broader sense—communities that may include neighborhoods or cities or states or countries. I prefer to think in the broadest sense and to echo the quote by John Muir that Mike Johnson of the International Living Future Institute included in his presentation Tuesday morning: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

Invest for impact does not just refer to the green building movement, or tradespeople, or buildings; it can be truly transformative on a societal scale. Investing in a green economy can create a cleaner, healthier, and more equitable society. We just need to keep putting in the work. If we want to build community resilience through better building and find ways to decarbonize the built environment, we need to lift up local communities and networks because they will ultimately form the backbone and arteries of the movement. We then need to connect those networks and create broad coalitions so that each network is not forced to work in a silo and expend resources doing work that has already been done by other communities.

As author Edward Everett Hale is believed to have written: “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.”

Zakaria also made some remarks about the rise of artificial intelligence and what that will mean for our way of life, and I would like to spend a few moments digesting what he said before returning to this open/closed divide.

As Zakaria explained, the way humans study the natural sciences is relatively new. For most of our history, we understood the forces that govern nature through the lens of superstition or religion. The sun rising, the sun setting, the seasons, the motion of stars and planets: these were associated with the will of a deity or collection of deities. Humans understood patterns, of course, but variations (e.g., a poor harvest) were thought to be due to the whims of the gods, and religions were developed to placate these gods through ritual and sacrifice. The actual mechanisms governing the world were thought to be locked away inside what Zakaria described as a proverbial black box.

During the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, thinkers argued that humans could use reason and scientific inquiry to better understand the natural world. As Immanuel Kant wrote, the spirit of the Enlightenment was defined by the motto “dare to know!” (sapere aude). Kant’s exhortation came relatively late in the game, as the first glimmers of the Enlightenment can be traced back to people like Copernicus (1473–1543), Bacon (1561–1626), Galileo (1564–1642), Kepler (1571–1630), Descartes (1596–1650), Boyle (1627–1691), and Newton (1643–1727).

The spirit of the Enlightenment may have begun among a small group of thinkers, but it was spread via rising literacy rates and the expansion of public education. It also dramatically changed the world as scientific advances (and scientific literacy) were followed by technological advances in everything from communications to materials science. These advances were proof that humans could dismantle the black box and use their own faculties for scientific reasoning to uncover the laws of nature. Through the lens of human reason, many of the mysteries of the world became clear.

However, with the creation of artificial intelligence, particularly the kind of intelligence that may prove better at understanding the nature of the universe than we could ever hope to, Zakaria noted that we may in turn produce a new black box. If this kind of AI is not just faster than us but understands the natural world on a level we cannot, then we will cease to be the analytic agent at the heart of scientific and technological advancement. For Zakaria, this has immediate effects on many knowledge workers, as AI will may prove to be better at diagnosing illnesses than doctors, analyzing law better than lawyers, and creating complex machinery better than engineers.

Somehow Zakaria managed to find a silver lining here—or, in his phrasing, a crack where the light can shine through. He believes that our real defining faculty has less to do with scientific inquiry and more to do with compassion and empathy. AI may soon be better at diagnosing a patient, Zakaria said, but walking that patient through their prognosis and treatment options will always be handled better by a human.

That sounds nice, but…what about an engineering team? Will they be tasked with walking a client through AI-generated design details? Will the architect’s role become almost entirely artistic because AI will handle the technical challenges? Will the warmth and compassion of a structural engineer keep them employed? More crucially, if AI does all the work that an entry-level person would normally do, how is anyone supposed to get their foot in the door?

To bring this full circle, the open/closed divide in our politics that Zakaria spoke about did not come out of nowhere. It has clear structural and economic antecedents. The skepticism of openness expressed by many blue-collar workers emerged as part of a backlash to globalization, particularly the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to the Global South that started in the 1970s and accelerated with the implementation of free trade agreements dating back to the 1990s and early 2000s. Advances in automation then supercharged the process of deindustrialization.

In North America, the backlash to globalization has been most pronounced in places where the impact of deindustrialization has been most acute, particularly the Rust Belt and parts of Appalachia. These regions are where millions of people feel left behind and where unemployment, addiction, and deaths of despair have run rampant for years. It is no wonder they are less concerned with problems that seem abstract or that encourage global collaboration. By contrast, it is also no wonder that regions that have benefited from globalization are more open to large-scale collaboration.

All that said, if AI’s grand promise is that it will make millions of workers functionally obsolete because their labor will become both inferior to and more expensive than the work of AI, more people will end up feeling left behind. Even if workers are given a universal basic income, the psychological impact of believing oneself to be superfluous can become a source of humiliation and ressentiment, causing that crack where the light can shine through to become paper-thin. This is not a novel observation; it comes from thinkers like Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom, The Sane Society) and Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism). As they argued in their works, people who feel useless, hopeless, powerless, and humiliated tend to lash out in violent and self-destructive ways (e.g., addiction). It certainly doesn’t make them more open.

So here’s the point: Fighting climate change can create a green economy. Creating a green economy can keep people gainfully employed. Keeping people gainfully employed makes them more open to collaboration and less subject to despair. Therefore, if we want to combat a global problem like climate change with a global effort, we should focus our attention on creating stable and regenerative economies over technologies that will make entire industries largely obsolete and leave millions of people adrift. More than just being a self-evidently good thing to do, it also helps to prevent economic conditions that can lead to alienation and despair, as well as a more isolationist perspective.

If we want to invest for impact, our focus should be on people and communities rather than creating a darker lens through which to view the world.