"Back in February 2006, when I began editing C-VILLE's special sections, I didn't know beans about green building. Conveniently, neither did the public at large. And so, with one of my duties being to oversee the Green Scene pages in ABODE, C-VILLE's monthly shelter section, I began getting educated. First I learned about specific eco-friendly products (a brochure for recycled-denim insulation sticks in my memory); later I wrote a story about local builder Doug Lowe and his new home in Crozet, which was one of the first LEED-certified houses in the country. Our local area, it seemed, was something of a hotbed not only of green design—architect William McDonough has long been a bright national light—but of green building, too.

It was the first time I encountered the term LEED, but it wouldn't be the last. A short year and a half later, LEED is, if not a household word, certainly a term with considerable leverage in the local development scene. Albemarle County and UVA have both made public commitments to LEED-certified building. My colleagues in the news department regularly return from planning commission meetings to report on LEED- and EarthCraft-certified projects in the works. Meanwhile, local builders have more and more widely embraced all things energy-efficient, watershed-friendly, nontoxic, and nonpolluting. Charlottesville now has its very own chapter of the James River Green Building Council, a lively schedule of LEED and EarthCraft seminars, and a de facto requirement that any new development must profess its energy efficiency if it doesn't want to appear hopelessly outdated.

That's the supply side of the equation. On the demand side, the public is rapidly boarding the green bandwagon. In November 2007, no fewer than 90 people turned out for a free workshop at the Habitat Store, part of an ongoing series called GreenMatters, to hear from experts about basic ways to shrink their homes' footprints. More telling to me, though, was an almost offhand remark made by a woman I was interviewing while she and her husband were house-shopping. "We're trying to green our lifestyle," she said. For that reason, they were looking to move from Fluvanna County to the heart of Charlottesville—to slash their commute, and then to renovate in the green fashion (as examples of how they'd do this, she rattled off tankless water heaters and EnergyStar appliances).

These people didn't seem like hippies, and two years previously, I would have been genuinely surprised to hear that they were making big changes in their lifestyle for the sake of an often abstract greater good. But these days, couples like them are common. And their dollars—for mortgage payments, gasoline, groceries, and low-VOC paint—are starting to really mean something.

Enter Belvedere. Or rather, enter the green version of Belvedere. As I realized in May when I first wrote about the high-profile, 675-home development off Rio Road, its presentation as an enlightened community (organic farm, EarthCraft houses, LEED neighborhood development certification) was not the vision of some altruistic designer as much as it was a savvy marketing strategy. A growing segment of the population wants to combine luxury and moralism in the form of free-trade coffee and eco-friendly resorts. Why not also in the form of a housing development? Stonehaus, Belvedere's developers, had won approval for hundreds of houses on this site in 2005, long before they'd started calling their plan "sustainable." Now, the image of earth-friendliness would maybe help those houses sell in a faltering market.

This is not to say that the actual development of Belvedere wouldn't have to be, in many ways, green. You can't fake bike lanes or rain barrels, and third-party certifications like LEED and EarthCraft are by all accounts rigorous. But the way the project presented itself—with all the well-researched slickness of a Whole Foods cheese-and-membrillo display—seemed to me a signal that "green building" was no longer about doing the right thing. It was about having the right thing. It was a form of consumerism.

What's more, the rollout of green Belvedere landed in a year rife with media coverage of the sustainability movement. Newsstands sagged with magazines' "green issues," packed with good news about solutions.

When an enviro image is your primary product—as it is for Belvedere, at least now while the houses still exist only on paper—bad press about pollution sure is a bummer. Just a few months after its May groundbreaking, the project hit its first major PR snag in the form of disgruntled neighbors, who said that a bonfire of felled trees on the 207-acre Belvedere site was coating cars with soot and making people cough. The October incident soon faded from the news cycle after developers gave neighbors car washes, but it left a smoky smudge on Belvedere's image. In a small way, it felt like a fall from grace.

I'm not sure it really was, though. A tarnished corporate image is one thing; a global crisis is another. Over my time at C-VILLE, as I've reported on many small facets of the green-building trend, it has very clearly taken its place in local culture. And if I were reading and writing about only green building, the world would seem like it was headed in quite a good direction. Except there are other things happening too—things like this year's drought, the second in the only six years that I've lived here, and traffic and meat recalls and bottles of insecticides lined up on the shelf at Lowe's. It's impossible to say with any confidence that Charlottesville or America or the world at large is thinking deeply about its environmental woes with the same energy that we're drawing up blueprints to adhere to LEED standards.

What's the lesson here? I wouldn't presume to say. For me, though, there is a reminder—that the routine of the news, whether one is producing it or consuming it, can be a distraction. And that the management of images is, truly, the least of our problems." (Erika Howsare, C-Ville Weekly, January 1, 2008)