100 mile building

I have heard a lot lately about the 100 mile diet. Apparently, when the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically traveled at least 1,500 miles to get from where it was grown to your plate. Last spring, two people living in an apartment in Vancouver tried an experiment: for one year, they would attempt to eat and drink only those items that came from within 100 miles of Vancouver, British Columbia. The 100-Mile Diet was born, and their committment to themselves has turned into something a great deal bigger. Today you can pledge to get involved and help grow the local-food movement at: 100milediet.org/i/joinhere

But recently Helen Goodland wondered outloud: "what about the 100 mile building?" The Canadian Green Building Council's LEED system awards two potential points for the selection of materials extracted and manufactured regionally: within 800 km (500 miles) of the project site. Of course, this is lifted from the USGBC LEED system, and when Bill Reed, one of the USGBC's LEED creators, was in town recently, he talked about the rather arbitrary way in which this limit was developed, and agreed that it was all too easy to meet.

What does a 100 mile building look like? Somehow in my mind it looks like the fuzzy building behind the georgeous bike fence in the below picture, and it will probably remain a fuzzy idea until someone actually builds one, and proclaims far and wide that it is a 100 mile building.

Let me know if you see one.