AS THE GREEN BUILDER MEDIA TEAM enters our second decade—as the undisputed leader in delivering information and inspiration about sustainable development, green building and intelligent living—we find ourselves on the doorstep of realizing a long-standing dream of sharing our passion for both the natural and built environments in what, for us, is a totally new and powerful medium.

After more than a dozen years of pursuing the ambitious goal of airing the Green Builder television series, along with our international award and Emmy-winning friends at Christopher Productions, we now have the commitment for the distribution support we’ll need to ensure that the completed production is effectively promoted to public television stations across the entire country.

2015 marks Green Builder® Media’s 10 year anniversary. So much has changed in the past decade. The green building market, and Green Builder Media along with it, has evolved from niche and fringe to mainstream and intelligent. As individuals, corporations, and governments around the world have awakened to our pressing environmental realities, sustainability has become recognized as the most cost-efficient, durable, and efficient design and building strategy.

The city of New Orleans proved to be a perfect venue for this year’s annual Greenbuild Conference.

Once crippled by storm surges from Hurricane Katrina, the city has come back with a vengeance, rejuvenated by a focus on durability and sustainability. Subsequent restorations and rebuilds have included techniques such as building raised structures on stilts, strategic parklands and integrated wetlands to manage stormwater.

January 2015 will mark the tenth anniversary of Green Builder® Media. So much has changed over the past decade. The green building market, and Green Builder Media along with it, has evolved from niche and fringe to mainstream and intelligent. As individuals, corporations, and governments around the world have awakened to our pressing environmental realities, sustainability has become recognized as the most cost-efficient, durable, and efficient building strategy.

Since Green Builder Media’s inception, we have aspired not just to report the news about green building; we’ve broken ground and made headlines with our thought-provoking editorial, advanced VISION House demonstration projects, involvement in the code and regulatory arena, and advocacy efforts. We’ve joined forces with building professionals, sustainability experts, manufacturers, and organizations throughout the industry, and, together, we’ve helped shape the national conversation about sustainable living.

Among the most intriguing and extravagant approaches to emerge in recent years to address the challenge of urban sustainability has been so-called “smart-from-the-start” eco-cities, medium-sized cities built from the ground up to incorporate the latest and greatest thinking in sustainable technology and design. These built-from-scratch settlements have started to sprout in several countries – so far, there are projects in various stages of completion in South Korea, Abu Dhabi, Portugal, Kenya, and across China—and they are being touted by developers as showcases for the most advanced ideas in resource-efficient living. They are financed largely by governments and deep-pocketed information technology companies that see a huge business opportunity in urban systems—as the global imperative for sustainable living becomes ever-more evident and pressing.

Masdar City, in Abu Dhabi, embodies many of the aspirations of this new urban genre. By combining ancient design features, such as narrow, shaded streets angled to channel desert winds—with modern technology—including solar power, electric cars, and waste-to-energy systems—lead architect Norman Foster initially claimed that the city would be both carbon-neutral and zero-waste. Nearly seven years on, financial reality has set in; ambitions have been scaled back, and the completion date postponed. But the project is still moving forward. Looking ahead, planners intend for Masdar to serve as a test bed for home-grown innovations developed in an on-site research institute they hope will rival MIT.