In the United States, K–12 school buildings spend more than $8 billion each year on energy—more than they spend on computers and textbooks combined [i]. Most occupied older buildings demonstrate poor operational performance—for instance, more than 30 percent of schools were built before 1960, and 53 percent of public schools need to spend money on repairs, renovations, and modernization to ensure that the schools’ onsite buildings are in good overall condition. And among publ

As pointed out by one of the greatest physicists of this century, Freeman Dyson: “It has become part of the accepted wisdom to say that the twentieth century was the century of physics and the twenty-first century will be the century of biology… Biology is also more important than physics, as measured by its economic consequences, by its ethical implications, or by its effects on human welfare.” [i] In the natural ecology system, performance is the overarching goal of all ind