A Nihilist's Guide to Saving the Planet
GreenCE’s mission is to support the necessary transition to a sustainable built environment by empowering design professionals to address the environmental, economic, and social impacts of buildings. GreenCE’s course catalog includes LEED exam preparation, continuing education to maintain your AIA or LEED credential, as well as specialty education focused on topics such as ADA/Barrier-Free requirements. We are committed to designing the highest quality continuing education programs in the construction industry.
Are you tired of sustainability webinars and workshops that ignore the elephant in the room? This course confronts environmental reality without corporate greenwashing or cheerful platitudes. We examine climate change, mass extinction, toxic building materials, and institutional failure through the lens of philosophical nihilism—not to surrender to despair, but to clear away false hope and find authentic pathways forward.
We explore why confronting apparent meaninglessness might be essential for discovering genuine meaning in environmental action. For every environmental catastrophe, we examine breakthrough technologies and innovations that demonstrate authentic progress: By the end, you won't feel better about the planet's state—you'll feel clearer about where authentic opportunities exist for meaningful impact in your professional work, equipped with frameworks for navigating the gap between environmental necessity and economic reality.
- Analyze environmental challenges through nihilistic philosophy to understand how climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion create design contradictions, while identifying breakthrough technologies that offer authentic rather than false hope.
- Evaluate sustainable building systems including LEED within planetary-scale crises, distinguishing meaningful progress from greenwashing in pursuit of genuine human health and environmental outcomes.
- Navigate institutional failures that prevent large-scale environmental action, understanding how polarization and misinformation create sustainability barriers while developing strategies for authentic professional engagement.
- Apply nihilistic clarity to design decisions by confronting apparent meaninglessness of individual action within systemic collapse, then creating authentic meaning through committed practice integrating human health and environmental protection.
