Readers React: Can green builders save the world? No, but that shouldn’t stop them from trying.

To the editor: Wade Graham’s piece was a curious polemic replete with self-defeating falsehoods. (“Are we greening our cities, or just greenwashing them?” Opinion, March 6)

I know of no architect, sustainable designer or community activist who contends that urban farming, rooftop “shrubs” or the green trend in design “solves the problem” or “saves the world.” To insert this rhetorical accusation throughout his article defeats his intent, which is to encourage more dramatic and fundamental urban development models that can and will counter humanity’s devastating impact on the environment.

To cite Paolo Soleri’s and R. Buckminster Fuller’s grand but flawed macro planning for sustainable cities is to employ yet another classic straw-man argument.

The many green initiatives that Graham demeans, however small and incremental, do bring urban dwellers closer to nature’s beauty and grandeur. They can and will lay the groundwork for broader and more systemic changes in our urban environments.

Mark Mawrence, Santa Monica

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To the editor: I share Graham’s concern about the impacts of our “economic system based on the destruction of nature.” However, I was very disappointed that he devoted the bulk of his essay to petty criticisms of green architecture.

Graham claims that “architecture isn’t responsible in any meaningful way for humanity’s disastrous environmental impacts.” Actually, buildings consume nearly half of all the energy produced in the United States.

Whatever shortcomings any individual project has, the potential for green architecture to be part of creating the low-carbon future we need should not be trivialized.

John D. Kelley, Santa Barbara

The writer is an architect.

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