Local Luminary: Skip Backus

by Jan Larraine Cox and photographs by Andy Milford, June 25, 2009

Omega Institute of Rhinebeck is responding to the worldwide water crisis—in which one billion people currently have no access to clean water—by demonstrating via an innovative new living building how we can protect the less than 1 percent of fresh water currently left here on Earth.

The Omega Institute for Sustainable Living’s grand opening on July 16 represents a milestone in Executive Director Skip Backus’s environmental leadership of the past 25 years. OSCL will purify and reuse all five million gallons of Omega’s wastewater that the site generates every year.

Naturally intrigued with how things work, Backus says he “loved to take things apart” as a youngster. Also entrepreneurial, he operated his own residential and commercial construction company before he joined Omega. He compares the self-sustaining organisms that purify the water in OCSL’s Eco-Machine to a self-sustaining human community, and explains how nature can teach us to live in a state of harmony and balance between organic and constructed environments.

OSCL meshes with Omega’s more than 350 workshops focusing on holistic and sustainable living and engage 23,000 participants per year in seminars promoting community building. As a major new education center with both outdoor and indoor classrooms and laboratory, OSCL has been called one of the greenest buildings in the world, and it will be the stage for Omega’s upcoming environmental sustainability workshops.

Backus says that OCSL is on track for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) platinum status, the highest of four rankings. Designed by John Todd Ecological Design, winner of the 2008 Buckminster Fuller challenge award, OCSL’s Eco-Machine will generate all its own energy, heat and cool the building via geothermal systems, use solar and photovoltaic power, and collect and utilize rainwater. It is completely pollution free and carbon neutral. “OSCL represents Omega’s 30-plus years of commitment to modeling an integrated way of looking at the world and our place in it,” says Backus.

There will be an opening ceremony for the OSCL on July 16 at 3:30pm in connection with Omega’s first annual benefit celebration. (845) 266-4444, ext. 470; www.eomega.org.