I Am Still Alive

Why would a company want employees diving into its trash bins? Because at Sasaki Associates, one of the country’s hottest landscape and urban-design firms that’s shaping the Olympic village in Beijing, life is all about salvaging good from bad.

Dr. James Hansen writes after his testimony before Congress – twenty years after his first testimony about global warming.

Again a wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by policymakers and the public. Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic. Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 percent.

The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next president and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.

I accidentally broke a CFL in the office a couple days back and nearly evacuated the building. It’s good to hear folks are investigating alternatives to the alternative.

More and more countries are banning incandescent light bulbs in favor of energy-efficient compact fluorescent lamps, or CFLs. But options to recycle the mercury-laden alternatives are often scarce.

Mark Bittman on the problem (personal and environmental) of Western diets (too much meat, too few plants; too much fast food, too little home cooking).

It’s not the ingredients in plants. It’s the plants. It’s not the beta-carotene in carrots. It’s the carrots.

In an effort to improve electronics recycling in the United States, the U.S. Postal Service is developing a free national collection program for small electronic items.

The program, now in a pilot stage, provides courtesy envelopes with pre-paid postage for patrons to deposit their unwanted digital cameras, printer cartridges, MP3 players, cell phones, and PDAs. International recycling company Clover Technologies Group processes the devices in its U.S. and Mexican facilities and then refurbishes and resells them if possible.

That’s a pretty cool initiative from the USPS.

When we examine the physical environment, we find a set of patterns emerge of what works and what does not. Architect Christopher Alexander codified many of these patterns into a book in 1977 A Pattern Language so we can use it as a quick reference to anchor any attempt to design a physical environment.

In order to secure a relatively high-density environment where everything is within a ten-minute walk, housing needs to be close with shared walls between buildings. Yet people who grew up in detached housing (the quarter acre section) express concern. “Kiwi’s won’t like that” said a New Zealand developer. Why not? It turns out the problem is not proximity but an aversion to neighbour conflict. The closer two neighbours are, the more they get on each other’s nerves. It turns out that it has to do with the physics of noise through air. The quarter acre section gives enough distance that the decibels of the noisy neighbour drop enough to be comfortable. The alternative is to use design so neighbours do not make irritating noise that travels. For a start, place the outdoor activities somewhere else: on the plaza or in the greenbelt rather than next to the house. Do not have a back lawn that needs mowing with an 85 dBa mower. Do not have a back yard where people curse each other. Build the row houses wide rather than deep and make the common wall soundproof. The developer listened, considered and replied “Yup, that should do it… you’re right. I had never considered why.”

Unlike global warming, the science of fish stock collapse is old and its practitioners have been pretty much in agreement since the 1950s. Yet Roberts can think of only one international agreement that has actually worked and preserved stocks of an exploited marine animal – a deal in the Arctic in 1911 to regulate the hunting of fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. So why has the international community failed so badly in its attempts to stop the long-heralded disaster with our fish?

NAC: Jim, can you talk about your thoughts on LEED certification?

JHK: Well, I put that in the category of what I call “blowing green smoke up our ass[es].” I saw a fantastic example of that last night. In a commercial break from the Iowa caucus returns, there was a commercial from General Motors for a hydrogen car, and the story they were trying to put across was, “We’ve already invented this, and you can go out and buy it tomorrow.” Which is complete nonsense. We don’t have any hydrogen cars, we don’t have a fleet of hydrogen cars, and we certainly don’t have any network of hydrogen filling stations even on the drawing boards that would service these things. So the whole thing was just an exercise in unfortunately bending and twisting the reality of the American viewing public. And we do an awful lot of this.

Some Bold Steps to Make Your Carbon Footprint Smaller

In the 1860s and 1870s, Augustin Mouchot built the first dish-shaped reflector that ran a heat engine, and he used solar thermal to heat a boiler that ran an ice maker. His assistant demonstrated a printing press running on concentrated solar. But all this work came to naught because of the general lack of direct sunlight in France and the abundance of cheap coal, which became a primary energy source for the Industrial Revolution.

Wind turbines, once used primarily for farms and rural houses far from electrical service, are becoming more common in heavily populated residential areas as homeowners are attracted to ease of use, financial incentives and low environmental effects.

Ecological concerns, more than cost savings may drive many new residential turbine installations. “People want to reduce their carbon footprints,” Mr. Tonko said. “They’re concerned about climate change and they want to reduce our reliance of foreign sources of fuels.”

Even if the wind is strong, zoning and aesthetics can pose problems. “Turbines work in rural areas with strong wind,” Mr. Schwartz said. “But in urban and suburban areas, neighbors are never happy to see a 60- to 120-foot tower going up across the street.”

Transparent glass containing solar cells could capture enough energy to power a home.

“The answer to the question ‘Paper or plastic?’ should be ‘Neither,’ ” [Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels] said at a news conference Wednesday morning. “Both harm the environment. Every piece of plastic ever made is still with us in the environment, and the best way to handle waste is not to create it in the first place.”
- on the Mayor’s proposal to charge customers a 20-cent “green fee” per bag used at the checkout line. If approved by the City Council, the fee would take effect January 1, 2009

Architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account “All children, all species, for all time.” A tireless proponent of absolute sustainability (with a deadpan sense of humor), he explains his philosophy of “cradle to cradle” design, which bridge the needs of ecology and economics.