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Smart Green Infrastructure: How to Grow Sustainable Cities (EnviroSpeak.tv)
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Andy Lipkis, Founder and President of TreePeople, describes how this organization has pioneered an integrated approach to managing urban ecosystems as watersheds in the Los Angeles region. This involves strategic tree planting, tree-mimicking technologies, and community engagement to generate multiple solutions to the environmental threats facing our cities, including ensuring a sustainable water supply, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, preventing water and air pollution, fostering stronger neighborhoods, and creating jobs. For a summary of TreePeople's six demonstration projects that are now collecting 1.25 million gallons of water every time it rains 1" in Los Angeles, visit www. treepeople.org. Video Going to Green: Planting Seeds of Change with Community Forestry produced by the Media & Policy Center Foundation for PBS.
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Great stuff here - fascinating to see how "silo-think" works against solving problems.
"Environmental Heresies; The founder of The Whole Earth Catalog believes the environmental movement will soon reverse its position on four core issues," by Stewart Brand
Great article from May 2005, by Stewart Brand, on scientific thinking v romanticist thinking, applied to environmentalism and predictions for the future. Great stuff. It starts like this (and doesn't slow down):
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Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.
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The success of the environmental movement is driven by two powerful forces -- romanticism and science -- that are often in opposition. The romantics identify with natural systems; the scientists study natural systems. The romantics are moralistic, rebellious against the perceived dominant power, and combative against any who appear to stray from the true path. They hate to admit mistakes or change direction. The scientists are ethicalistic, rebellious against any perceived dominant paradigm, and combative against each other. For them, admitting mistakes is what science is.
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they need to recognize what caused the turnaround. The world population growth rate actually peaked at 2 percent way back in 1968, the very year my old teacher Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The world's women didn't suddenly have fewer kids because of his book, though. They had fewer kids because they moved to town.
Cities are population sinks-always have been. Although more children are an asset in the countryside, they're a liability in the city. A global tipping point in urbanization is what stopped the population explosion. As of this year, 50 percent of the world's population lives in cities, with 61 percent expected by 2030. In 1800 it was 3 percent; in 1900 it was 14 percent.
The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history. Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it. In every single region in the world, including the U.S., small towns and rural areas are emptying out. The trees and wildlife are returning. Now is the time to put in place permanent protection for those rural environments. Meanwhile, the global population of illegal urban squatters -- which Robert Neuwirth's book Shadow Cities already estimates at a billion -- is growing fast. Environmentalists could help ensure that the new dominant human habitat is humane and has a reduced footprint of overall environmental impact.
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"Premier rightly targets blowhard NIMBYists," by Christopher Hume (Toronto Star)
Backed by a recent announcement by Dalton McGuinty (that "the province will limit the endless NIMBY wrangling that accompanies its every attempt to introduce environmental measures"), Hume takes aim at Toronto NIMBYs and blasts away. No holds barred, great stuff:
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The NIMBY response has become a given, a default position, an automatic reaction, a cliché. It's the same whether we're talking about highrise condos in north Toronto, narrowing Jarvis St. from five lanes to four, constructing a streetcar right-of-way on St. Clair Ave., rehabilitating the Wychwood Barns or trying to slow global warming to save the planet and this sorry ass of a city.
Many residents assume that to live in a neighbourhood confers the exclusive right to decide what should or shouldn't happen in it. In some cases, NIMBY opponents of homes for unwed mothers and the like have claimed the right to say who can live next door. The sense of entitlement behind such an attitude could sink a battleship.
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So true.
"Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait / current work" by Chris Jordan
Fascinating project:
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Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.
This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibililties of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
~chris jordan, Seattle, 2008
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Better Place || Electric Changes Everything
Hmmm, from the header: "electric changes everything :: When we break the cycle of oil dependence, new things become possible. See how the switch to electric transforms the relationship between cars, people and the planet."
Proposed solution? Electric everything?
Portal page.
Interesting - lots to explore...
Business Guide - David Suzuki Foundation
"New guide to cutting greenhouse gas emissions shows how businesses can save millions and the environment." Portal page for downloading the document(s), etc.
The Gospel of Green | CBC News: the fifth estate
CBC portal page for a program on Germany's shift to a green(er) infrastructure/ economy, w/ focus on Hermann Scheer, parliamentarian who helped make it happen.
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Hermann Scheer is a German parliamentarian who has turned ideas into practical solutions. Because of the laws that bear his name, Germany is now a solar-paneled, windmill-building, job-producing green powerhouse of the industrialized world. Fifteen per cent of Germany's electricity now comes from renewable energy systems. Scheer predicts that, if his country continues on this course, that number could be 100 per cent by 2030.
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Introduction: By Paul Hawken - SustainLane
Great defense of cities by Paul Hawken.
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Urban migration represents a kind of collective wisdom, and how we configure our cities will be critical to our survival. Regardless of the myths about living close to the land, cities are where human beings have the lowest ecological footprint. It takes less energy, wood, material, and food to provide a good life for a person in a city than in the country. Rather than perceive the city as an ecological sink sucking up the resources of the countryside, which cities can do, cities can also be a kind of ecological ark, places where humanity gathers while we peak in population and develop ecological intelligence for a new civilization. There is wisdom in this that is rather extraordinary. It was not predicted that cities might be the best strategy for our long-term survival and well-being. Yet that is exactly what is happening.
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For most of the 19th and 20th century, cities, despite the hardships and suffering experienced in ghettos, were seen as places where culture and intelligence concentrated and evolved. In the latter part of the 20th century, urban decay, environmental problems, and ethnic riots created a rush for the exits and rampant urban sprawl. Cities became more dangerous and inhuman. Post-war modernist planners and architects made matters worse by creating concrete monuments to themselves, hollowing out downtowns into commercial centers that felt like mausoleums at night.
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Add Sticky NoteEhrlich predicted England would cease to exist by the end of the 20th century and India would have collapsed while mass starvation swept the globe.
- All predictions of the future turn out to be hare-brained, it seems... - on 2008-11-20
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LED Lamp is Powered by Dirt | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration
I wonder whether something like this could be used to power city streetlights? Just stick the poles in the ground, and ...?
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Sounding like something out of a science fair project, the Soil Lamp runs on mud. Designer Marieke Staps says that the metabolism of biological life within the soil produces enough electricity to power the lamp’s LED bulb. The mud is housed within copper and zinc cells that conduct the electricity produced within the wet soil. Maintenance is simple - pour a little water in the dirt, and the lamp will keep going.
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Oil sands will pollute Great Lakes, report warns
I was already opposed to the oil sands project on several levels (it seems inefficient, for one thing), but this really clinches it: exploiting the oil sands in Alberta will lead to a build up of refineries along the Great Lakes, which will raise pollution and environmental degradation levels exponentially in that region.
The article references a report by UofT's Munk Centre, which calls the pipeline network for transporting the fuel a "pollution delivery system."
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The environmental impacts of Alberta's oil sands will not be restricted to Western Canada, researchers say, but will extend thousands of kilometres away to the Great Lakes, threatening water and air quality around the world's largest body of fresh water.
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In a new report, the University of Toronto's Munk Centre says the massive refinery expansions needed to process tar sands crude, and the new pipeline networks for transporting the fuel, amount to a “pollution delivery system” connecting Alberta to the Great Lakes region of Canada and the U.S.
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WATT: World's 1st Sustainable Dance Club (SDC)
Page for WATT, Rotterdam's Sustainable Dance Club. Includes a really cool video (one guy, quoting verbatim, talks about how we're "leaving the tree hugger age" and moving into a whole new era that embraces innovation etc.). Found via Inhabitat (see http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/10/02/sustainable-dance-club-opens-in-rotterdam/), which includes more images.
A Concrete Fix to Global Warming (MIT Technology Review)
A company in Nova Scotia says it has developed a process by which manufacturers of precast concrete products can store 60Ts of CO2 in every 1000Ts of concrete product. This would be factory carbon dioxide (produced by heating the plant, running the machinery, etc.), which would be redirected onto the concrete, and absorbed (sequestered) by it, effectively negating the initial production of CO2. From the article:
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Concrete accounts for more than 5 percent of human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually, mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Making finished concrete products--by mixing cement with water, sand, and gravel--creates additional emissions because heat and steam are often used to accelerate the curing process.
But Robert Niven, founder of Halifax-based Carbon Sense Solutions, says that his company's process would actually allow precast concrete to store carbon dioxide. The company takes advantage of a natural process; carbon dioxide is already reabsorbed in concrete products over hundreds of years from natural chemical reactions. Freshly mixed concrete is exposed to a stream of carbon-dioxide-rich flue gas, rapidly speeding up the reactions between the gas and the calcium-containing minerals in cement (which represents about 10 to 15 percent of the concrete's volume). The technology also virtually eliminates the need for heat or steam, saving energy and emissions.
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One of the comments to the article notes that carbonated concrete wouldn't be good for use in reinforced concrete buildings because the carbonation reduces the alkalinity of the product, and that in turn affects the durability and strength of the rebar/ steel, but that it would work well for sidewalks (and presumably cinderblock type materials?).
Interesting development, at any rate, as concrete production accounts for 5% of the world's human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually.
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A Canadian company says that it has developed a way for makers of precast concrete products to take all the carbon-dioxide emissions from their factories, as well as neighboring industrial facilities, and store them in the products that they produce by exposing those products to carbon-dioxide-rich flue gases during the curing process.
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Concrete accounts for more than 5 percent of human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions annually, mostly because cement, the active ingredient in concrete, is made by baking limestone and clay powders under intense heat that is generally produced by the burning of fossil fuels. Making finished concrete products--by mixing cement with water, sand, and gravel--creates additional emissions because heat and steam are often used to accelerate the curing process.
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Why daylight saving time is bad for the environment (Toronto Star)
"The annual time change has long been sold as a way to save energy, but the opposite might be true." I wouldn't mind if we stayed on one time all year round, although I admit liking daylight savings for the longer evenings. But then I don't live in an area that uses air conditioning -- the main reason why electricity use goes way up in DST and therefore there's a net increase in fuel / energy consumption (vs any sort of energy saving).
I dislike changing from standard time to daylight saving time and vice versa, the silly business of spring forward or falling back -- it feels like jet lag without any of the benefits of actual travel.
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Always sold as a conservation measure, the practice of daylight savings actually jacked electricity use in homes across one central U.S. state by up to four per cent, according to a new American study.
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Instead of saving electricity and money by adding an extra hour of sunlight to evenings most of the year, it cost Indiana homes an extra $8.6 million in electricity bills – mostly from chugging air conditioners – each year. And since 95 per cent of that extra energy was generated by coal-fired power plants, that meant much more atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide was spewed into the air.
Expanded nationally, those results would translate to at least two coal-fired electricity plants pumping power just to feed the daylight savings habit.
"In Indiana, I can tell you unambiguously now, there are social and environmental costs associated with daylight savings time because of the pollution emissions and carbon dioxide emissions contributing to climate change," Kotchen says.
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My Other Car is a Bright Green City - WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future
via CEOs for Cities, an article by Alex Steffen, which argues for dense, urban communities that will help curb (literally) car use. \n\nFrom his intro preamble: "This is a rough draft of a long essay about why I believe building compact communities should be one of America's highest environmental priorities, and why, in fact, our obsession with building greener cars may be obscuring some fundamental aspects of the problem and some of the benefits of using land-use change as a primary sustainability solution."
Crosscut Seattle - Green is the new gold rush? Not without government R&D
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He reframed the discussion about coping with global warming by saying it was a golden opportunity to make money. One week earlier, Seattle business leaders were hearing the same siren song at the Chamber of Commerce retreat in Vancouver. A bank president declared, "Green is the new gold."
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One big factor that this rosy scenario leaves out is the role of government. Here, the seminal thinkers are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of a new book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. The authors argue against the high-regulation model for battling pollution and other environmental woes, or approaches that raise the cost of dirty energy. You can read about the controversy they have stirred up with greens in this essay.
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