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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.
Prefab-ulous: New Development in England Goes Up Green — and Fast
Brief article by Andrew Blum about Oxley Woods, a development of "90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres." The key aspect? They're all pre-fab, relatively cheap to build, can be built quickly, and have in-built green features.
If Canada had a federal housing plan/ strategy, this would be something the Feds (and the Province) could take a closer look at. It sounds like it could be a reasonable (if partial) solution to our affordable housing crisis.
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northwest of London, British developers are pulling one off on a scale that Americans are still only mocking up in Photoshop. The site, dubbed Oxley Woods, already features 90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres. The factory-made dwellings make good on prefab's promise of low cost and quick construction. They take as little as $118,000 and seven days to erect: five in the plant and a day and a half onsite, where crews slide and screw together the modular pieces. (Electrical, plumbing, and other finishing work takes another four weeks.) Manufacturing the major components offsite reduces waste and makes it easier to use green materials, like insulation from recycled paper and lumber harvested from sustainably managed forests.
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But the biggest advantage is improved build quality. The same precision manufacturing that makes an Ikea bookshelf easy to assemble makes the Oxley Woods homes nearly airtight. But that doesn't mean they aren't well-ventilated. Each abode has an environmentally responsible cherry on top: A self-contained unit called an EcoHat controls circulation with a tiny 10-watt fan, pushing out stale air and drawing in fresh stuff, which is then solar-heated to warm the house.
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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