The Umbrella House -- by Kengo Kuma

As one umbrella is a cheap, portable shelter for a single person, many can become shelter for a group of people, in Kengo Kuma's Casa Umbrella, made of ordinary umbrellas modified with extra flaps and zippers sewn on the edges. The umbrellas are combined to form a Buckminster Fuller dome, with any number of entrances and windows. Kuma's aim, he said in a recent interview, is to "recover the tradition of japanese buildings" and to reinterpret it for the 21st century: see more of his designs in Spacehacking.

This is just one of the 99 things you can do in the city, a 2008 exhibit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Other things include fruit-harvesting, trash architecture, guerilla gardening, freegan dumpster-diving, foam & velour suits to challenge urban brutalism, and a Rebel Clown Army.

Atlantic Friends Gathering May 2011 -- Keith Helmuth

See Windhorse Farm website - more pictures

Over 60 Friends from the Atlantic region of Canada came together for their annual gathering at Windhorse Farm near Bridgewater Nova Scotia. Both the setting and the gathering theme focused our minds and spirits on the ever-present reality of the human-Earth relationship and the health of our social and economic relationship within this larger context.

Windhorse Farm combines a sustainably managed forestry operation with permaculture

gardening and natural building design projects. It is, in addition a Buddhist retreat centre. Our weekend theme was “ sustainability” with particular attention to food.

Geoff Tansey, a Friend from the UK and co-editor and primary author of the award winning book, QIAP's The Future Control of Food, provided a powerful view of what is happening with the world food situation. He outlined three potential futures which are yet to be determined: collapse and human catastrophe; corporate control aiming at the survival of the wealthy and write off of the poor; the development of a science led, community based, agro-ecological food system.

The five-acre garden of Windhorse Farm, which is a good example of what the third outcome looks like, was a five-minute walk from our meeting place, and we had an instructive tour. Likewise, our host provided a walking tour and a seminar on forest ecology and the woodlot management practices of the Farm. Additional seminars on building with material native to the environment and on how to grown shitake mushrooms were on the agenda. With time for small group discernment, worship sharing, and a generous helping of music-making and story-telling.

Tansey's co-author Tasmin Rajotte  in Jan 2011 attended the 13^th Biennial Conference for the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) in Hyderabad, India. See its Commons Digest online. Key themes of the conference were climate change; forests; the impacts of external global forces such as the increasing privatization of land and resources; better recognition of the commons; and new business models for financing work. She held a pre-conference workshop on “Changing perspectives within policy processes” with John Powell of the Countryside and Community Research Institute at the University of Gloucester (UK): dealing with top down policy imposition, violent conflict over forests in Kenya; corrupt deals in Indonesian coastal communities and in the Forest Rights Act of India. 

Straw Bale Houses for Indian Country -- by Bob Gough

This interview first appeared in an FCNL Indian Report 14 July 2010. Bob Gough is secretary of the Intertribal Council On Utility Policy, on the Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota.

Efficiency First

Before you get to generating a single megawatt of electricity, become energy efficient first. We just spent this whole week on a building project on Rosebud, a pilot project of a straw bale house. You build the walls out of packed straw bales and they're about 18 inches across. You've now got the perfect combination of mass of the earthen plaster on the walls and insulation from the straw sandwiched in the middle, and you get an R40 [insulation] value, which is double anything 6 inch fiberglass insulation will give you. It's sequestering carbon in the form of straw, which is a waste material…. Instead of burning it, put it into housing walls, make them far more efficient; then you need less energy to heat it in the winter and cool it in the summer.

straw bales with timber frame on a reservation in MT
There are many straw bale buildings constructed in the early years of the last century still occupied and holding up very well. There's a house in Alliance, Nebraska that was built in 1903 and abandoned in 1954. A photograph was taken of it in 1994, 40 years later, and that house looks like 3 good weekends and you could be back living in it again. You cannot show me a HUD [Housing and Urban Development] house…that could be abandoned for 40 or 50 years and it'd still be standing at all. These straw bale houses, made with natural materials, not only last a long time, but to build them requires a lot of local labor. We call that a solution to the unemployment problem.

How Can Congress Help?

earth plaster on straw bale, AZ
There's now a whole wave of training grants; just through the Department of Labor we can get a whole lot of money to train people, and we'd love to train them to build straw bale houses. With one grant from a given department you can get training funds but can't get stipends or buy a whole lot of straw bales to build houses. "No, this is a training grant, this isn't a housing grant."…If you're going to train somebody to paint you've got to buy them paint. You've got to be able to get enough straw bales to train in construction techniques…it means you've got to get the Department of Agriculture working with the Department of Labor and with the Department of Energy, and with the Department of the Interior. You need them all…playing together.

Why Indian Country?

Tribes and tribal governments are very different from cities and counties, because so much more of the housing on an Indian reservation is…low-income, public assistance housing, because that's the population, these are America's poorest communities. Cities don't have programmatic control over all the residential buildings in their jurisdiction the way tribes do-or the way tribes can. Tribes have a greater opportunity to really make a difference; tribes can programmatically address their housing needs and address their unemployment needs and at the same time address their energy needs.… If we could meet the present need for new homes and replace a good deal of the existing Indian housing in the next 20 or 30 years with energy efficient homes, these reservations would hum as models, as islands of sustainability, as shining stars of passive and efficient survivability.

***

See also Wikipedia, straw bale construction.

The naked house -- by Lloyd Alter

This article is from Treehugger 3 Jan 2011.

Photos: Alex de Rijke at drmm

How did I miss this one? It pushes every button. British architecture firm drmm designed the Naked House for an exhibition in Norway in 2006; it is delivered (and is built on top of) a shipping container, filled to the brim with flatpack panels made from my materiel-du-jour, cross-laminated timber or CLT.

It can be erected anywhere in the world where there is road or sea access, and delivered six weeks from client design approval as a flat pack in a standard container. This envelope forms the structure's base, elevating the house to the container's 3m height. The container becomes support structure, store, garage or boathouse. Naked House can be dismantled, repacked into the container, and moved to a new site anytime.

All the panels are cut out of the solid wood panels. The architects write:

Conceptually, the house works as a cut-out diagram, with all numbered elements - including door and window openings - digitally pre-cut from substantial cross-laminated timber panels made from fast growing soft woods....the house can use existing services, or solar waterheating and a wastewood-burner.

This three dimensional jigsaw is secured by superlong screws, and can be assembled by four people and a small crane in two days.

There are so many interesting ideas here. Flatpack construction means that one is not shipping a lot of air; designing around the shipping container means that transport is pretty economical; the use of cross-laminated timber means that there is very little finishing required on site. Nice idea. Found on Trendhunter.

More case studies of Living Buildings.
More on cross-laminated timber:
Skagen ØKOntor: The Greenest Office Building in Norway
Nine Storey Apartment Built Of Wood in Nine Weeks By Four Workers
School Built From Wood By Sheppard Robson

Toronto's Evergreen project restores Don Valley

The Brickworks before and after, from Reading Toronto
Evergreen is a charity dedicated to greening Canadian cities, neighbourhoods, schools and homes. Last weekend there was a Grand Opening of the former Don Valley Brick Works, which has already been restored for use as a farmer's market and a site for environmental education, demonstration gardens and kitchens, conference facilities, youth and children’s camps, community bike space, and family events. See their local and national blogs. In 2010 National Geographic named it one of the world's top geotourism locations.

Reclamation of the valley: Toronto Free for All

By revitalizing and reusing historic buildings, and offering programs for children, heritage and ec0-sustainability, Evergreen is an environmental community centre in the heart of the Toronto ravine system.

Summer camp While parents explore the reclaimed valley, or shop at the farmers' market, their children can join in Nature Nut fun: eco-games, frog and turtle monitoring, snowshoeing, animal tracking, local food harvesting and eating, making vegetable and "wild" gardens. See the native plant database and tips on starting gardens.

Below: a trail walk

Future plans for the site include Evergreen headquarters in the new LEED-Platinum-certified Centre for Green Cities. "It will be a venue where we will explore and address the global issues that we all face, including the green economy, urban ecology, transportation, water, energy, waste management, agriculture and food, building design and land-use planning. The site’s use of a wide range of green technologies will help make it a national hub for urban sustainability."

See also the main page of Evergreen, Greening the Inner City, Worldchanging on cities, Joan Roelofs, The economics of greening cities.

Drawing power from the Father and the sun -- greening churches in Trenton NJ

Story by Meir Rinde, in Trenton Times 19 Sep 2010 -- thanks to Mary Gilbert and the NY office of UNEP for calling this to our attention. Photo of the church from Shiloh website.

From the roof of Shiloh Baptist Church, the Rev. Darrell Armstrong has a great view. He sees not only the surrounding Canal Banks neighborhood and the tops of the city's tallest buildings, but also some 180 brand-spanking-new solar panels, soaking up the sun and sending pollution-free power back down into his church.

Rev Armstrong: courtesy The Trentonian

The 37.8-kilowatt solar installation is a financially prudent choice for the church, and part of its ongoing effort to act on biblical instructions to take care of the environment, Armstrong said. The system was dedicated at a Sunday worship service two weeks ago.

"We are trying, with other organizations, to give a very clear and definitive message about what it means to create health in our environment, health in our bodies, health in our spirits, health in our souls," he said last week after a trip to the roof to show off the panels.

Shiloh worshippers: photo Tony Kurdzuk, Trenton Star-Ledger

Armstrong said he believes the solar installation is the first on a house of worship in Trenton, though he was quick to recognize the pioneering efforts of Grace Cathedral Fellowship Ministries, which is located on the city border in Ewing. Grace installed solar panels last year.

Grace's Bishop Jerome Wilcox and the Rev. Dan Whitener of Abiding Presence Lutheran Church "freely shared their wisdom, knowledge, advice and counsel in this highly involved process, for which I am very thankful," he said. St. Mark Lutheran Church in Hamilton also offered advice.

Another helpful adviser was GreenFaith, a nonprofit organization that promotes environmental action among religious institutions of all faiths.

The New Brunswick organization was formerly located in Trenton. Its executive director, the Rev. Fletcher Harper, said he was particularly pleased by Shiloh's work to improve its urban environment. "Shiloh has been an influential leader in the African-American community for generations," Harper said. "The fact they are making this commitment to renewable energy makes a very important statement in itself on a symbolic level."

Solar power is an important alternative energy source because it does not cause pollution, he said. The burning of coal to create electricity sends fine particulate matter into the air, causing respiratory problems, and contributes to climate change.

"That's particularly true in urban settings, where air pollution levels are much higher and climate change effects are more severe," Harper said. "You see an increase in heat-related stress and illness, which often has a greater impact than in suburban or rural communities."

Armstrong said the congregation began discussing the possibility of a solar installation five years ago. Eventually the church signed up with the Bureau of Public Utilities' CORE program, which provided nonprofit organizations with solar subsidies. Shiloh is slated to receive a $139,910 rebate on the project's cost of about $230,000, according to Armstrong and the BPU. Fundraising is expected to provide another $101,000.

In the coming months, the church will benefit from a sale of renewable energy credits, which utilities such as PSE&G buy to meet requirements that they generate alternative energy. Shiloh also expects to stop having to pay for electricity. Lower utility bills and the sale of renewable energy credits should together quickly add another $100,000 to Shiloh's bottom line, Armstrong said. "It's a great investment for the church. We're anticipating a return on our investment within a year," he said.

The panels are also an investment in God's Earth and scriptural calls for environmental stewardship, Armstrong said. He cited Psalm 24:1, "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein," and Genesis 2:15, "Then the Lord God took man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it."

With the recent Gulf oil spill on his mind, Armstrong dedicated a series of sermons in recent weeks to environmental issues, he said. They concluded with the dedication of the solar panels Sept. 5. "Man has not "tended' to God's "garden' very well," he wrote in a letter announcing the solar installation. "Humanity must be better caretakers of the natural environment."

***

See also Greenfaith citations of Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist environmental teachings, evangelical Christian CreationCare, CCFP, A Rocha's Care of Creation; Mennonite and Quaker subsidies for greening churches, Philadelphia Friends Center LEED reno, Mennonite Creation Care Council; The Great Warming video and study guides. GR Dodge Foundation blog about New Jersey learns, NJ green job training, Wikipedia on green jobs, CAP and PEW lists of job opportunities by state, Goodwork list for Canada.

Building a green economy -- Amory Lovins

Climaxing three decades of research and expert discussions, Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute offers this vision of a "green capitalist" transition in the USA. (français en bas)
Building on its 2004 synthesis "Winning the Oil Endgame", RMI's "Reinventing Fire" shows technology that exists, that works, and that makes money. It aims to move the US debate from "it’s impossible" and "how much will it cost?" to "here’s how" and "how can we invest in the next 5 years?"

For full details, see the RMI webpage Reinventing Fire links to proposals for green architecture, transport, manufacturing, and energy -- "a peer-reviewed, industry-validated roadmap of practical steps toward an efficient, resilient, cost-effective, all-renewable energy system".
[Thanks to Bill Curry for calling this to our attention. - Ed.]

En français: lire Andrée Mathieu, Développement durable - Pourquoi pas «réinventer le feu» dans Le Devoir 23 Sep 2010 et d'autres thèmes dans Le Devoir - environnement.

Pig City -- by Jamblichus

This post by Jamblichus is reprinted with his permission. Modestly hiding behind his nom de clavier, the British blogger tries "To point out and record the abuse of power by corporations, politicos, police and anyone else who has it coming. To give big-ups to academics, poets, musicians, activists and any other souls who have something interesting and unusual to say... [And to write about] civil liberties, the politics of the Korean peninsula, genetic engineering, religion and rationality, the environment in any sense of that word, poetry that makes your brain sizzle and music that makes your ears sting. " We recommend his blog.

*****
MVRDV's Pig City proposal (details below)

Pork is the most widely eaten meat in the world, accounting for about 38 percent of meat production worldwide. And you know what? There’s good reason for that, all you vegetarian puritans out there: it’s downright delicious.

Smoky bacon, crispy Lincolnshire sausages, pork and pineapple stir fry, Korean Samgyeopsal barbecue… God, I’m dribbling on my keyboard already, is it lunch time yet?

Sadly for fans of the full English Breakfast and other craven carnivores like myself, industrial pig farming itself is a much less pretty thing to behold than the aforementioned dishes.

Rife with sickening dereliction of animal welfare, hugely polluting and frankly unsustainable, something has to change. Fast. For pork consumption is booming.

According to the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, nearly 100 million metric tons of pork were consumed worldwide in 2006 alone and it’s been climbing since then as increasing urbanization and disposable income lead to a rapid rise in pork consumption in developing nations across the world.

It’s worth considering what this entails at the point of production: a brief insight into industrial pig farming courtesy of a story written for Rolling Stone a few years back”

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering…
… Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons — cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.
Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as “overapplication.” This can turn hundreds of acres — thousands of football fields — into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.
Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.
The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker’s older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker’s father dived in. They all died in pig shit.

There is moral in here somewhere isn’t there? Live by the pig, die by the pig perhaps… Facetiousness aside, although nobody experts a pig slaughterhouse to be the Elysian fields, the facts stand that keeping piggy wiggies in teeny weeny cages, pumping them full of antibiotics and growth hormones and using loads of land to do this all is neither an edifying spectacle nor good for human, hog or planet.

Which brings me, finally, to the point: there may be a solution other than opting for nuts and raisins, which I am in fact (half-heartedly) considering. And it is an elevated one. A well-regarded Dutch architectural firm, MDRDV, has spent four years creating a plan to build seventy six high-rise towers to house pigs. Here’s the Wiki:

In Pig City MVRDV proposes a novel way of accommodating the population of 15 million pigs that share the Netherlands with 15 million human inhabitants.
The prototype is an 80 meter high tower. Each level is divided into animal friendly farm areas… The biogas generated by the pigs’ waste is collected as a clean energy source; fish farms inside the towers provide animal food and help reduce transport. Precious countryside is liberated from the polluting bio-industry.

The proposal (which came to my attention after reading around this New York Times article on vertical/urban farming) was made several years back and apparently caused a real outcry in the Netherlands, where it was seen in no small part as an indictment of industrial farming and our consumption patterns rather than a genuine proposal. The Dutch Archined website summed it up thusly:

Why spend four years on this supposedly unfeasible project? Is Pig City an indictment of the bio-industry? Is this radical proposal and powerful visual presentation meant to inject life into a tiresome discussion?
Seen for what it is, Pig City is a cartoon-like representation of today’s situation and, unlike the secret bio-industry, makes no attempt to gloss over the consequences of our pattern of consumption. The presentation, for that matter, is so lifelike that many read it as a realistic alternative. And no doubt MVRDV would be the first to take on the job should it prove feasible.

It strikes me after looking at it more closely that MVRDV may also have been making a point about the failure of the government to provide nearly that level of eco-friendly architecture to humans, let alone pigs. There are many layers to this idea, all provocative in the best of ways. Food for Thought once more… For more on the debate and urban farming, check out The Vertical Farm Project. Until then, here’s some vegetarian recipes! Bon Appetit.

"The Living Skyscraper: Farming the Urban Skyline" by Blake Kurasek

*****

Jamblichus takes his name from the 3rd c. philosopher who refused to separate soul from body, an early exponent of panentheism. Read Arturo Vasquez on the historical Iamblichus.
***
See also Evan Bromfield's research on urban vertical projects.

Eco-art: an exploration

melting animals by Kawano Takeshi, Japan

Thanks to Milan Ilnyckyj, whose blog on climate change art blazed this trail. I spent a couple of hours chasing links and looking up old notes -- but this is only a sampling. Suggest other links in your comments.

art and sculpture

Strandbeest by Theo Jansen, Netherlands (see the video below)
Kawano Takeshi, Japan
Art at the Cheese Factory, Marin County CA
Reuben Margolin, kinetic sculptor, Los Angeles CA
RCA Arts and Ecology, London UK
Design for the Other 90% exhibition, book, Cooper-Hewitt, New York
Design and the Elastic Mind: Organic Design MOMA New York
Another Limited Rebellion by Noah Scalin Chicago IL
Wunderkammer by Jenny Kendler, Chicago IL
Naturemorph by Amy Ross, Boston MA
Recycle-Roanji by Judith Selby Lang, San Francisco CA
global warming with 50 lb of chocolate bunnies by EclecticAsylum, Colorado Springs CO. The title is misspelled, should be Dies Irae (day of wrath)
Bioephemera by Jessica Palmer, biologist & artist in Washington, DC

performance / ideas

Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko Musée des Beaux Arts, Montreal and Eva Blue photos
99 Actions: What You Can Do With the City Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal QC
We Make Money not Art by Régine Debatty, Europe
The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, UK

networking

The Art of Engagement created by Caffyn Kelley, Saltspring Is. BC
Green Museum USA
Eco Arts Space, USA
Inhabitat USA
Olympia Dumpster Divers WA
Earth Artists Network, Vancouver BC
Art and Environment, Nevada Museum of Art
The Ashden Directory UK
Translocal.org Europe

theatre

Green Theatre Initiative Portland OR
Ecotheater
Mo'olelo Performing Arts newsletter San Diego CA
Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts CA

dance

SEEDS Somatic Experiments in Earth, Dance and Science CA
Dance Brigade led by Nina Fichter and Krissy Keefer, San Francisco in "Song of the Earth" 2005: David Millar photo

textile and found objects

Abigail Doan of NYC, Sofia, and Italy
Brandon Jan Blommaert's Biosphere
Canstruction New York
An Art and Ecology Notebook by Cathy Fitzgerald, Ireland

ecohistory

W. Kovarik's environmental history timeline
Voices of the Colorado Plateau one of my favourite oral history sites
CHE, U. of Wisconsin online resources
my environment, peace and social justice links - see lesson plans, plans de leçon

Theo Jansen's wind-powered strandbeesten; music by Emir Diril.

Green buildings: a new frontier - by Grace Barrasso

This BC home was the first built in Canada to LEED platinum standards. It consumes 1/4 of the energy of a conventional house: photo courtesy of Greenbilt

In Canada [and the USA], buildings generate approximately 30 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions. The Human Development Report notes that “with 0.5 percent of the world’s population, Canada accounts for 2.2% of global emissions - an average of 20.0 tonnes of CO2 per person. These emission levels are above those of high-income OECD countries. If all countries in the world were to emit CO2 at levels similar to Canada’s, [humanity] would exceed our sustainable carbon budget by approximately 799 percent”.

The potential for efficiency gains via Green Buildings is therefore huge as it reduces or eliminates the negative impact on both the environment and the occupants. Despite numerous nvironmental, economic and social benefits, green building represents only a small fraction of new construction.

Commercial (office buildings, shopping centers) and residential buildings (single family dwellings, apartment buildings) have significant environmental impacts. In the U.S., it is estimated that commercial and residential buildings consume approximately 65 percent of all electricity generated, 12 percent of fresh water supplies and 40 percent of all raw materials, as well as contributing about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions.

See Grace Barrasso’s Blog for the full text, Wikipedia article on LEED, UNEP Year Book 2009.

The Sky Farm - by Suzanne Elston

The world is running out of arable land (see our previous post Peak everything). Add to this the rising cost of oil, which dramatically affects both the cost of shipping food and many of the fertilizers used to produce it, as well as the growing demand for feed stocks such as corn to produce ethanol, and the impact of climate change on agricultural production, and it would appear that we are only a few bushels away from a global famine.

That is unless you talk to Gordon Graff, a graduate student at the University of Waterloo.... In architectural schools, “the idea of sustainability is rather vague,” he says. “Architects are closer to the fashion industry than they are to creating sustainable cities. It’s more about fashion than things that matter,” said Gordon. He set out to prove the concept of sustainable architecture is not an oxymoron.

He found direction and inspiration in the work of American architect, Edward Mazria. "I wanted to tackle urban sustainability. The question is, how do we make an existing city like Toronto sustainable?”

(click on images for greater detail)

Gordon's answer is the 59- storey Sky Farm, a new paradigm in urban design and locally- supported agriculture.
Using hydroponic gardening to maximize food production, his design translates 3.8 million square feet of floor space into 11 million square feet of growing area -- all on a mere 1.32 hectares.

By his own estimate, the Sky Farm could produce 54 million pounds of fruits and vegetables, nearly a million pounds of animal meat and nearly a half a million pounds of eggs – enough food to feed 40,000 people year round. A ground level grocery store could sell the produce, making the entire food cycle carbon neutral.

The building’s heating and lighting are provided by a wall of photovoltaic cells and a Living Machine – an anaerobic digester that uses organic wastes from the gardens and an exterior grow wall (depending on the climate) to produce power and filter waste water. By also capturing waste methane from the city’s sewer system, Gordon estimates his Sky Farm could easily provide electricity back to the grid.

Gordon’s second design, Grow Housing, incorporates a smaller version of the Sky Farm into a low-rise city block development that includes condominium and town house units, a grocery market, and street level retail and commercial space. The complex is topped off with a green rooftop that is designed to function as a community garden for low-income earners.
Gordon hopes that his designs will help us to avoid “the tragedy of the commons”, that age-old conflict over finite resources between individual interests and the common good – a pretty amazing goal for this modest 29 year-old grad student from Perth, Ontario.

Once Gordon completes his thesis his hope is that he might be able publish his work, get his architectural licence and start practicing sustainable architecture as soon as he can.
*****
This is a digest of the full text in Elston's splendid blog Your Earth. See also other articles about Gordon Graff's ideas in GROW housing, in Tree Hugger 28 July 08 and The Independent 1 June 08, SustainableCities.net, and Sustainable Buildings Canada (SBC). For different visions of a "Resilient Agriculture" see the CIELAP Nov 08 conference and papers.

Green buildings should be the first cut in GHG - says CEC / Priorité aux édifices verts - CCE

Le Vistal, édifice vert

The first priority in cutting greenhouse gas emissions should be in buildings -- possible with existing technology and as urgent as converting from SUVs to hybrid cars -- according to a 2008 report from the trinational Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) of NAFTA.

North America’s buildings release more than 2,200 megatons/year of CO₂ into the atmosphere, more than a third of the continent’s total.

LEED construction, green retrofit and new energy-saving technologies could make a 35% reduction, compared to the business-as-usual trend. This reduction nearly equals the CO₂ emissions of the entire US transportation sector in the year 2000, and would be a giant step towards fulfilling Kyoto obligations.

Green buildings can now cut energy usage by 30-70 percent from that in conventional properties, with economic and health benefits to owners, tenants and the whole population.

Green entrepreneurship is sadly lacking. In Canada and the US, only 2% of commercial building and less than 0.5% of home construction is up to LEED standard. Mexico has no similar data. The root of the problem, according to industry experts, is in governments' perverse subsidies and lack of incentives; without which, owners simply pass on energy costs to tenants and do nothing.

Green Building in North America: Opportunities and Challenges, marks a major shift of the CEC Secretariat, from reaction to proaction. The CEC project director Geoff Garver devoted two years to seeking expert advice from developers and architects, sustainability and energy consultants, real estate appraisers and brokers, local and national government representatives. But are state, provincial and national politicians willing to take action?

***
Le Vistal, complexe résidentiel écologique sur l'Île des Soeurs à Montréal, face au fleuve St Laurent, comprend actuellement 160 unités, qui avec un 2e tour deviendront 300. Sa certification LEED vise l'aménagement écologique du site, les matériaux de construction, la qualité de design intérieur, la gestion d'eau, d'air et d'énergie. Ses promoteurs sont parmi les rares -- seulement 0.5% en Amérique du Nord -- qui cherchent à réduire les impacts environnementaux.

Néanmoins, l'architecture verte peut baisser les émissions GES de 30 à 70 pour cent, selon un rapport récent du comité environnemental de l'ALENA signalant une tournant de son activité de la réaction en proaction. Selon le CCE , les bâtiments non-écologiques émettent 2200 Mt de CO2 par année, un tiers de la production continentale, et l'équivalent de tous les GES émis par le secteur transport en 2000. Donc, priorité aussi urgente et réalisable que de changer son VUS pour une hybride.

La faute, selon les experts en immeuble cités par le CCE, reste avec les octrois pervers et la manque d'incitation positive de la part des gouvernements. Le propriétaire d'une édifice peut simplement hausser le bail pour ne pas écoper des frais de l'energie. Mais les hommes politiques, nationaux ou en région, oseront-ils changer le régime fiscal ?

*****

See/voir Wikipedia LEED et LEED en français, vidéo du Vistal. The Montreal Gazette 11 Sep 08 reports on its construction, noting that while Toronto subsidizes energy-saving construction, Montreal fails to offer any such incentive. Graeme Stewart's blog Toronto Tower Renewal explains how many cities retrofit old energy-guzzling buildings. Schumacher UK briefing on Sustainable Cities. Other resources: in the blue tag-cloud, at lower right in this blog, click on "city" and architecture".

Green housing: just add water, wait 25 years

For fun. © Boston-based multiblog myninjaplease.com and the FabTreeHab of MIT Human Ecology Designers: Mitchell Joachim, Ph.D., Lara Greden, Ph.D., Javier Arbana, SMArchS.
growth of the structure

This home concept is intended to replace the outdated design solutions at Habitat for Humanity International. Our goal was to propose a method to grow homes from native trees. This enables these new local dwellings to be a part of an absolutely green community.

Its Principles from the design team's website:

1. Composed with 100% living nutrients.
2. Harmonize & embrace growth.
3. Make effective contributions to the ecosystem.
4. Accountable removal of human impacts.
5. Involve arboreal farming & production.
6. Subsume technology within terrestrial environs.
7. Circulate water & metabolic flows symbiotically.
8. Consider the life cycle, from use to disposal.
9. Achieve a fitness with our earthen web of life

cross-section with Rain Harvester, Gravity Plumbing & Compost. click on image

"While I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for one of these bad boys, much respect for the design team for coming up with a truly green housing solution. Humans are a part of nature; it's only right that our architecture should be too." -- MNP

Practical suggestions:
- for greening existing churches from KAIROS Canada, KAIROS en français, UK Living Witness, QEW, Web of Creation.
- for family homes from QEW, Australia, CSBA links including Green Building Primer.
- for architects: LEED Canada design software. USGBC research, publications and links. GUSSE, Michael Reynolds' Earthships website and video, John Todd's Ocean Arks International (cf. New Alchemy bioshelters).
- Alex Steffen on cars vs Bright Green Cities in Worldchanging.com
- The Greening of Southie a film about Boston's first LEED building
- Ecocity World Summit April 2008
See also city and architecture tags in Delicious, lower righthand column.