GreenGeezer

Green Building History

The Green Building website has a handy timeline of green building.  It is enlightening to see how long ago the architectural profession began considering sustainability and energy:  in 1973 the American Institute of Architects formed the AIA Committee on Energy.  We're still catching up.  Also check out Green Remodeling which  "discusses simple green renovation solutions for homeowners, focusing on key aspects of the building including foundations, framing, plumbing, windows, heating and finishes."

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

If you want to finally understand the link between factory farming and Americans' worsening health, plus know why our agricultural system is so dependent on oil and is so polluting, read The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which is out in paperback in time for Christmas.  After you read it you'll be perfectly prepped for the new documentary King Corn, which takes the veil off how our sick farm policies allow agribusiness to make big bucks selling us cheap corn, fatty, corn-fed beef, and processed foods. Finally you will be able to solve the mystery of why a Big Mac is cheaper than a salad, and maybe you, like millions of Americans, will begin to loudly question our farm policies.

"Americans have begun to ask why the farm bill is subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils at a time when rates of diabetes and obesity among children are soaring, or why the farm bill is underwriting factory farming (with subsidized grain) when feedlot wastes are polluting the countryside and, all too often, the meat supply. For the first time, the public health community has raised its voice in support of overturning farm policies that subsidize precisely the wrong kind of calories (added fat and added sugar), helping to make Twinkies cheaper than carrots and Coca-Cola competitive with water. Also for the first time, the international development community has weighed in on the debate, arguing that subsidized American exports are hobbling cotton farmers in Nigeria and corn farmers in Mexico."
                Michael Pollan, "Weed it and Reap" NYT 11-04-07

Blessed Unrest: Why Green Geezers are So Restless

We've lately heard a lot about how baby boomers aren't going to go placidly into old age, be herded into "retirement communities" or generally behave themselves.  In my last posting I shared Paul Hawken's new book Blessed Unrest, and I urge everyone to go read it.  It's a massively important and useful work that helps point the way out of the messes we're in, with seminal quotes from those who've gone before, and and impressive bibliography and appendix.  Not to mention that Hawken has launched a website to keep the momentum going.   Visit Wiser Earth and browse the directory of groups that are changing the world.

Where did Blessed Unrest get its name?  Here's the first quote in the book, and when I read it I got goose bumps:

"There is vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.....You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.  Keep the channel open....[There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time.  There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the other." --Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille, Dance to the Piper (NY: Da Capo Press, 1980)

Paul Hawken Wows Crowd at GreenBuild Conference

A friend who attended the GreenBuild Conference in Chicago saw Paul Hawken speak and was all fired up.  Hawken, who has been around the environmental movement for awhile and is the founder of Smith & Hawken, from which he retired years ago, as well as the writer of Natural Capitalism, has written a new book and it is just the book we need right now.    A sweeping history of the environmental movement and a compelling analysis of where it's going, it describes what he learned during the past ten years of speaking engagements during which he met people from all types of groups who were passionately engaged in trying to heal the world.  Best of all, he links all the threads of the environmental movement together, starting from the origins in the 19th century, to today's anti-globalists, indigenous peoples' movements, the politics of food , and the green building movement.

Something About a Cabin

I always preferred smaller houses, and a cabin reminds me of the enchantment found in my favorite childhood books.  This book on the cabin provides inspiration and examples from all over the country.

No Impact Man on Happiness

No Impact Man reports on his happiness level after ten months living the "no impact" life.

"Isn't that strange? You click off family's electricity and make them go to bed at nine every night because it's too dark to do anything else. You ban them from the elevator so they have to walk up and down nine flights of stairs. You take away their fridge so they can't keep more than a day or two of food around the house.  All this and then they turn around and say it's life as usual?

Probably it feels that way because people quickly get used to almost any set of conditions. Within a few years, lottery winners and people who become paralyzed tend to return to the same level of happiness they had before their change in circumstance.

What people can't get used to, though, is the loss of one of the main factors positive psychologists find does have a lasting affect on happiness: community."

Daniel Gilbert's excellent book "Stumbling On Happiness" addresses the problem of how what we imagine will make us happy seldom does.

William McDonough in Oak Park, IL

GreenSource has a short interview with William McDonough, the author of Cradle to Cradle and we (along with thirty other people) are going to have dinner with him tomorrow night right here in Oak Park, IL, where McDonough will keynote the Greentown Conference.   That's a lot of links for one sentence, and that's what will happen to you if you start reading McDonough and following his activities -- you'll start making links between how we consume things and how they are designed.   It seems fitting that McDonough, an architect, will be speaking here in Oak Park, the site of the first studio of that other architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.  And maybe it says that we are just a little over-immersed in this stuff when I confess that this dinner is my husband's 55th birthday present.

A good way to get an introduction to McDonough is through TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.  This annual conference hosts the world's most fascinating people and charges them with using 18 minutes to give "the talk of their lives" -- then it shares the talks free on the web via the Creative Commons licensing agreement. 

    

   

Going Green: Just a Fashion?

Sunday's Chicago Tribune featured a story titled Green is the New Black lamenting the co-opting of green living.   

'"Here's one popular vision for saving the planet: Roll out from under the sumptuous hemp-fiber sheets on your bed in the morning and pull on a pair of $245 organic cotton Levi's and an Armani biodegradable knit shirt.

Stroll from the bedroom in your eco-McMansion, with its photovoltaic solar panels, into the kitchen remodeled with reclaimed lumber. Enter the three-car garage lighted by energy-sipping fluorescent bulbs and slip behind the wheel of your $104,000 Lexus hybrid.

Drive to the airport, where you settle in for an 8,000-mile flight -- careful to buy carbon offsets beforehand -- and spend a week driving golf balls made from compacted fish food at an eco-resort in the Maldives."

We agree that consuming less is the answer, and merely consuming "green" stuff will not get us out of this mess.  For example, according to the Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook televisions account for 4% of energy use in the United States (just let that sink in for a moment......FOUR PER CENT) and your old set uses a lot less energy than a plasma-screen energy hog. 

On the other hand, if someone is already having to buy something, it can be a great time to switch consumers over to green products.   

"After you buy the compact fluorescent bulbs," said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Rainforest Action Network, "you can move on to greater goals like banding together politically to shut down coal-fired power plants."   John Passacantando, the executive director of Greenpeace USA, argued that green consumerism has been a way for Wal-Mart shoppers to get over the old stereotypes of environmentalists as "tree-hugging hippies" and contribute in their own way.

This is crucial, he said, given the widespread nature of the global warming challenge. "You need Wal-Mart and Joe Six-Pack and mayors and taxi drivers," he said. "You need participation on a wide front."

So go ahead and get your friends and relatives to shop for those CFLs...it can be just the start of changing an entire lifestyle.

Home for Sale at Vermont's Cobb Hill

Vermont's Cobb Hill Cohousing Community has a home for sale.  In the best endorsement of the community, the sellers are not moving away, just moving up the hill to a different house:

"The home is a private unit (one bedroom) in the Common House of Cobb Hill.  Share huge beautiful kitchen with other apartment dwellers and community.   Includes den, fireplace, laundry, root cellar, finished attic, wood shop with all kinds of tools, and much more."

Cobb Hill was founded by Donella Meadows, the author of Limits to Growth.  

 

The Long Emergency continues

James Howard Kunstler's book "The Long Emergency" will find you cheering along to his delightfully cranky condemnation of suburban blight in all its banal and disgusting forms.   Reviewers comment on his grouchiness but for anyone who has been stuck in a suburban traffic jam or driven down another hideous and dreary mini-mall-lined suburban highway, the wonder is that this crap is acceptable at all.  Today's Treehugger column on why most new houses are so ugly is inspired by the same "I Hate Suburbia" spirit.