Efficient materials can sometimes seem to be the ideal path for green building. If we can find a way to more efficiently produce the materials we need to build our buildings, it would seem that we would be well on our way to reducing our impact on the planet.
For example, rather than using lumber sawn from old growth forests, engineered lumber and I-joists make more efficient use of lumber resources
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It might surprise many of you American readers to know that, down here in Australia, we don’t actually have wildfires. It’s a surprising fact isn’t it? From what I’m able to cobble together, Australia has never had a wildfire.
Granted, our bushfire seasons are horrific!
OK, so yeah, I’m just having a bit of fun with the different words and descriptions, but I have a point. Not an etymological point, but a point nonetheless.
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Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak may be the first mayor in the nation to drive a plug-in hybrid vehicle as his official city car.
Since he was first elected in 2002, Mayor Rybak’s official car has been a Toyota Prius. But the dramatically superior gas mileage of a plug-in hybrid vehicle prompted him to make the switch: he had his hybrid converted to a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, from which he expects to get
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Americans eat more than a ton of corn every year. Literally, a ton. Right now, you’re thinking, "There’s no way. No one eats that much corn, even in August." Well, that ton is not really corn in its unsullied, fresh-from-the-field, bought-at-a roadside-stand form. Nor is it in its canned-creamed-or-not form. Most of the corn we eat is in the form of processed additives and sweetners. Green Options’
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A match made in heaven it surely isn’t, but global warming has definitely played its part in the recent tragic events hitting California. The wildfires sweeping across parts of California have forced half a million to flee their homes, left 400,000 acres of land a charred ruin, and reduced some 1,300 homes to rubble.
The terrifying part — if we hadn’t already seen it — is the prediction that firestorms (or bushfires)
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On April 14, 2007, Step it Up 2007 facilitated over 1400 different rallies in all 50 states urging Congress to cut carbon emissions 80% by 2050. It was the largest day of citizen actions on global warming in history, and it truly was citizen action. Although Step It Up 2007 was the brainchild of Bill McKibben and several former Middlebury College students, the success of the event was contingent on
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Sustainability is making its way into mainstream periodicals. It seems like almost every magazine in the past year has featured a "green" issue, some credible, some not. My friend just gave me the green issue of a magazine targeted at the marketing industry. So it’s no surprise that Edutopia, an education magazine for teachers and administrators published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, used sustainability as a theme for their
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If your office is anything like mine, you have a TON of outdated/broken/obsolete tech stuff lying around, with nowhere to go. Now, in my office, we try not to throw this stuff out, because we are aware of the fact that it probably is not safe to go into the garbage dump. So we have what is lovingly referred to as the “tech graveyard”. It is a large box in a closet where
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Terra preta (or agrichar, as it is also sometimes called) is not a new concept, but it is probably unfamiliar to most readers. The term terra preta refers to rich black soils found in the Amazon. These soils are not natural, but were human-made, produced by the civilizations living in the region before the arrival of Western settlers. The terra preta has a high level of nutrients, with three times
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You may not be aware, but it won’t surprise you to learn that the United Nations has its own university. They have more than a dozen campuses around the world, all with the motto "Advancing knowledge for human security, peace, and development."
And, for five Asian nations, they are initiating a new course focused and designed around preparing for bigger floods.
Experts from China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Nepal and Sri Lanka will head to the
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I love getting the chance to write about topics like this, and when I get to see Greenpeace making a stand, I’m even happier. The conservation group is out to prove to Japan – and the rest of the world – that death is not a necessary part of animal research.
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