Green Options

Nine ‘outstanding’ programs from around the world have been chosen as winners at the first ever Sustainable Cities Awards. According to sponsors, the Urban Land Institute and the Financial Times, the awards honour worldwide examples of initiatives that showcase new ideas and perspectives for best practice in sustainable land use. Each of the winners is incorporating initiatives that are making significant contributions in highlighting the concept of sustainability in real estate.

I can’t help but be a little confused by these awards though. On the one hand, they showcase some truly inspiring projects from around the world. On the other, it seems a little suspicious that at least two of the winners are projects with high-level involvement from companies represented on the awards panel. There is also a heavy emphasis on large-scale American projects, with at least seven of the nine winners coming from the U.S. Is this simply an indication of where the main centre’s of sustainability excellence really are, or did the panel gloss over worthy candidates from elsewhere?

Here’s the full list of winners:

The Cascade Land Conservancy for the ‘Cascade Agenda,’ a 100 year visioning exercise aimed at preserving more than 1.3 million acres of forest and farmland by using market-based tools to encourage sustainable growth across the Puget Sound region of Washington State.

Thank you thank you thank you to Greenoptions and all of the great minds behind it for offering this platform. In this journal we will follow Ecocities - the projects happening around the world and the humans that make them happen.

We’ll start with today’s posts, but if you would like to see the full range of stories, people and multimedia we have gathered around the Ecocity topic, visit the main site at www. ecocitymedia.org.

Be well!

As a resident of Santa Monica, California, I’m proud of my city. Thanks to its comprehensive Sustainable City Plan, Santa Monica continues to take big steps towards its goal of becoming sustainable. And, since businesses have a large part to play in reaching that goal, it makes perfect sense that Santa Monica offers businesses a way to contribute: Green Business Certification.

By partnering with the non-profit organization Sustainable Works, the city encourages businesses

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Bill McKibben's highly successful Step It Up campaign may have overshadowed the release of his latest book Deep Economy, which probably overshadowed the recent paperback re-release of one of McKibben's earlier books, 1995's Hope, Human and Wild: True Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth. Luckily, this second edition of Hope (Milkweed Editions), largely in part because of a new afterword [...]