What do over a thousand protests around the world last weekend in support of Occupy Wall Street have to do with Green Building?
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If you thought making substantive change by 2030 was a challenge, how about by 2014?
A new initiative launched last week and getting spread around the Internet today, 'fouryears.go' says "There is still time to act, but no time to waste." Started by Pachamama Alliance and Wieden+Kennedy--the ad agency behind Nike's 'just do it' (they're donating their services to do a major communications campaign for this)--it's about waking people up to urgency we face in these times and helping each member group meet its most ambitious goals toward a just, thriving, and sustainable world.
The video asks--"could we spend the next four years growing our cities?" and shows green roofs on everything; it asks, "in four years, could Manhattan look like this?" and shows the street filled with bikes.
It's nice to set aside the usual reality concerns and just watch the video and dream.
Over the years I've held a lot of job titles and have done most kitchen jobs, from cleaning a large supperclub's grease traps in mid-July after the obligatory upper-Midwestern Friday fish fry (I don't recommend that as a career path) to picking herbs and edible flowers from the garden that I'd use in lobster salads at a Relais & Châteaux restaurant (that was a pretty good job).
So when I started writing the article Commercial Kitchens: Cooking up Green Opportunities for Environmental Building News I knew there wasn't enough space to adequately cover all the stories, equipment, and processes encompassing sustainable commercial kitchens.
Kitchen size and demands vary enormously; each piece of equipment is worthy of a feature article; and don't get me started on menu choices and sustainable agriculture. Yet I hoped to give at least a cross section of the some of the more important issues.
The most intriguing stories I heard while researching this article were from those pushing the envelope.Here's a tool that tries to connect the best available science directly to the international climate change negotiations and commitments, and the politicians are using it!
Perhaps that, in itself, is progress.
"How Does It Work? In the run-up to COP-15, we are scanning UNFCCC submissions and news sources from around the world to collect a list of what we call 'current proposals' — possible scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions by UNFCCC parties. We share our compilation and use the C-ROADS-CP climate simulation to calculate the expected long-term impacts (in terms of GHG concentration, temperature increase, and sea level rise) if those proposals were to be fully implemented." For more info, see the Climate Interactive website.
In the wake of the pictures of that 13-story apartment building that fell over, here's video of a multistory factory building rolling over and coming to rest upside-down, largely intact.
Success and failure are often matters of perspective.
Recently, I broke one of my long-standing rules and blogged about something BuildingGreen-related at my own blog. My Costanzian fears were indeed warranted, and I've been egged on to cross-post it to the Live blog. Here she is, warts and all: my unvarnished opinion on the very best parts of the BuildingGreen product GreenBuildingAdvisor.com./BF
I don't often blog about worky stuff here, but decided this week that my "Worlds Will Collide!" fears are probably completely unwarranted. Besides, I'm working on some cool stuff these days. And finally, when my wife asks me, "What have you been doing?," when I come to bed at an obscene hour, I have an acceptable answer: "Changing the world, baby. Changing the world."
Have Your Wood or Pellet Stove and Cleaner Air Too
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