We grumbled when GBCI overhauled the LEED AP program, introducing specialities, fees, and difficult-to-navigate credential maintenance. Is this the silver lining?

Today and at Greenbuild Toronto we stand and applaud the first class of LEED AP Fellows--the top tier of the LEED Accredited Professionals. Today, GBCI announced the 2011 class, the first of many deserving sustainability professionals to receive this honor. Yes, we may continue to grumble about the hoops you have to go through to get this honor, but apparently those hoops were worth it for at least 34 individuals, and from our long experience with many of them, we know they deserve it.

A lot can change in two hours. At 8 a.m. Sunday, I walked the length of our half-mile driveway here in southern Vermont, checking the culverts and water bars, all fortified and cleared the day before. All good. The brook next to our driveway was raging, but staying within its banks. The Green River was doing the same across the town road.

At 10 a.m., I got a call from my neighbor that my other neighbor's house was flooding and they'd had to get out. Going back down the driveway with the hope of helping them, I found that the brook had grown to 10 times its usual width, filling the valley that this tranquil little brook usually meanders through. The Green River had done the same, covering the road and making it impossible to get anywhere. Friends who had been excited about rafting the swollen rivers canceled their plans after watching whole trees float by, and hearing boulders roll through the river.

This Venn diagram shows the overlap of various "red lists" that recommend chemicals to exclude from building products. Courtesy Healthy Building Network

A "red list" of chemicals is supposed to make the screening process simple. But with so many red lists popping up, which ones should you trust?

If you're one of the many people becoming increasingly concerned about chemical hazards found in building products, you might turn to a "red list" of chemicals for help in your screening process. Red lists have been proliferating, and whose should you trust? How does the Living Building Challenge red list of chemical hazards match up with the list associated with the LEED Pilot Credit 11? What's covered by the Perkins+Will Precautionary listthat isn't covered by the others?

Composting and waste-to-energy are winners in a new study of food disposal options.

I have been having a lot of fun feeding worms my garbage. We have something you could either call a "worm bin" or a "home vermicomposting system," and we throw our food scraps, banana peels, melon rinds, moldy bread--you name it--into that. There are a couple pounds of worms in the bin, and they gratefully accept the waste, eat it, and turn it into worm castings, which is basically organic matter that is broken down in such a way that it's very good for our garden.

Here's how it works. I started with two pounds of redworms, purchased from Green Mountain Soil. I set up a plastic bin with a few buckets of partially rotted horse manure. This serves as the worm "bedding." Whenever our compost crock is full, I take it into the basement, dig a hole in the bedding, empty the crock, and cover it with a bit of bedding. Within a couple weeks, it's gone. For more information, the classic how-to book on the topic is "Worms Eat My Garbage" by the "worm woman," Mary Appelhof.

Many professors use EBN feature articles as course material. We're always looking for ways to make their lives easier.

We are already adding blankets to our beds here in Vermont, and it's still dark when my husband and I get up for our early-morning run. Looks like time to wean the kids off their late-to-bed/late-to-rise schedule and remember the meaning of the phrase "school night."

A simple, sturdy house on Peaks Island, Maine, around 1900. Photo: City of Portland

Home unimprovement, noun. During renovation, the removal from a building of misguided features or home "improvements" added during previous renovations.

It's always satisfying to see a name given to a phenomenon that you already know well, and that is just what happened for me recently with "home unimprovement." Yes, the prefix is intentional: home improvement can result in things that aren't "improvements" at all, and the only logical thing to do is to "unimprove" them.

A renovator's job is to unimprove

I picked up the unimprovement concept from my uncle Chris Roberts, the most handy guy I know and a lifelong builder. Chris has renovated or helped renovate quite a few houses in his life, but his method of working might be considered unconventional. "As a renovator one of the things I do on houses is unimprove them," he told me recently. "I come in and say 'I need to get rid of that--it's been over-improved!'"

36,597 square feet of Ritter XL solar collectors were installed on an exhibition hall in Wels, Austria, providing almost 7 million Btu/hr of supplemental hot water for district heating. Photo: Ritter Group

Most solar thermal systems installed in cold climates use antifreeze, but Ritter XL Solar is engineering its systems with water. Can a large-scale commercial system survive the cold?

Ritter XLis doing what few solar thermal manufacturers have dared: creating large-scale solar thermal systems in cold climates running on only water. The company is using its compound parabolic concentrating (CPC) collectors to generate high-temperature water for commercial, multifamily, district heating, and other applications that have high demand for hot water. Distributed in the U.S. by Regasol USA, a subsidiary of the German company Ritter Gruppe, these complex systems require precise engineering and controls but can provide supplemental solar hot water in cold climates without freezing .

The strategy of living with inefficient homes and cars, and then looking to retirement accounts and paychecks to pay for that inefficiency appears more and more questionable. And I have some numbers to prove it.

Sure, I've heard of placentas before, but my mental image of them was of some kind of amorphous blob that sort of disappeared after the baby was born.

But as an expecting father, I learned in a class last weekend that the placenta is the main source of nutrients, waste processing, and oxygen for the developing fetus, which is attached to it via the umbilical cord. From the Latin word for "cake," it's a flat, roundish organ attached to the uterine wall. Within half an hour after giving birth to the baby, the mother gives birth to the placenta, which weighs in at one to two pounds!

What happens next depends on your species and culture. Most animals that have a placenta, including herbivores, eat it, but few humans do so. People of many cultures bury it. In some cultures it is fed to animals--for example, fed to ravens to encourage prophetic visions in the child.

As I was hosing down the dirt driveway in front of my house last week to keep the dust down with some guests due to arrive, I got to thinking about Chicken Dinner Road.

I once lived in Canyon County, Idaho and often passed a junction for Chicken Dinner Road. Some years ago, I was told, this road was a dusty dirt track traveling between a few farms. One of the farmers got tired of the dust clouds that came up from passing vehicles. He had the local highway supervisor over for a chicken barbecue, and had a buddy driving up and down the road, demonstrating the problem directly. The road got paved, and it also got a name.

There's another story about this same road--read on to the end. But one lesson I take from the ol' chicken dinner: when something isn't working, get creative and do something about it.

I called Pete Samaras, Senior Electrical Estimator at DPR Construction, to ask him about job-site lighting practices for our product review on LED jobsite lighting  (see LED Systems Provide Huge Energy Savings for Jobsite Lighting, EBN Aug. 2011 and our GreenSpec listing of the Flex SLS system). To make sure he had the latest information, he surveyed four electrical subcontractors via email. Their responses offer a good window into the shifting technologies used to illuminate jobsites--at least those on the scale of the commercial and institutional projects that DPR builds.