Oct 7th, 2008 | Architecture, Helping the Environment, Education, Innovation, Today's News | No Comments
Nine years ago the California Academy of Sciences asked: What’s a natural history museum in the 21st century? Its stunning new building is the emphatic answer.
The new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, is a building of mythic proportions. At 410,000 square feet, it’s expected to be the largest public building ever to attain a LEED Platinum rating. And, with a $488 million price tag, it also represents the largest fund-raising effort for a cultural institution in San Francisco history. How did this low- profile natural history museum and research facility become a half-billion-dollar marquee project by a Pritzker Prize–winning architect, not to mention a landmark in sustainable design?
According to an oft-told origin story, it all started on the roof. In late 1999, architect Renzo Piano visited the site, climbed up on top of the Academy’s former building, and—there amid the canopy of trees—declared that the roof itself needed to be-come an exhibit of the museum. “This was a magic place in the middle of Golden Gate Park,” Piano recalls. “I said, ‘The roof has got to be part of the experience of the building, part of the itinerary.’”
To read article by Karen E. Steen go to Metropolis.com
Oct 7th, 2008 | Architecture, Helping the Environment, Innovation | No Comments
Ten years ago, Portland developer Mark Edlen and his partner, Bob Gerding, were scarcely known even in their home city. Today, they run the top development company in Portland. Over the past decade, Gerding Edlen Development has been responsible for over ten different LEED-rated condo and office projects, as well as a renovation of a 19th Century armory that became the first building on the National Register of Historic Places to achieve a Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. Along the way, the firm helped transform two blighted industrial areas in Portland, the Pearl District and the South Waterfront (which now boasts one of only two aerial trams in a U.S. city.)
The firm has been busy outside their hometown as well, and are active in transforming downtown Los Angeles. In September of 2007, the Elleven project became the first California condominium to receive LEED Gold and was later honored as the Best Multifamily Highrise at the Los Angeles Architectural Awards.
To read complete article by Brian Libby go to Metropolis.com
Sep 28th, 2008 | Editorial, Innovation | No Comments
Many things make me weep about the current economic crisis, but none more than this brief economic history: In the 19th century, America had a railroad boom, bubble and bust. Some people made money; many lost money. But even when that bubble burst, it left America with an infrastructure of railroads that made transcontinental travel and shipping dramatically easier and cheaper.
The late 20th century saw an Internet boom, bubble and bust. Some people made money; many people lost money, but that dot-com bubble left us with an Internet highway system that helped Microsoft, I.B.M. and Google to spearhead the I.T. revolution.
The early 21st century saw a boom, bubble and now a bust around financial services. But I fear all it will leave behind are a bunch of empty Florida condos that never should have been built, used private jets that the wealthy can no longer afford and dead derivative contracts that no one can understand.
Worse, we borrowed the money for this bubble from China, and now we have to pay it back — with interest and without any lasting benefit.
To read full editorial by Tom Friedman go to NYTimes.com
Sep 16th, 2008 | Science & Technology, Today's News | No Comments
NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — It is probably a good thing that the Mohonk Mountain House, the 19th-century resort, was built on Shawangunk conglomerate, a concrete-hard quartz rock. Otherwise, the path to the National Weather Service’s cooperative station here surely would have turned to dust by now.
Every day for the last 112 years, people have trekked up the same gray outcropping to dutifully record temperatures and weather conditions. In the process, they have compiled a remarkable data collection that has become a climatological treasure chest
To read complete article by Anthony DePalma go to NYTimes.com
Sep 13th, 2008 | Today's News | No Comments
A blueprint for the eco-tropolis of the future with fresh air, pristine water and cheap energy. Plus, 48 audacious ideas to save the planet
In our annual Future of the Environment issue, we take a look at the monumental problems facing our world as we continue into the 21st century, as well as solutions ranging from the audacious to the everyday to, quite literally, save the planet.
This year we turn much of our focus toward a bold blueprint for the city of the future. Check out our interactive tour of a future green megalopolis, the 10 most audacious engineering solutions for saving the planet, as well as the most problematic cities, industries, and projects looming on the horizon.
To read complete article by PopSci staff go to popsci.com
Sep 13th, 2008 | Today's News | No Comments
Coalition: $100 bil plan would create 2 mil jobs
A coalition of labor and environmental groups has a plan for boosting America’s sluggish economy: persuade Uncle Sam to invest $100 billion in green building and technology.
Such an infusion would create 2 million jobs nationwide in two years, the groups say, four times more than would be created if that money was invested in oil.
The conclusions are part of a report released this week by the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington D.C.-based think tank.
To read article by Ginger Richardson go to AzCentral.com
Aug 29th, 2008 | Science & Technology, Helping the Environment, Innovation, Today's News | No Comments
Shai Agassi looks up and down the massive rectangular table in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom and begins to worry. He knows he’s out of his league here. For the last day and a half, he’s been listening to an elite corps of Israeli and US politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals debate the state of the world. Agassi is just one of 60 sequestered in a Washington, DC, hotel for a conference run by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Among the participants: Bill Clinton, former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, and two past directors of the CIA.
It’s December 2006. Scheduled to speak in a few minutes, Agassi gets nudged by the Israeli minister of education: “Be optimistic,” she tells him. “We’ve got to close with an upbeat tone.” Agassi thanks her. Optimism won’t be a problem.
At 38, Agassi is the youngest invitee. Just after the dotcom boom, SAP, the world’s largest maker of enterprise software, paid $400 million for a small-business software company he started with his father; now he’s SAP’s head of products and widely presumed to be the next CEO. But he’s not here this morning to talk about business software. Instead, his topic will be the world’s addiction to fossil fuels. It’s a recent passion and the organizers invited him to counterbalance the man speaking now, Daniel Yergin, the famed energy consultant and oil industry analyst. Yergin gives them his latest thinking: Energy independence is unattainable. Oil consumption will continue to rise. Iran will get richer. It’s not exactly what this audience wants to hear.
Now it’s Agassi’s turn. He starts off uncharacteristically nervous, stammering a bit. He’s got something different, he says. A new approach. He believes it just might be possible to get the entire world off oil. For good. Point by point, gaining speed as he goes, he shares for the first time in public the ideas that will change his future—and possibly the world’s.
To read article by Daniel Roth go to Wired.com
Aug 24th, 2008 | Alternative Energy, Helping the Environment, Education, Innovation, Today's News | No Comments
It was a steamy morning in late July when Greg Peterson walked out the door of his Phoenix home. He was talking on his cordless phone while hunting amid the fruit trees and vegetables in his garden for something to cook for dinner.
Outside, he was sidetracked by an exciting discovery. A beefy crawdad had wandered onto his lawn.
Peterson knew just what to do. He picked the crawdad up, walked it through his house and plopped it into his backyard fishpond.
It was typical behavior for Peterson, proprietor of the Urban Farm and the guru of green. Peterson, perhaps the Valley’s most influential voice on sustainable living and ever the curious student of Mother Nature, takes in new findings with the enthusiasm of a child.
The Urban Farm is Peterson’s home. It’s an average ranch-style house near 13th Place and Glendale Avenue, snuggled amid dozens of fruit trees (43 in the front yard alone), with a handful of chickens in back. The home is powered by enough solar energy that several times a year, he has no monthly electric bill to pay.
To read complete article by Lisa Nicita go to Arizona Republic.com
Aug 14th, 2008 | Science & Technology, Architecture, Helping the Environment, Today's News | No Comments
A green designer says we need to save energy by making our architecture more efficient.
Architect William McDonough draws his green-building techniques from the world around him. Before attending architecture school at Yale, he worked on a redevelopment project in Jordan and observed the clever way the Bedouins’ tents utilized natural materials to protect them from the elements. His most ambitious project, a redevelopment of the Ford Motors complex in Dearborn, Mich., incorporates a “living roof” that features nearly 11 acres of vegetation to purify storm water and provide natural air conditioning. NEWSWEEK’s Fareed Zakaria spoke to him about energy efficiency in architecture, the future of environmental design and the possibility of eliminating all industrial waste from the planet.
To read complete article by Fareed Zakaria go to Newsweek.com
Aug 11th, 2008 | Innovation | No Comments
When you flush in Santa Ana, the waste makes its way to the sewage-treatment plant nearby in Fountain Valley, then sluices not to the ocean but to a plant that superfilters the liquid until it is cleaner than rainwater. The “new” water is then pumped 13 miles north and discharged into a small lake, where it percolates into the earth. Local utilities pump water from this aquifer and deliver it to the sinks and showers of 2.3 million customers. It is now drinking water. If you like the idea, you call it indirect potable reuse. If the idea revolts you, you call it toilet to tap.
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