Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Throughout the last year Michelle and I have been researching green building methods. So far we have visited and helped build strawbale houses, spent time in an underground concrete building in Denmark, checked out adobe brick and visited the Passivhaus Institute (Passive House) in Germany.
A few years ago, at Seed Savers in County Clare, I helped sculpt, pound and pat a house together.
One of my goals in moving to Ithaca was to get into a position where I can began transitioning my family to a carbon-negative lifestyle. Obviously writing posts about alarming climate papers only goes so far; if one isn’t prepared to personally do something, at some point it starts to feel hypocritical (at least it does to me). This process is absolutely in its infancy, but I plan to blog about it to a certain degree. Our experiences may be helpful to others traveling along the same path. Perhaps a few other people who wouldn’t otherwise have contemplated this will get the idea. And at a minimum, I will be able to feel less guilty, and more smug and self-righteous, as the climate goes to hell around us.
Once people get into their heads that maybe the personal automobile is not really such a good idea — in other words, after they have moved beyond the biodiesel/electric car phase, as if the only problem with the personal automobile is the fuel it uses — they usually fixate on bicycles. I say “fixate” because this often becomes an eco-fetish like so many other such things, as if more bicycles were better, and if you could just get enough bicycles in one place, you could “save the world.”
Dwindling global oil supplies are leaving the world ever more reliant on a group of unstable countries – many of which are themselves facing major domestic problems right now.
Believe it or not, many of the world’s major oil exporters cannot maintain their own domestic energy requirements. Venezuelan consumers endure electricity blackouts of “seven or eight hours a day,” but less well known is the situation in the Middle East, where residents are facing rolling power outages just as summer temperatures soar, and with it, the demand for air conditioning.
Many American cities—mostly in the Midwest and Northeast—have seen serious continuing shrinkage in recent decades and are now beginning to face up to it. A few have tentatively tried to craft measures that accept the persistence, even permanence, of their smaller size. As these cities search for answers, one of the few models they can turn to comes from, of all places, the buffalo country of the Great Plains states. There, communities that fought population decline for decades are now preparing for the realities of a smaller, but not necessarily worse, future. Through our work with these communities over many years, we believe that they have experience that can help guide shrinking cities in what we have called “smart decline.”
Sometimes it seems as if little is happening and then suddenly a major shift occurs. This seems true of the Department of Energy (DOE) when it comes to energy use in buildings. The DOE is beginning to take big strides in supporting the reduction of energy use in existing buildings. Retrofit costs are still high and funding difficult to obtain but this should change over the next year. The nation’s consciousness is moving away from new green buildings to impressive energy retrofits of the existing stock.
– Sustainability: From Excess to Aesthetics
– Bamboo Houses to the Rescue
– How to Share Time
– Six ways to teach kids to value community life
A trullo is something that you can’t ignore. The first time you see one, from a distance, it looks slender, elegant, even cute. With its conical roof, its round shape, it reminds you of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, it looks like a place where hobbits could live.
People in the Dark Ages filled in the gaps in the very limited knowledge base available to them with the help of wizards and soothsayers. As we close in on a future for which most people are hopelessly unprepared, a new kind of wizard — a green wizard, adept in the forgotten arts of appropriate tech — may be one of the things that a deindustrializing world needs most.
The BP oil gusher should remind us that our civilization relies on unseen, not very well understood forces, especially energy and the environment, for our day-to-day economies.
In 2009, Post Carbon Institute recruited 29 of the world’s leading sustainability thinkers to answer one fundamental question: How do we manage the transition to a more resilient, sustainable, and equitable world? Like us, our Fellows see five key truths:
