Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Last post I covered some guiding principles for urban resilience planning in the face of climate change and diminishing resources (especially fresh water and oil). Considering these guidelines, what aspect of U.S. metro development stands out as the most ill-advised and risky? Short answer: exurban sprawl.
-Public safety means more than just cops
-Dominican Authorities Approve Container Cities For Haiti Housing Relief
-Detroit homes sell for $1 amid mortgage and car industry crisis
-Digital designer shows what future towns could look like
What if future leaders became sensitive to local environmental and social issues before stepping into leadership roles? Tanya Narath describes nine day-long events in the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy’s program: Students visit a watershed for ecological context; tour an organic farm (sustainable agriculture); take a walking tour from which students’ urban design ideas are presented to the mayor; explore social issues like racial injustice, homelessness, and poverty; consider water ecology, local economy, transportation and land use. (www.ecoleader.org).
-Coventry to ‘dim’ city’s street lamps in British first
-Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Hatch Massive Plan to DeCarbonize Chicago
-Imagining a Carbon Neutral Seattle: A Collection of Ideas
-Getting Your Family On Board With Food Storage
-The community-owned, timber-framed, self-heating village shop
-Nitrogen for Free
Monday night I was having drinks in downtown San Francisco with some seriously smart people—top-level IBM scientists and strategists involved in Big Blue’s Smarter Planet initiative. Given the room’s collective interest in creating smart electrical grids, smart water systems, advanced electric car batteries and other green technologies, the talk naturally turned to how to create sustainable cities.
-Even Boulder Finds It Isn’t Easy Going Green
-Ecocities Emerging Newsletter
-The Cleveland Model
-De-Industrializing the City
-Urban Form, Behavior Energy Modeling in China: Sim City for Real?
Derek’s book is a far cry from anything so conventional. He aims to inspire with his ideas, ideas that may well earn his book a place in tiny house history. What he ends up doing is reconstructing the mind into accepting what constitutes shelter. (Also “Build Your Own House”)
When cheap energy reigned, we built acres of infrastructure throughout the United States, without giving too much thought to the energy, materials, and money that we would need to maintain and operate these constructions. The crumbling of this legacy of infrastructure is one of the many day-to-day living problems that we face over the next fifty to a hundred years.
-A High School For Green Teens
-Climate change and the West
-DIY Life: Urban Homesteaders at Kitchen Table Talks
One way of looking at our current set of predicaments is that we’ve been on a binge, consuming energy considerably faster than it can be captured and stored by Earth’s ecosystems. While fossil fuels once appeared limitless (and still do to deniers of peak oil), and though we’re literally bathed in energy (in the form of sunlight), the disappearance of the fossil-fuel storehouse accumulated over millions of years isn’t something that can be replaced with anything nearly as convenient as fossil fuels.
Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil…And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one.
