Nov 22, 09
The must-read solutions book -- Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore
The long-awaited sequel to An Inconvenient Truth comes out Tuesday. If you want a preview, Gore and the book are featured in an excellent Newsweek cover story, The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man. In September, Nature Reports Climate Change asked me (and several others) to suggest three books to read ahead of the Copenhagen conference. Of those, they then asked me to review Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis: When your last work led to an Oscar and...
Fish Systems and Design
A grim new film, The End of the Line, reveals the impact of overfishing on our oceans. It exposes the extent to which global stocks of fish are dwindling; features scientists who warn we could see the end of most seafood by 2048; and includes chefs and fishers who seem indifferent to the ecocidal consequences of their business practices. "We must act now to protect the sea from rampant overfishing” says Charles Clover, author of the book of the film. Must, must. Although important in...
The Solar Forest: Charging Station And Shady Spot For Electric Cars
by Christa Morris The approaching age of electric vehicles presents us with a secondary, albeit significant, challenge: building accessible recharging stations with renewable energy. While we’re at it, can our parking lots be shady, please? One solution may already have arrived. In Neville Mars’s dreamy design, appropriately dubbed the Solar Forest, large, leaf-shaped photovoltaic panels on branching “trees” will provide both shade and power-up plugs for electric cars relaxing...
Its Economy in Shambles, The Midwest Goes Green
by Keith Schneider It took awhile, but the U.S. Midwest finally has recognized that the industries that once powered its economy will never return. Now leaders in the region are looking to renewable energy manufacturing and technologies as key to the heartland’s renaissance. On the same day in late June that the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly approved legislation to curb greenhouse gases and invest billions in developing wind and solar energy, Mariah Power displayed one of...
Green Bundle of Energy
by Roger Valdez Portland joins Vancouver in code changes that encourage urban renewables. Last week I heaped praise on Portland’s plans to revise their city building codes to encourage family-friendly courtyard housing. This week, I am feeling the same way about another set of changes being considered that would make it easier to generate clean energy and reduce runoff in urban neighborhoods. A package of changes called the “Green Bundle” is being reviewed this summer by the City...
Worldchanging Interview: Nancy Kete on the Future of the American Transportation System
Nancy Kete, a program director at the World Resources Institute, knows that in order to create the bright green cities of tomorrow, we must reimagine how we move about and in between them today. For decades, heavy reliance on the automobile has shaped cities globally, but arguably most dramatically in the United States. To reverse this trend and its harmful side effects, we need a new vision of transportation that will work both for those already entrenched within this system and for those...
AUTO. SUEÑO Y MATERIA - Cars And Landscapes
Panos Kokkinias, Gas Station, 2003 AUTO. SUEÑO Y MATERIA [AUTO. DREAM AND MATERIAL], the new exhibition at Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial analyzes contemporary car culture through the lens of some 100 artworks. Lovely interior architecture by longo + roldán arquitectos What an interesting moment to organize an exhibition on cars. Reading online newspaper over the past few months, i had the feeling that an era is closing. Buying a new car is suddenly not as desirable...
Does Carbon-Eating Cement Deserve The Hype?
I am trying to identify the plausible CO2-mitigation strategies that are scalable -- that can comprise at least a half a wedge (see "How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution). So when a new process gets this much hype -- as in Scientific American's, "Cement from CO2: A Concrete Cure for Global Warming?" -- it deserves scrutiny. Wired magazine's "The Top 10 Green-Tech Breakthroughs of 2008," provides both a good summary of the process and more evidence...
Community as Technology
By Andrew Outhwaite With new options for collaboration, telecommunications and social networking coming online at a furious pace, it's worth pondering how society will continue to change as a result. Having the tools in place is, of course, only half the battle. The rest is learning to shift our ways of thinking and working away from models that favor segregated specialties and exclusivity to relationships that encourage and enhance co-creation. I recently had an experience that...
Designing a Zero-Waste City: A Visit to the San Francisco Dump
With Julia Levitt On February 20, I had the opportunity to tour the San Francisco city dump, a facility run by Norcal Waste Systems. The tour was part of Compostmodern 09, a conference sponsored by AIGA, a professional association for designers. It might seem strange to have a group of creative types clamoring to learn from the city dump, but there are numerous good reasons why their thinking is important to the waste management process. As we've often pointed out here on Worldchanging,...
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