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Ecovillages |
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Posted on July 9, 2009 @ 10:03:00 PM by Paul Meagher
It has been busy the last while so my blogging has dropped off.
Finished reading the book "The Basics of Permaculture" (1996) by Ross Mars.
The book is 170 pages long, clearly written, with alot of interesting artwork depicting various permaculture concepts and techniques (artwork by Martin Drucker).
It is filled with many good ideas for living sustainably and provides a useful orientation to the larger field of body of work on permaculture.
One chapter that I want to touch on is Chapter 13 on "Communities". What struck me about this chapter was the idea that we can live more sustainably if we find more ways to live cooperatively. Ross Mars distinguishes between sizes of settlements - families, hamlet, village, town, city - and then focuses on trying to flesh out the concept of an ecovillage. For example, an ecovillage takes care of providing basic infrastructure like food, water, energy, and waste treatment. Cooperative approaches to providing such infrastructure can result in large sustainability improvements relative to more individualistic approaches.
The concept of an ecovillage is a useful mindtool for developing a systems-level understanding of how sustainability might work under various low-carbon cooperative arrangements.
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Green Home Building |
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Posted on May 25, 2009 @ 06:21:00 AM by Paul Meagher
About 1/3 of the way through "Green from the Ground Up: Sustainable, Healthy, and Energy-Efficient Home Construction (Builder's Guide)" (2009) by David Johnston & Scott Gibson. The book excites me because I see the massive economic potential in the building profession moving in the green directions outlined in this book. The book offers many nicely illustrated examples of how green building techniques and materials differ from conventional building techniques and materials.
I will offer a couple of examples.
1. One issue that green builders worry about is how their concrete is made. A green builder would prefer that fly ash be used to create the concrete that is used for a green building. Here is Wikipedia's more detailed take on the issue of using fly ash to make concrete:
Owing to its pozzolanic properties, fly ash is used as a replacement for some of the Portland cement content of concrete.
The use of fly ash as a pozzolanic ingredient was recognized as early as 1914, although the earliest noteworthy study of its use was in 1937. Before its use was lost to the Dark Ages, Roman structures such as aqueducts or the Pantheon in Rome used volcanic ash (which possesses similar properties to fly ash) as pozzolan in their concrete. As pozzolan greatly improves the strength and durability of concrete, the use of ash is a key factor in their preservation.
Use of fly ash as a partial replacement for Portland cement is generally limited to Class F fly ashes. It can replace up to 30% by mass of Portland cement, and can add to the concrete’s final strength and increase its chemical resistance and durability. Recently concrete mix design for partial cement replacement with High Volume Fly Ash (50 % cement replacement) has been developed. For Roller Compacted Concrete (RCC)[used in dam construction] replacement values of 70% have been achieved with POZZOCRETE (processed fly ash) at the Ghatghar Dam project in Maharashtra, India. Due to the spherical shape of fly ash particles, it can also increase workability of cement while reducing water demand. The replacement of Portland cement with fly ash is considered by its promoters to reduce the greenhouse gas "footprint" of concrete, as the production of one ton of Portland cement produces approximately one ton of CO2 as compared to zero CO2 being produced using existing fly ash. New fly ash production, i.e., the burning of coal, produces approximately twenty to thirty tons of CO2 per ton of fly ash. Since the worldwide production of Portland cement is expected to reach nearly 2 billion tons by 2010, replacement of any large portion of this cement by fly ash could significantly reduce carbon emissions associated with construction, as long as the comparison takes the production of fly ash as a given.
Note that there is nothing revolutionary about using fly ash to make concrete as power companies are selling lots of it to concrete companies already; the point is that a green builder needs to know the arguments as to why certain materials should be preferred over others in constructing a green building.
2. The second illustrative example of how green building might differ from conventional building techniques is in how the basement foundations are constructed. One technique that green builders recommend is insulating the inside and outside wall of a concrete foundation. One popular material/technique for building such walls are Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF's). The forms are made from foam or recycled woodchips mixed with cement. You just pour the concrete into these stackable ICF's and you have a wall with a higher R value that is easier to heat, better resistence to the development of moisture, mold and mildew in the basement, and a better sound protection factor (SPF) so noise from inside or outside the house is not transmitted as easily.
If I were a home building contractor these days I would be looking to get educated in what green building is all about. I don't think we are ready yet to write the ISO manual on what is involved in green home building; nevertheless, it would pay dividends for a home building contractor to purposefully educate him or herself on an ongoing basis about what new materials and techniques are being put forward as part of the cannon of green building. In this slumping economy, there is demand for green homes built by knowledgeable green home contractors and I expect this sector of the economy has the potential to be a key driver in a resuscitation of the U.S. economy.
The meme of "Green Home Building" is like the "Organic Food" meme in the depth of its potential influence on our material culture. The meme of "Green Home Building" is more immature than "Organic Food" but I think soon it will be a rival in our collective meme space.
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Design patterns for sustainability |
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Posted on February 5, 2009 @ 09:04:00 AM by Paul Meagher
Software programmers are familiar with the concept of "design patterns" and, if you are into this topic, you can familiarize yourself with a library of solution approaches to recurring types of problems in programming. In a similiar vein, one might wonder whether there are similiar types of "design patterns" for sustainable living? Perhaps if we had such "design patterns" they might help us develop innovative and practical approaches to a more sustainable society.
You can in fact find many such "design patterns" in PERMACULTURE: A Designers' Manual by Bill Mollison.
One such design pattern involves the idea that the best use of a resource is often achieved by arranging space and time according to a schedule. In the case of a sports field, we achieve maximal utility by allowing multiple teams to use the field at particular points in time. Contrast this will dedicating the field to a sports team that only uses the sports field to practice or play. Many of our practices involve the dedicated assignment of a person or group to a resource to the exclusion of other persons, groups, or animals. Conversly, whenever we schedule a resource to be used by multiple persons, groups, or animals at particular times, we generally achieve a net increase in sustainability. Public transit, and the increasingly popular phenomonon of car sharing, are prime examples of the application of a scheduling design pattern.
What intrigues me is the idea that there might be a range of heuristics, like the scheduling design pattern, that can be used to find new opportunities for green entrepreurship. Bill Mollison's book "Permaculture: A Design Manual" is probably one of the best resources I've come accross that speaks specifically to design patterns for sustainability. Even though I've only begun reading it, I can see that it is an impressive collection of design ideas for sustainable living.
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Green Computing |
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Posted on November 13, 2008 @ 08:22:00 AM by Paul Meagher
The concept of Green Computing has been on my mind of late. Rasmus Lerdorf, who pioneered the PHP programming language (which this site utilizes), mentioned Green Computing in his keynote speech Simple is Hard (Aug 20, 2008). The talk focused more on optimizing web applications using various debugging tools and it was in this context that the Green Computing remarks below were made.
Attendee, meyers, summarizes Rasmus's views as follows:
if we could take all the web apps in the world and speed them up by 100, we could have a lot less data centers and servers - we used to count cycles when writing c code, and no one tracks that level today. Green computing - we need to save the trees (and kittens) by writing cleaner code - we'd need fewer servers...
Green Computing consumes fewer computational resources which reduces the need for more servers, power, physical space, retail cycles, etc.... A more fleshed out concept of Green Computing might be capable of acting as a powerful guide to best practice in computing? Green Computing is not wasteful of computational resources, is biomimetic, and is sustainable. These Green Computing principles can perhaps be applied to all levels of computing from hardware to software.
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How green are you? |
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Posted on September 25, 2008 @ 07:30:00 AM by Paul Meagher
There are many bodies out there willing to certify how green you are. A new one is called Degree of Green. The idea is to rate your company according to 3 main criteria: health impacts, environmental impact, and sustainability. Based on these ratings you can provide consumers with some of their marketing material to indicate where your company rate's on these three dimensions.
What is interesting about this effort is that it makes the point that "being green" isn't a one-dimensional concept; that at the very least it consist of environmental, health, and sustainability dimensions and that comsumers may be more interested on one dimension versus another or particular combinations.
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Eco-advertising |
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Posted on September 19, 2008 @ 08:00:00 AM by Paul Meagher
In their 2008 book, The Hot Topic, Gabrielle Walker and Sir David King observe that:
The richer the world gets, the farther it wants to travel and the less carbon efficient the means it chooses. As the wealth of a nation rises, its citizens change from walking and cycling, through buses and local trains, to cars, high-speed trains, and air travel. (p. 110)
Overlain on this tendency towards travelling further using less carbon efficient modes of transport, is the imperitive that "bigger is better". Given this mentality, cycling is often perceived as either not progressive or reflective of a low wealth status.
In much of the consumer imagery around automobiles is the idyllic green nature scene with the vehicle comfortably situated in it. The imagery is meant to suggest that buying this vehicle is either good for the planet or better for the planet relative to another vehicle. But is it?
Perhaps one of the options that we should be advertising is the choice between buying a vehicle and not buying a vehicle. To sell the null purchase option might require a more aggressive approach towards the automobile industry in which vehicles are situated in less appealing surroundings, some atmospheric facts and societal trend data are quoted, and the real option is put to the consumer: purchase a vehicle which may spew more co2 and pollutants than your moral quota, or investigate and spend your money on alternative methods of transport.
The green movement has recognized the need for eco-justice lawyers to defend the earth against unsustainable development, however it does not seem to have recognized the need for eco-advertisers to help shift the consumer mindscape into more sustainable directions.
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Geo-engineering to the rescue |
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Posted on September 18, 2008 @ 08:00:00 AM by Paul Meagher
Some scientists think we have gone beyond the tipping point with respect to runaway climate change or that we will lack the political will to carry out the necessary steps to reduce our usage of fossil fuels in time to prevent catastrophic outcomes. When all hope is lost where you gonna turn? Carbon-busters, otherwise known as Geo-engineers.
The idea behing geo-engineering is that we can engineer our way out of the global warming problem. I am familiar with two geo-engineering schemes for doing this.
One sheme put forward by atmospheric scientist and Nobel Laureate, Paul Crutzen, involves injecting clouds with sulpher dioxide to reflect sunlight back out into space and offset the effects of global warming.
A second scheme put forward by Klaus Lackner from Columbia University involves gigantic chimneys that would pump polluted air from the surroundings, scrub the carbon from it, and then prepare the collected material for sequestration. This idea is being proposed as a way to win the Branson prize of 25 million for a way to eliminate 1 billion or more tons of co2 from the atmosphere.
The second scheme seems much more promising to me especially if you imagine each major city in the world with enough carbon scrubbers to offset the amount they are putting into the atmosphere. Actually, each major city in the developed world would probably be obligated to operate more scrubbers than would be needed in order to help the less developed world - or finance the installation of scrubbers there.
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The market for green building and design |
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Posted on July 31, 2008 @ 06:02:00 AM by Paul Meagher In the CNN article, Going green a growing trend among homeowners, they report that 6% of residential construction in 2008 was "green", up from 2% in 2005. Current ideas about "Green Building" can be found in a recent Smart Home exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The exhibit is actually a fully functional urban-house designed by architect Michelle Kaufmann. The design embraces concepts like using recycled materials, using sustainable building materials like bamboo flooring, conserving water, and real-time metering of power usage (i.e., a "dashboard" for home power usage).
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