Building Alive, Designing to Thrive

Here is book number one from My list of books I need to read: Hungry City- How Food Shapes Our Lives by Carolyn Steel. I really wanted to read this book after hearing her speak at the Willow School's Food For Thought event in April 2011. As a speaker, she has an amazing combination of enthusiasm, sarcasm, fact-based-knowledge, vision, and optimism. Her book reflects much the same. This book began to ring even truer after my very first trip to Whole Foods about a month ago. Needless to say, I was in love with the store. And while I've always actually enjoyed grocery shopping, this was Heaven. However, when I brought the $400 bill home to my mother, I was back to reality. Like Carolyn discusses in her book, modern society is spending less and less of their money on food- when it is the most important thing we need to sustain life, culture and community. The $400 of groceries lasted my family of four almost 3 weeks- which equals out to less than $50 per mouth per week. And this wa

Yes, sorry mom. Here is yet another thing I am insisting we change in the house. Here's a couple Did-you-knows to help start proving my point (via Greenseal) : 40% of trash in landfills is paper products 30% of the timber harvested annually in the US is used to make paper products And yes mom, I hear your first argument " But when it gets to a landfill, it breaks down eventually. AND it still has to go to a landfill after it's used- recycled or not " First of all, nothing breaks down in landfills anymore. Since the 1960's the US has invested in something called sanitary landfills. Sounds nice, right? Well it means that be basically lead-line all of our landfills so nothing can seep into the soil and contaminate it because of all the toxins inside of things we use everyday: mercury, formaldehyde, BPA, etc. Things that, if they did leak into the soil could reach the water table and make a lot of people very very sick. So they are necessary. However, without

Aristotle once said, "The energy of the mind is the essence to life". Too bad for him and us, buildings and modern society as we know it can't survive on the stuff. Buildings consume about 40% of the energy and 75% of the electricity produced annually in the United States. (usgbc), which means they are the largest demanders for power, heat, air and electric. So, for obvious reasons, these are the most important places to focus our energies (pun intended) in reduction and reuse. Reduction is probably the more obvious of the two, creating better buildings that don't leak heat and air conditioning, that are so well insulated the heat from the bodies of it's occupants actually warms the building. This will create a lower energy demand to control thermal comfort within the space. Reuse is the more challenging and yet I'd argue the more exciting way to increase efficiency in a home, building... or wherever. Something like using the wastewater from the toilets to co

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KeGhPZtF0c If you can't see the video directly below, click the link up there ^^^