This blog will follow U.S. local governments that are curbing greenhouse gas emissions, reducing energy consumption, utilizing renewable energy sources, adapting to the impacts of climate change, and developing more sustainably. It will showcase their challenges, accomplishments, innovations, strategies, and lessons learned. ICLEI’s Local Action Blog launches to make available information on cities and counties [...]
Beautiful pictures from the collections in the Earth Observatory. These images were taken from many different satellites and astronaut missions. You can see evidence of climate change and nature of human settlement especially in the images of a Las Vegas suburb and South of Khartoum, Sudan.
The extent of the spillage of an estimated 1 billion gallons of sludge containing years’ of waste from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal-burning power plant over an area of 300 acres cannot be better described than these pictures taken by Dorothy Griffith. The entire region is a brownfield and I wonder how many years, resources, [...]
Just because you can doesn’t always mean you should. “This gleaming hunk of urban development is about to rise on an artificial, perfectly square island off the coast of Dubai” [source]. Dubai has been going crazy creating all these islands off their coast probably because coastal properties enjoy greater demand and thus elicit higher prices. [...]
GROW, a project that develops innovative solutions on green technologies draws inspiration from ivy growing on the side of a building – resulting in a hybrid energy delivery device of leafy, fluttering solar shingles that provide power via both sun and wind. I would love a day when roof shingles that use solar power are [...]
Architect Vincent Callebaut’s latest project balances public galleries, meeting rooms and gathering spaces over canals and abandoned railroad tracks in the 19th Parisian district. Callebaut describes the process as an intention to “absorb and recycle by photo-catalytic effect the cloud of harmful gases (Smog) from the intense traffic near Paris” [source: Inhabitat]. Definitely a worthy [...]
“Try this experiment. Go knock on someone’s door in West Oakland, Watts or Newark and say: ‘We gotta really big problem!’ They say: ‘We do? We do?’ ‘Yeah, we gotta really big problem!’ ‘We do? We do?’ ‘Yeah, we gotta save the polar bears! You may not make it out of this neighborhood alive, but [...]
A new swanky possibly the greenest building comes up in Athens: The five-story structure in southern Athens produces zero emissions, uses no fossil fuel and meets virtually all its own energy demands — in winter and in summer — thanks to a computerized system that draws on both solar and geothermal sources. It even produces [...]
Ash talks about the adverse environmental impacts of religious festivities in India. But I am glad that things are changing and people are taking remedial steps to reverse such damage. Ganesh Chaturthi is an annual religious festival celebrated by Hindus in India. It has grown from household worship to societal celebration involving huge idols of [...]
China, India, and Russia each have two cities in the top ten list of the world’s worst polluted places. The primary factors behind the pollution was cited as mining, Cold War era pollution, and unregulated industries. Note that most of the these towns aren’t major urban centers but rather isolated industrial concentrations. However, the inordinate [...]
As much as I am against wasting energy, I am not entirely comfortable with secret government monitoring. The city of Haringey, UK hired a spy plane to fly overhead and identify which households are wasting the most energy. They used this information and mapped it. Further more, to play the guilt card, they put this [...]
In today’s age of unpredictable weather and rampant flooding, the Dutch are leading the way with creating amphibious houses. As I mentioned before, we can forget about controlling nature (levees, etc.) and instead focus on adapting our living to minimize damages when weather turns foul.
Will the design community respond to the challenge of building the twenty-first century city? Will they rally around the mayor’s plan? The Metropolis Magazine is asking whether designers and city planners will heed to Mike Bloomberg’s vision of creating a cleaner and greener New York City
Almost two years after Hurricane Katrina exposed the brittleness of New Orleans, New York Times reports that even after spending more than a billion dollars the city is still at risk. I had written earlier on how New Orleans might be the city that never should have been and if taken at face value, I [...]
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