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 level of pollution cannot be justified.
Category Archives: Environment
Are you wasting energy?
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 information online [via Techdirt]. Trying to ‘shame’ people into conservation has honestly never worked but it definitely does freak them out and make them not trust anything the government says or does.
Floating Homes
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.
Designers wanted to create a green 21st century city
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
Log a Forest Leave a Tree
Saving New Orleans or bailing out?
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 can be acussed of undermining human tenacity and resilience. But at the core of the matter is our struggle with nature. To put it bluntly, we can never win. No matter how hard we try or how long we hold her off, nature will always win. Rivers that change their flow or sea levels that rise will not consider the fate of those millions living on its banks or the coastline.
Christopher Hallowell’s Holding Back the Sea documents man’s futile attempts in controlling nature. Hurricane Katrina not only exposed our societal inadequacies but also laid bare some of our massive engineering feats. No offense to the Army Corps of Engineers, but they will always be fighting a losing battle and can only hold the fort so long. Even if it was technically possible to hold off the inevitable for a longer time, I doubt we have the financial prowess to do it anymore. Other more urgent and important priorities have crept up the national agenda. At some point in time, we have to reevaluate our presence in the volatile Mississippi basin. Perhaps nature doesn’t want us there at all. We can claim that we have been there for over a hundred year but nature has been there much longer, right?
Impact on our Environment
Danger of Plastic Bags
Americans throw away 12 million oil barrels’ worth of plastic bags every year. And now they are choking us.
Vote for Gateway National Recreation Area Design finalists
Do you know of a national park near New York City? Probably not. The Gateway National Recreation Area spreads over more than 26,000 acres and is located on the New York-New Jersey harbor and coastline. This national recreation area was crated in 1972 and provides recreational opportunities for more than 22 million tri-state area residents while protecting the natural and urban ecologies of the system.
The Gateway National Recreation Area is currently planning on furthering the potential of the park and with the help of Van Alen Institute, National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), and Columbia University are conducting a design competition. The competition has already attracted more than 100 architects, planners, and conservationists. The finalists are posted online and are pretty impressive. In a rare move, the competition has now moved to the voting stage where the public votes on the design of their choice. Head over and vote for the design of your choice; especially so if you live in the tri-state area. Conservation and protection of the last vestiges of our ecology are of utmost importance however it is equally important for us to reconnect with our natural habitat even if it is for recreational purposes.
Green is the new Black
We know that building environmentally-friendly buildings has finally come into vogue when you have more than one accreditation services. Earlier LEED was the gold standard for a building seeking to achieve a ‘green’ status. Well, it still is and thanks to its long-standing and stringent standards, it has gained more importance and credibility in spite of its steep costs [$3000 per home].
For anyone unsatisfied with LEED, the options for green-home ratings are proliferating. The National Association of Home Builders is starting a certification system. Randy Hansell of Earth Advantage, a Portland-based rating system launched in 1994, reckons that there are more than 60 green-building rating systems in the country, up from six or seven in 2000.
Some local programmes, such as Earth Advantage, are partnered with LEED—and most are cheaper. (Earth Advantage usually costs $500-800; the price depends in part on how far in the boonies a green home is located.) [via The Economist.]