Category Archives: Sustainability

Green Buildings: Now Mainstream

Posted on by

A trend that has taken hold across the USA in the past few years is evolving to a new level. What has been a patchwork of green buildings in many cities is expanding to whole communities, whole neighborhoods. Portland, well known as an urban-design innovator, particularly for its transit-oriented developments, is leading the way again.

The green ethic — energy-efficient, water-stingy buildings full of features that stress the natural over the chemical, the recycled over the new and the renewable over the finite — is firmly mainstream [source].

Green technologies is a consious choice that we have to perserve with. I am glad to see that finally green buildings are coming into their own and becoming more mainstream and achieving defacto standards as opposed to experimental. The Green Building 101 is a good place to start if you want to know more.

No More Beachfront Property?

Posted on by

Thanks to global warming and climate change crisis, beachfront property might not seem like a feasible option in the future. Increase in sea level will definitely impact such properties as the world’s geography undergoes some serious changes. The New York Times mentions that:

According to a 2000 report by the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, at least a quarter of the houses within 500 feet of the United States coast may be lost to rising seas by 2060. There were 350,000 of these houses when the report was written, but today there are far more.

That is indeed a significant impact and this time, it will not affect the lower income group of people like it did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Denial may work for some time but in the long run, beachfront properties will be the first line of defense in our battle against rising waters. And as we have been constantly reminded, nature always wins.

Too Ambitious

Posted on by

We finally heard back from the EPA’s P3 [People, Prosperity, and Planet] Request for Proposals and sadly, they rejected our grant application. The reason – too ambitious and infeasible for the allocated grant money. Well, they are right. We had submitted a proposal suggesting developing a sustainable model to rebuild Southern Louisiana by seeking to analyze risk perceptions and economic necessities of residents that force them to make unsustainable choices.

On the flip side, it is not entirely lost. We can always choose to divide up our proposal and resubmit to other funding organizations or just modify this and send it off to a larger funding organization. In lieu of Katrina hurricane, we found our proposal quite timely and had managed to keep the scope of the project broad enough to warrant adequate examination of the research issues involved. Restricting ourselves to a particular region of Louisiana or just to media-popular New Orleans would have led us to ignore correlational factors that influence every move in the southern state.

Climate change data has shown how everything is interrelated and a little bit of tweaking elsewhere can have larger implications often unintended elsewhere. Developing a sustainable model for Louisiana (and New Orleans) cannot be a piecemeal project but has to encapsulate the larger region. This may not have been possible within the parameters of the P3 Project but hopefully, the EPA takes this issue seriously enough to allot more funds for such a study.