(click on image for larger view) Implementing sustainable development in urban and suburban areas will require developing new benchmarks for areas and regions as opposed to "scoring" specific amenities in a building or a site. It is a more systemic, or comprehensive view, of a local cluster of structures and landscape. This goes well beyond current LEED guideline developments.
A method used in "smart zoning" is called an urban transect, and the sustainable version of this approach is called a green transect. How does this transect (mapping areas and systems relative to the distance from an established point) reflect a scale of sustainable, or "green" building strategies?
There needs to be a ranking based upon the development scale. This ranking could say that the best method to build small homes is to use simple stratgies such a solar orientation, building form, conservation in landscape drainage, and so forth.
Larger projects and major structures should be required to produce their own energy and recycle all water and waste, or become part of a system of local recycling with 100% recapture. In other words, it is a set of benchmarks that are imposed depending upon the scale of the impact of the development, or its "footprint". This would be evaluated in much the same way that an Environmental Impact Report is done now, except that there would be very specific requirements for the system's energy and water performance. Very large projects would need to provide a net surplus of power and water, with no carbon production outside the system; in other words, Regenerative.
"The alternative (to geoengineering) is the acceptance of a massive natural cull of humanity and a return to an Earth that freely regulates itself but in the hot state." --Dr James Lovelock, August 2008 Alternet: Australia faces collapse
Extreme drought means desertification, especially if it lasts for hundreds of years, as the recent NOAA-led study found (see NOAA stunner: Climate change "largely irreversible for 1000 years," with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe). The regions that NOAA identifies as facing permanent Dust Bowls:
* U.S. Southwest * Southeast Asia * Eastern South America * Southern Europe * Southern Africa * Northern Africa * Western Australia
The point of this map is to show that not only is desertification happening, which destroys water resources (watershed and aquifers) and food production for human societies, it is spreading across that horizontal global band of historical development of civilization. Understanding the biggest threat to industrialized countries that are overdrawing their local resources is to view this through Jared Diamond's chronicle of the expansion of human civilization that took place because of plentiful resources across the millennia, in his book "Guns, Germs and Steel".
It will hit the highly developed societies the hardest, endangering not only human civilization but planetary systems of life. Diamond further documents the consequences of human depletion of resources in "Collapse", as well as the choices that human society must make very quickly. Humanity now faces the unwinding of the civilization bubble, and our choices lie in how we manage this without further devastation across the globe. Further discussions of "far-ahead" thinking is at the Long Now Foundation.
An open turf area. This open space hosts "civitas", the means to foster, mobilize and coordinate civic concern in the community for sustainable public and private spaces. This includes urban planning, public policy, infrastructure, watershed management, zero impact projects and regenerative "green" strategies. These create innovative spaces and design so people can reconnect with nature.
The California Natural Resources Agency just released its fourth Climate Change Assessment, a call to action on rising global temperatures — the state’s first in six years. August 2018, 132 pages covering these issues:
A space program initially launched in response to the Soviet challenge and put forth in a speech by John Kennedy in 1961 resulted in not only technology advances, but a shift in human awareness of the biosphere we all inhabit. This resulted in the Apollo program that put men on the moon and let human eyes look back upon the world.The view of a blue globe floating in empty space marks a transformation in human understanding and points towards an evolutionary change in collective priorities.
Ongoing action via the Planetary Society - Carl Sagan, from his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us." And that Bulgarian folk song from Sagan's Golden Record that NASA sent off into interstellar space in 1977. And that poem by Maya Angelou inspired by Sagan's "mote of matter". Carolyn Porco writes about how this image of our planet came to be.
Apollo 8 astronauts later presented their experiences to the US Congress: "To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together." Here's a movie of that experience from the astronauts.
Public presentations from JPL/NASA on climate change are available as videos from the Pasadena League of Women Voters as part of their Climate Change Forum series
The Fibonacci sequence is a famous group of numbers beginning with 0 and 1 in which each number is the sum of the two before it. It begins 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and continues infinitely. The pattern hides a powerful secret: If you divide each number in the sequence by its predecessor (except for 1 divided by 0), then as you move toward higher numbers, the result converges on the constant phi, or approximately 1.61803, otherwise known as the golden ratio.
My regenerative concept for the Trade Center was submitted to the New Visions New York panel for consideration as an overarching vision. The documentation is here. The concept of crystalline light shattering at 9:15 am on Sept. 11, in a site regenerated with a tree of life and "green towers" now lives on in many other urban design schemes.
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