The Green Transect: benchmarking sustainability

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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.

Climate-driven desertification

"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

Tom Dispatch: Burning Questions

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

To visualize this, here's a map from the World Resources Institute, Information and Analysis tools

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.

Art and Architecture

Art is about itself. An excellent article here - "Why do we need art?" - about its roots in human celebration and expression in all ways. It connects people by "making special" the experience of being in a place.

This experience of a place is about the haptic (spatial, tactile, acoustic and light) dimension of physical space. It's grounded in the location and orientation of a site in an urban or rural environment. The place itself is part of a larger ecosystem and infrastructure, and the meaning of architecture is to make that experience coherent, not chaotic and arbitrary. Ways this has been addressed throughout human history is shown in the book, "Body Memory and Architecture" by By Kent C. Bloomer and Charles Willard Moore, as I pointed out in my first post here, Starting Out.

Our perceptions are also explored in this article "This is Your Brain on Architecture".

The organizing principles of architecture began with practical site constraints and protection from the elements; it is part of the land, an earth science. This later evolved into expressions of larger monumental structures that expressed the central community organizing principle, basically churches, temples and pyramids. The euro-centric history of the built environment is the history of churches built over several lifetimes, usually because most early cities and towns had homes/farms, stores and the central church, which expressed their community values and allowed them to congregate. Then came schools, specialty civic buildings and libraries, all still "monumental" to express continuity and stability. Banks became temples of commerce. Industrial revolution brought factories and weapons manufacture (no more ironsmithing those old flintlock muskets and cannons) and an explosion of building types in now-urban areas, including trains and shipping transport. Automobile production finally destroyed everything, thankyouverymuch Henry Ford.

Portovenere, Italy Sept. 2000

Epiphany

It's Twelfth Night - the night of epiphany, of recognition and awakening. From the darkest days of the year we need to look towards the light, celebrated around the globe, regardless of creed, in different cultures down through the eons with fire, candles, light and music.









We can choose to follow these luminous trails to a better future through intelligent crafting of solutions to the consequences of human habitation on earth. The dimensions of the resource problems are clear - see TED - and our financial challenges will force creative and highly streamlined efforts in rebuilding a new kind of infrastructure that creates instead of consumes.

Walking in the path of natural capital - see the footprint network! - following the trails of nature's processes and becoming part of this ecosystem in balance again, is crucial to a future for all of life. Seeing the big picture and taking the high road will get us there, leaving behind the narrow and cynical view and the empty grasping of coin. Nature is not to be feared or conquered, but embraced and joined, because it's our world and our selves calling for stewardship.

Morning: After a fall rainstorm

Even in Southern California there are delightful, crisp days when the sun comes pouring in the south windows to take off the chill. The trellis overhang allows the winter sun to come in, and in the hot summer it blooms with trumpet vine flowers to provide shade and keep out the heat.

The trees and plants temper the environment when they're planted strategically, and the fruit-bearing trees and shrubs (Pomegranite!) are drought tolerant, too. Nothing like the right kind of garden to spend the long summer afternoons in, watching our local wildlife darting around in the mulch and through the branches.

From the Gadget Lab at Wired: Antikythera

An ancient Greek computer comes back to life. A British museum curator has built a working replica of a 2,000-year-old Greek machine that has been called the world's first computer. Featured on the History Channel in December 2004, the complete reconstruction now also has further inscriptions replicated. A Conference was held on it in 2006 in Athens. See the article, a video and historical links here.History reaches to us in the present, in many forms. Just like the Intihuatana - the sun's hitching post at Machu Picchu - the brilliance of early cultures in understanding the cycles of the natural world led to astonishing constructs that expressed the nature of the physical world. This knowledge was used to harness a place and its resources to human purpose. Its purpose carried human meaning as well as consequences of use and its influence on the natural environment.

Is it possible in this era to now capture the intelligence that will allow humanity to inhabit the earth in balance? Can we take biomimicry to the next level in human affairs? Can we express our purpose so that it benefits all living things and embraces life instead of destroying it?

Update 12/7/16: Built by more than one person on the island of Rhodes, it shows that the ancient Greeks were apparently even further ahead in their astronomical understanding and mechanical know-how than we’d imagined.

Update 11/13/18:  While scientific study continues,  the discovery has drawn attention to both the existence of this ancient ‘calculator’ and its amazing history.

Update 1/27/19: In 1900, sponge divers stranded after a storm in the Mediterranean discovered an underwater statuary on the shoals of the Greek island Antikythera. It turned out to be the wreck of a ship more than 2,000 years old. During the subsequent salvage operation, divers recovered the remnants of a puzzling clocklike contraption with precision-cut gears, annotated with cryptic symbols that were corroded beyond recognition. For years, the device lay unnoticed in a museum drawer, until a British historian named Derek de Solla Price rediscovered it in the early 1950s and began the laborious process of reconstructing it — an effort that scholars have continued into the 21st century. We now know that the device was capable of predicting the behavior of the sun, the moon and five of the planets. The device was so advanced that it could even predict, with meaningful accuracy, solar or lunar eclipses that wouldn’t occur for decades.

Update 3/24/21: Scientists may have finally made a complete digital model for the Cosmos panel of a 2,000-year-old mechanical device called the Antikythera mechanism that's believed to be the world's first computer.
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Coalesce & Tragedy of the Commons

A timely article about the evolution of capitalism by Hazel Henderson of Ethical Markets can be found on the Corporate Social Responsibility Wire. The importance of evaluating investment systems against several benchmarks, not simply dollar tracking, is important in our now global society:
"Money is merely one form of information, and now the pure information-trading platforms are providing the needed extra bandwidth for trading, e.g. e-Bay, Craigslist, Freecycle and thousands of similar electronic trading systems, cellphones, and local scrip "currencies" used to match needs and resources and clear local markets starved of credit. Wall Street's single-minded focus on money led to its demise. Money was equated with wealth and ignored all the other forms of wealth, from human skills and ingenuity to the productive systems of nature in which all economies are embedded. Money, like gold, will remain a useful store of value and medium of exchange, but now as part of a new broader, more inclusive regime dominated by pure, information-based markets."
A former corporate executive now restrained for the benefit of the commons.