Weekend Series Permaculture Design Course in Columbus, Ohio | relocalize.net Post Carbon Institute promotes the strategy of - building strong local communities to increase resilience. what is relocalization? Relocalization is a strategy to build societies based on the local production of food, energy and goods, and the local development of currency, governance and culture. The main goals of relocalization are to increase community energy security, to strengthen local economies, and to improve environmental conditions and social equity. In 2009 Post Carbon Institute partnered with the international Transition movement to support and inspire community led responses around the relocalization strategy. what is transition? A Transition initiative is a community-led response to the pressures of climate change, fossil fuel depletion and increasingly, economic contraction. Transiton US is a nonprofit organization that provides inspiration, encouragement, support, networking, and training for Transition Initiatives across the United States.
Consilience: The Blog - Consilience: The Blog - Deconstruction: Vital side of sustainable development Deconstruction: Vital side of sustainabledevelopment Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 9:35AM Introduction by Grant: This guest blog is by Toni Renee "TR" Vierra of eco-Organize in Napa, California. She is a green building advisor, educator, radio host and active green building organization leader. Most often we address the construction side of sustainable development but neglect the "deconstruction" side of infill development. Building Green from the Ground Upby eco-organize LLC As we look toward a future with mandatory Green Building Ordinances in California and elsewhere, one critical construction component is often overlooked - - site preparation. Toni Renee Vierra, LEED-AP,is Founder and President of eco-Organize LLC. eco-Organize provides green building and business advice to property owners and the building community.
Green at City Scale | GOVERNING Over the past decade, green building has moved out of the fringe and into the mainstream. LEED Gold and Platinum buildings are becoming commonplace in both public and private buildings. Now Portland, Oregon, is going one step further. As part of an evolving "eco-district" policy, city leaders aim to move beyond the design of individual structures to focus on greening entire neighborhoods. The idea is to pool resources among buildings to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy- and water-use efficiency. "Green buildings are pretty far along, but if you really want green cities, you have to look at whole systems," says Eric Ridenour, an associate with SERA Architects. At first glance, the eco-district framework, outlined in an eight-page city document, reads like a rehash of Sustainability 101: yet another plan to create green jobs, encourage smart growth and catalyze renewable energy development. Portland isn't the only city scaling up its green-building practices.
Marketing firm helping to green companies--and their images, too | Tech news blog - CNET News.com This post was updated at 11:55 a.m. PDT to better describe the scope of TCG's work. It was also updated at 12:52 p.m. The Communication Group, a San Francisco-based marketing firm, isn't just about touting its clients' environmental friendliness. The firm, also known as TCG, is helping corporations take their first green steps through what it calls its Green Prepare program, a 12-step process for companies to become greener. In the first stage of the Green Prepare program, a TCG consultant does a walk-through of a client's office or workplace and comes up with 12 steps for sparing the environment. When the company has completed 6 of the 12 steps, it signs TCG's "Blue Step Promise" to strive to complete the rest and is awarded a certificate and logo in return that the company can then display. The idea is that the Green Prepare program might also serve as the first step for corporations that want to become green-certified through other regional programs, Munn said. Livermore, Calif.
With Investment, Millions of Blue and White Collars Can Be Turned Green OAKLAND, Calif. — Building a green economy has the potential to affect millions of workers in occupations throughout the country, and a new report highlights some of those jobs than can be transformed, with the right investment, into green jobs. The Job Opportunities for the Green Economy report looks at six investments areas, then shows at the current states of jobs in each area. In total the report shows how 45 occupations employing more than 14 million people across the country can be boosted through investments in green measures. The report is not an exhaustive list of all green investments or green jobs, but is meant to give a snapshot of a few possible green jobs, said one of the authors, Robert Pollin, Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts-Amherst. "We all know that we have to build a green economy. "The jobs are real, the jobs are there," said Marco Trbovich, assistant to the president of the United Steelworkers of America.
Why Obama's green jobs plan might work HEMLOCK, MICH. — While Detroit's automakers struggle to rebuild their sputtering operations, the key to jump-starting Michigan's economy may lie 80 miles northwest of the Motor City. This is the home of Hemlock Semiconductor Corp. It makes a material crucial for constructing photovoltaic panels. On Dec. 15, the same week that General Motors Corp. and Chrysler begged $17.4 billion from taxpayers to stave off collapse, Hemlock announced a $3-billion expansion that could create hundreds of jobs. In contrast to Detroit iron, Hemlock's quartz-based polycrystalline silicon is in such demand that workers in white smocks and protective gear toil around the clock to get it to customers around the globe. Hemlock has been deluged with applications from idle factory hands such as former autoworker Don Sloboda. "It looks like the future to me," Sloboda said. Whether clean energy can pull Michigan out of the ditch remains to be seen. Americans have heard it before.
Certified Green Neighborhoods LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) has become the standard certification system for green architecture in the United States - and the organisation that oversees LEED ratings, the US Green Building Council, is growing by leaps and bounds as architects and developers catch on to the fact that LEED-certified buildings fetch higher rents and incur lower operating costs. As LEED becomes more popular, though, it is also attracting more criticism: its objective, point-based rating systems largely ignore differences in regional environments and assign equal point values to building technologies that vary widely in their costs and beneficial impacts. Also, LEED ratings typically assign little value to a building's site context: many LEED-certified buildings (including Maine's first Platinum-level LEED home in Freeport, at right) have been built in automobile-dependent rural hinterlands, creating instances of "green" suburban sprawl.
Passivhaus Institut How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get It Back | Environment May 13, 2008 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The following is excerpted from Has it ever occurred to you just how odd it is that we know so little about what we eat? The absurdity of this situation struck me about ten years ago. I began to wonder, were these the berries and eggs that I bought? Each product, I realized, was the culmination of some hidden story that I -- and most of my fellow shoppers -- had never bothered to consider. I was just starting to grasp that choices I made about what to buy in the supermarket had punch and bite -- in real places and in real people's lives.Yet when I shopped, these matters had rarely before come to mind. Now I started to wonder: Why did I consider some things but not others? That's what this book is about. The answers to my questions, I looked to history. In seeking to understand this drift toward indifference, I found an important clue in the work of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Turning Your Lawn into a Victory Garden Won't Save You - Fighting the Corporations Will June 22, 2008 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. I didn't mean to lead anyone down the garden path. Don't get me wrong: Growing food just outside your front or back door is an extraordinarily good idea, and if it's done without soil erosion or toxic chemicals, I can think of no downside. So it was in 2005 that our family volunteered our front lawn to be converted into the first in a now-expanding chain of " Edible Estates," the brainchild of Los Angeles architect/artist Fritz Haeg. Our perennials and annuals are thriving, we've gotten a lot of publicity, and I've been talking about the project for almost three years. World cropland: the pie is mostly crust The edible-landscaping trend is catching on across the country, and with food prices rising, it has taking sadly predictable turns. That's because the mainstays of home gardening -- vegetables and fruits -- are not the foundation of the human diet or of world agriculture.
What is the Leopold Center? Frequently Asked Questions Funding and Support Celebrating Our 25-year Anniversary View timeline of Leopold Center's 25-year history Proceedings from Our 10-year Anniversary What difference are we making? The Leopold Center is a research and education center on the campus of Iowa State University created to identify and reduce negative environmental and social impacts of farming and develop new ways to farm profitably while conserving natural resources. The Center's work is focused in four initiatives - ecology, marketing and food systems, policy and cross-cutting (water, energy, soil and alternative farming systems). Who we are The Center is led by Director Mark Rasmussen and Fred Kirschenmann serves as the Center's Distinguished Fellow. A 17-member advisory board, established in the 1987 legislation, advises the director on funding of research proposals, policies and procedures, budget development and program review. What we do The Leopold Center also has been a catalyst. How to stay in touch