I nearly stopped feeding the birds after being greeted in my yard by a particularly loud cardinal singing overtop hundreds of other avian creatures on a March day where the mercury rose close to 80.
Whether that particular bird sang for a mate, I do not know. Frankly, I'm not 100 percent sure the practically glowing red bird was a cardinal, because by the time I got my wife's attention to bring the binoculars, it had flown.
It remained brightly at the edge of my vision while perched. The information coming from heights of the tree on my neighbor's property reached my ears better than my eyes.
Whatever it was, the bird had a long, loud and persistent call for those minutes. It sang like I've never heard.
The effect of all the songs arrested me in mid dog walk. I don't think I've ever noticed as many calls before, not even in the deepest depth of woods.
The same day, not wanting to get behind in the yard any more than I already am, I grabbed my shovel to work on one of my many earthmoving projects.
Beginning as more cleanup of one of last year's projects than anything else, I still threw dirt around for several hours, not only moving dirt so that it sloped away from my foundation, but also trying to step down the hillside for eventual planting.
I had lots of little companions.
My basket-shaped birdfeeder stood on its shepherd's crook at the corner of the house, and persistent little goldfinches kept swooping down on it.
The farther I moved from the feeder, the more they came — wearing their duller winter colors, drab grey with streaks of white and black.
In summer, goldfinches remind me of escaped parakeets, having molted and grown vivid yellow feathers back. They're not called goldfinches for nothing.
I see a lot of goldfinches year round. Members of this species best realized that my plantings of sunflowers and allowing volunteer thistles to grow in spring and summer came from my desire to benefit wildlife. And goldfinches similarly started descending first to eat the sunflower seeds that I filled up my one feeder with.
For weeks, I saw no reason to feed the birds this winter until the temperature dropped to the teens and stayed there.
Slate-sided juncos joined goldfinches on the ground under the feeder at first. They disappeared and left mostly finches and a few common sparrows.
While digging there, I noticed my shovel turned up a profusion of worms. I figured that with the almost "summery" days and with more food becoming available soon, that it was okay just to let the birds peck the last few seeds out of the feeder and call it a season.
Well, an online link to eNature.com sent to me from the National Wildlife Federation arrived in my inbox just in time to tell me that I couldn't be more wrong.
"March is the most difficult month of the year for birds to find adequate food to survive winter in most of North America," the article said. "That’s because the supplies of natural food....last year’s seeds, fruits, berries and insect eggs and larvae...are at their lowest levels after months of birds feeding on them."
All of last year's seeds and berries have been eaten by this time, it goes on to say. I can confirm that in my yard — with birds having to compete for food not only with each other, but also with deer that consumed berries on my holly shrubs by starting with the leaves and branches and chewing every morsel off right to the stem. Little if any food is left.
So armed with the correct information, I've happily filled my birdfeeder several times since and watched as finches flocked to it. Too many for the seeds supply, in fact, so I've also scattered some on the ground, too.
I'm going to have to stop being so measured in putting out birdseed and show greater empathy for the creatures in their toughest month of the year.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Making of a LEEDer
Builders dedicating green structures will reap rewards while minimum-effort developers will pay the price in Portland, Ore., under a new sustainable building proposal.
Officials in the West Coast metropolis (formerly nicknamed as Stumptown for its active timber sector) want to green new large-scale developments through a system of fees and rebates based on attainment of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards, also known as LEED, according to sustainablebusiness.com
Developers working on sizable commercial projects could, under this proposal, put up new structures to merely satisfy the minimum Oregon building code, the article states. But those who only meet minimums like that would have to pay a fee to the city of up to $3.46 per square foot in the building.
As this so-called "feebate" structure would apply to commercial buildings of more than 20,000 square feet, the costs of those bare minimum improvements would prove a significant financial penalty for the developer.
A commercial building at 20,000 square feet would tack another $69,200 to the project under this program.
However, developers that go the extra mile and get levels of LEED certification on their buildings could have the fees waived or even get a rebate for earning the highest efficiency ratings for the facilities, the article says.
Those that install enough features like on-site renewable energy generation, water-efficient landscaping, controls on the heat-island effect or light pollution, use certified renewable lumber, choose suitable land and earn enough points on the LEED scorecard to reach the second tier of certification, or silver, won't have to pay extra fees.
And those developers who earn the gold or platinum LEED certification would get a financial reward from Portland, described as rebates ranging from $1.73 to $17.30 per square foot.
Multifamily residential developments would face similar disincentives for taking the easy route in construction and similar incentives for building better than required.
There rebates could range from 51 cents to $5.15 per square foot, depending on LEED ratings.
Portland officials would like to see a green revolution in single-family homes too.
The proposal states the city would set a goal of 20 percent of new home construction that earn LEED certifications in 2009.
If that goal isn't met — and if the number of new homes with LEED ratings doesn't jump again to 40 percent in 2011 — the city will apply the same feebate system as on commercial structures to residential homes.
Officials from Portland, which has adopted the motto "The City that Works," told Sustainable Business they expected the fees gathered from underperforming buildings would pay for the rebates to the certified LEED buildings.
Still in public hearing mode on the proposals, the reactions have been overwhelmingly supportive, the article says.
"About half the respondents in a public comment period think the policy is appropriate for the city," it quotes an official from the city's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. "Another 40 percent say it's not stringent enough, and about 10 percent don't support the policy. "
The motivation to implement the incentives comes from the fact that Portland cannot enforce building codes more stringent that Oregon's.
LEED ratings come from the U.S. Green Building Council, and participation is voluntary.
The council calls LEED standards "the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green building."
LEED, they say, "promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality."
Making LEED certification more attractive to the mainstream not just the "greenies" through incentives serves as Portland's real innovation here.
Earning rebates or avoiding fees will make more developers cognizant of LEED building practices and increase the program's everyday relevance.
That's makes Portland a real leader in terms of sustainable development.
More cities should consider following the feebate path that Portland has blazed.
Officials in the West Coast metropolis (formerly nicknamed as Stumptown for its active timber sector) want to green new large-scale developments through a system of fees and rebates based on attainment of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards, also known as LEED, according to sustainablebusiness.com
Developers working on sizable commercial projects could, under this proposal, put up new structures to merely satisfy the minimum Oregon building code, the article states. But those who only meet minimums like that would have to pay a fee to the city of up to $3.46 per square foot in the building.
As this so-called "feebate" structure would apply to commercial buildings of more than 20,000 square feet, the costs of those bare minimum improvements would prove a significant financial penalty for the developer.
A commercial building at 20,000 square feet would tack another $69,200 to the project under this program.
However, developers that go the extra mile and get levels of LEED certification on their buildings could have the fees waived or even get a rebate for earning the highest efficiency ratings for the facilities, the article says.
Those that install enough features like on-site renewable energy generation, water-efficient landscaping, controls on the heat-island effect or light pollution, use certified renewable lumber, choose suitable land and earn enough points on the LEED scorecard to reach the second tier of certification, or silver, won't have to pay extra fees.
And those developers who earn the gold or platinum LEED certification would get a financial reward from Portland, described as rebates ranging from $1.73 to $17.30 per square foot.
Multifamily residential developments would face similar disincentives for taking the easy route in construction and similar incentives for building better than required.
There rebates could range from 51 cents to $5.15 per square foot, depending on LEED ratings.
Portland officials would like to see a green revolution in single-family homes too.
The proposal states the city would set a goal of 20 percent of new home construction that earn LEED certifications in 2009.
If that goal isn't met — and if the number of new homes with LEED ratings doesn't jump again to 40 percent in 2011 — the city will apply the same feebate system as on commercial structures to residential homes.
Officials from Portland, which has adopted the motto "The City that Works," told Sustainable Business they expected the fees gathered from underperforming buildings would pay for the rebates to the certified LEED buildings.
Still in public hearing mode on the proposals, the reactions have been overwhelmingly supportive, the article says.
"About half the respondents in a public comment period think the policy is appropriate for the city," it quotes an official from the city's Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. "Another 40 percent say it's not stringent enough, and about 10 percent don't support the policy. "
The motivation to implement the incentives comes from the fact that Portland cannot enforce building codes more stringent that Oregon's.
LEED ratings come from the U.S. Green Building Council, and participation is voluntary.
The council calls LEED standards "the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green building."
LEED, they say, "promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality."
Making LEED certification more attractive to the mainstream not just the "greenies" through incentives serves as Portland's real innovation here.
Earning rebates or avoiding fees will make more developers cognizant of LEED building practices and increase the program's everyday relevance.
That's makes Portland a real leader in terms of sustainable development.
More cities should consider following the feebate path that Portland has blazed.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Molecular fields forever
You may have heard that green is the new black, but did you know carbon as the new cash crop alongside corn or beans?
Maybe, if the farmers can get paid for burying — but not growing — greenhouse gas emissions.
Agricultural researchers see potential for sequestration in both soil and in waters of wetlands.
Even now, scientists are conducting experiments to find out if wetlands grown with cattails and other plants can provide the world some breathing room from global warming by capturing carbon dioxide under dirt and water.
U.S. Geological Survey have a lot of information posted about their efforts in California's Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to trap the gas, as well as stop land subsidence.
Robin Miller, who has the very cool title of biogeochemist with the geological survey, explains it pretty well at http://www.usgs.gov/corecast/details.asp?ep=68.
"A carbon-capture farm is a wetland built specifically to grow very productive emergent marsh vegetation, in our case, cattails and tules that use photosynthesis to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and put it into their plant tissue," he said.
Normal farming methods on the delta for the last 100 years has stripped the land of its soil, Miller added. Farmers drained the fields to grow corn and other row crops.
Exposure of the soil infused more oxygen into it and encouraged microbial growth.
These microbes ate the organic matter in the peat soils.
"And so under traditional farming practices, the islands lose up to an inch of surface elevation a year," Miller continued. "And now many of the islands are subsided more than 20 feet below sea level and the ground water has to be kept even lower than the land surface to grow crops."
In turn, the water tables have dropped substantially, creating pressure on the region's levees.
If the levees broke, the delta would see a salt water intrusion covering the land, creating 20-foot-deep lakes in their place.
This could cause a catastrophic loss in the fresh water supply to Los Angeles and California's important agricultural pursuits, Miller said.
Growing generation after generation of cattails in wetlands could build the land back up, after they die and turn to peat moss. It would take decades, however, to regenerate the soil.
Selling carbon capture credits to an emission intensive industry could provide revenue for the farmer, Miller said. "And although the carbon-credit market is not yet established in California, our hope is that carbon farms will be able to sell their credits and make money, essentially replacing conventional farming in the Delta with carbon-capture farming."
California Department of Water Resources has given a $12.3 million grant to fund the 400-acre wetlands plot, partnering with the USGS and the University of California at Davis.
The federal and state agencies had previously partnered on a pilot project at a place known as Twitchell Island in the same area.
During these tests, scientists recorded "elevation gains" of more than 10 inches from 1997 to 2005 "as cattails, tules and other plants grew, died and decomposed.
"The process leaves behind roots and plant remnants that compact into a material similar to what formed the peat soils initially," a press release about the wetlands farming project says.
These could be considered passive carbon farms — there are ideas out there for more aggressive pollution controls through wetlands.
Such "marsh farms" could address the problems caused by excess nitrates, which come from fertilizers used to grow grains, according to Science News Online.
"Cities and farms throughout the upper Midwest provide a large share of the nitrate pollution responsible for the annual creation of a huge zone of oxygen-starved water—the so-called Gulf dead zone—1,000 miles downstream in the Gulf of Mexico," the article stated.
The problem causing nitrogen can be removed from the waters by bacterial found in wetlands, helping to prevent the dreaded dead in the oceans from growing larger.
Where carbon capture by wetlands could be a fairly low-tech business, nitrogen would require more intensive engineering and monitoring, Science News' information indicates.
But it's effective, at least for a time, as shown by the results of a test done by research Amy Poe at the University of North Carolina. A built-from-scratch 12-acre marsh handled about 50 percent of the nitrates washed off of a 2,200 acres of corn and beans for about three years.
Hopefully, a system of economic rewards can be developed to reward farmers for returning the land to this natural and important kind of productivity.
While the harvest might be more abstract, it's no less important than the air that we breathe.
Maybe, if the farmers can get paid for burying — but not growing — greenhouse gas emissions.
Agricultural researchers see potential for sequestration in both soil and in waters of wetlands.
Even now, scientists are conducting experiments to find out if wetlands grown with cattails and other plants can provide the world some breathing room from global warming by capturing carbon dioxide under dirt and water.
U.S. Geological Survey have a lot of information posted about their efforts in California's Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to trap the gas, as well as stop land subsidence.
Robin Miller, who has the very cool title of biogeochemist with the geological survey, explains it pretty well at http://www.usgs.gov/corecast/details.asp?ep=68.
"A carbon-capture farm is a wetland built specifically to grow very productive emergent marsh vegetation, in our case, cattails and tules that use photosynthesis to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and put it into their plant tissue," he said.
Normal farming methods on the delta for the last 100 years has stripped the land of its soil, Miller added. Farmers drained the fields to grow corn and other row crops.
Exposure of the soil infused more oxygen into it and encouraged microbial growth.
These microbes ate the organic matter in the peat soils.
"And so under traditional farming practices, the islands lose up to an inch of surface elevation a year," Miller continued. "And now many of the islands are subsided more than 20 feet below sea level and the ground water has to be kept even lower than the land surface to grow crops."
In turn, the water tables have dropped substantially, creating pressure on the region's levees.
If the levees broke, the delta would see a salt water intrusion covering the land, creating 20-foot-deep lakes in their place.
This could cause a catastrophic loss in the fresh water supply to Los Angeles and California's important agricultural pursuits, Miller said.
Growing generation after generation of cattails in wetlands could build the land back up, after they die and turn to peat moss. It would take decades, however, to regenerate the soil.
Selling carbon capture credits to an emission intensive industry could provide revenue for the farmer, Miller said. "And although the carbon-credit market is not yet established in California, our hope is that carbon farms will be able to sell their credits and make money, essentially replacing conventional farming in the Delta with carbon-capture farming."
California Department of Water Resources has given a $12.3 million grant to fund the 400-acre wetlands plot, partnering with the USGS and the University of California at Davis.
The federal and state agencies had previously partnered on a pilot project at a place known as Twitchell Island in the same area.
During these tests, scientists recorded "elevation gains" of more than 10 inches from 1997 to 2005 "as cattails, tules and other plants grew, died and decomposed.
"The process leaves behind roots and plant remnants that compact into a material similar to what formed the peat soils initially," a press release about the wetlands farming project says.
These could be considered passive carbon farms — there are ideas out there for more aggressive pollution controls through wetlands.
Such "marsh farms" could address the problems caused by excess nitrates, which come from fertilizers used to grow grains, according to Science News Online.
"Cities and farms throughout the upper Midwest provide a large share of the nitrate pollution responsible for the annual creation of a huge zone of oxygen-starved water—the so-called Gulf dead zone—1,000 miles downstream in the Gulf of Mexico," the article stated.
The problem causing nitrogen can be removed from the waters by bacterial found in wetlands, helping to prevent the dreaded dead in the oceans from growing larger.
Where carbon capture by wetlands could be a fairly low-tech business, nitrogen would require more intensive engineering and monitoring, Science News' information indicates.
But it's effective, at least for a time, as shown by the results of a test done by research Amy Poe at the University of North Carolina. A built-from-scratch 12-acre marsh handled about 50 percent of the nitrates washed off of a 2,200 acres of corn and beans for about three years.
Hopefully, a system of economic rewards can be developed to reward farmers for returning the land to this natural and important kind of productivity.
While the harvest might be more abstract, it's no less important than the air that we breathe.
Overhead savings
The solution to urban heat island effects may well be over peoples' heads, I would say.
That is to say, their roofs.
Good candidates for lowering temperatures and energy costs in the built environment of towns and cities come in the form of flat roof structures, such as schools, big box superstores and traditional urban buildings like those found in downtown Hillsville and Galax and the core of larger cities across the country and the world.
Black tar roofs — sealed to keep out water leaks — also absorb the heat from the sun's rays and can at times make the roof temperature almost boiling hot.
A cost effective solution, for both new construction and roof replacement, is to choose the "cool roof" option.
What it amounts to is creating a more reflective, i.e. white, roof surface with the goal of cutting down solar heat gain.
The Environmental Protection Agency says while the reflective roofing systems costs about the same, they can lower energy usage in a building by about 10 percent.
Right here in Virginia, an Energy Star roof replacement project at Jefferson Houston Elementary School in Alexandria showed the electricity saving possibilities.
When replacing the roof on the school built in 1970, administrators realized that a reflective roof could cut down on cooling costs, especially as the mercury in summer typically rises to 100 degrees in the eastern Virginia locality.
The old surface on the 83,000-square-foot facility was replaced in the 1990s with — to use the jargon — a white ethylene propylene single-ply membrane as part of a more insulated and reflective roofing system.
"The reflectivity of the new roof, compared with the old roof, increased from less than 20 percent to 78 percent," said the case study.
The insulation value of the roofing was doubled at the same time to stop the heat gathered at the surface from raising the temperature inside the school.
While the cost of the cool roof was "no higher," the school started seeing immediate savings after the installation was finished.
The total cost of the replacement came to $330,000, or about $3.87 per square foot, the EPA said. The electricity costs for the year fell by $31,000, or 37 cents per square foot.
Electricity savings totaled a whopping 514,000 kilowatts for that one elementary school for the year.
That's a reduction of more than 1.2 million tons in carbon dioxide emissions, equal to taking about 122 cars off the roads, according to the EPA information.
"These savings are due to both greatly reduced electric power demand and lower electric energy consumption," the case study said.
On top of that, the school saw these electricity use reductions despite adding to the square footage of the facility by enclosing an interior courtyard and turning it into classrooms.
"The white EP membrane accounted for approximately 30 percent of the realized savings," said the EPA. "Based on their energy-saving potential and ease of installation, white, reflective, single-ply membrane materials have become the roofing product of choice for Alexandria City Public Schools."
With that good introduction to energy efficiency as a starting point, the school also received further upgrades to lights and air conditioning and heating systems and a new energy management system, the EPA added. These improvements combined with the new roof cut the school's electricity usage by a total of half.
Sunny California has long known the benefits of reflective roofs, seeing the systems as not only relief from the heat but as a way to stretch the available power supply and prevent electricity shortages in the summertime, according to a California Energy Commission news release dating back to 2002.
Peak temperatures can range from 150 to 190 degrees at the surface of a traditional roof, but the temperature on a cool roof can be on average 50 to 60 degrees lower.
Other benefits touted by the CEC include: extended life of air conditioning units due to less cycling and operations; improved comfort for workers in buildings and on the roof; and reduced air temperatures surrounding the cool building, lessening the heat island effect.
So, it seems there are considerable opportunities to save on overhead electricity costs and some continuing maintenance simply by installing a white tinted roof.
As building continues and as rooftop surfaces in cities expand, the benefits to installing cool roofs should accrue.
The Heat Island Group, at http://eande.lbl.gov/HeatIsland/CoolRoofs/, conducted a study in 11 cities to estimate the net savings by using the reflective roofs, for example.
Considering both summer cooling savings and increasing needs for heating in winter, this study still found the Windy City of Chicago with its winter chill saw decreased power costs in the seven figure range.
Hot spots savings were considerably more, of course. The study calculated the impact of white roofs in Los Angeles to total $35 million a year, $37 million in Phoenix, $27 million in Houston and $20 million in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
Heat Island Group took these findings and expanded them to forecast nationwide savings, which the researchers said came to $750 million worth of energy reductions a year.
All this means that there's abundant acreage overhead that could be tapped to lessen the impact of our buildings on the environment.
That is to say, their roofs.
Good candidates for lowering temperatures and energy costs in the built environment of towns and cities come in the form of flat roof structures, such as schools, big box superstores and traditional urban buildings like those found in downtown Hillsville and Galax and the core of larger cities across the country and the world.
Black tar roofs — sealed to keep out water leaks — also absorb the heat from the sun's rays and can at times make the roof temperature almost boiling hot.
A cost effective solution, for both new construction and roof replacement, is to choose the "cool roof" option.
What it amounts to is creating a more reflective, i.e. white, roof surface with the goal of cutting down solar heat gain.
The Environmental Protection Agency says while the reflective roofing systems costs about the same, they can lower energy usage in a building by about 10 percent.
Right here in Virginia, an Energy Star roof replacement project at Jefferson Houston Elementary School in Alexandria showed the electricity saving possibilities.
When replacing the roof on the school built in 1970, administrators realized that a reflective roof could cut down on cooling costs, especially as the mercury in summer typically rises to 100 degrees in the eastern Virginia locality.
The old surface on the 83,000-square-foot facility was replaced in the 1990s with — to use the jargon — a white ethylene propylene single-ply membrane as part of a more insulated and reflective roofing system.
"The reflectivity of the new roof, compared with the old roof, increased from less than 20 percent to 78 percent," said the case study.
The insulation value of the roofing was doubled at the same time to stop the heat gathered at the surface from raising the temperature inside the school.
While the cost of the cool roof was "no higher," the school started seeing immediate savings after the installation was finished.
The total cost of the replacement came to $330,000, or about $3.87 per square foot, the EPA said. The electricity costs for the year fell by $31,000, or 37 cents per square foot.
Electricity savings totaled a whopping 514,000 kilowatts for that one elementary school for the year.
That's a reduction of more than 1.2 million tons in carbon dioxide emissions, equal to taking about 122 cars off the roads, according to the EPA information.
"These savings are due to both greatly reduced electric power demand and lower electric energy consumption," the case study said.
On top of that, the school saw these electricity use reductions despite adding to the square footage of the facility by enclosing an interior courtyard and turning it into classrooms.
"The white EP membrane accounted for approximately 30 percent of the realized savings," said the EPA. "Based on their energy-saving potential and ease of installation, white, reflective, single-ply membrane materials have become the roofing product of choice for Alexandria City Public Schools."
With that good introduction to energy efficiency as a starting point, the school also received further upgrades to lights and air conditioning and heating systems and a new energy management system, the EPA added. These improvements combined with the new roof cut the school's electricity usage by a total of half.
Sunny California has long known the benefits of reflective roofs, seeing the systems as not only relief from the heat but as a way to stretch the available power supply and prevent electricity shortages in the summertime, according to a California Energy Commission news release dating back to 2002.
Peak temperatures can range from 150 to 190 degrees at the surface of a traditional roof, but the temperature on a cool roof can be on average 50 to 60 degrees lower.
Other benefits touted by the CEC include: extended life of air conditioning units due to less cycling and operations; improved comfort for workers in buildings and on the roof; and reduced air temperatures surrounding the cool building, lessening the heat island effect.
So, it seems there are considerable opportunities to save on overhead electricity costs and some continuing maintenance simply by installing a white tinted roof.
As building continues and as rooftop surfaces in cities expand, the benefits to installing cool roofs should accrue.
The Heat Island Group, at http://eande.lbl.gov/HeatIsland/CoolRoofs/, conducted a study in 11 cities to estimate the net savings by using the reflective roofs, for example.
Considering both summer cooling savings and increasing needs for heating in winter, this study still found the Windy City of Chicago with its winter chill saw decreased power costs in the seven figure range.
Hot spots savings were considerably more, of course. The study calculated the impact of white roofs in Los Angeles to total $35 million a year, $37 million in Phoenix, $27 million in Houston and $20 million in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
Heat Island Group took these findings and expanded them to forecast nationwide savings, which the researchers said came to $750 million worth of energy reductions a year.
All this means that there's abundant acreage overhead that could be tapped to lessen the impact of our buildings on the environment.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Softening the urban fabric
Cities are hard places.
While Destiny, Fla., Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and to an extent tornado ravaged Greensburg, Kan., are about designing green communities from scratch, the larger challenge for the globe is making the existing metropolises environmentally friendly.
After all, if we make every new development from now on greenhouse gas-neutral, the pollution causing and energy intensive urban jungles will still continue to generate their Industrial Age problems.
It's not enough to just build communities correctly from here out — the environmental degradation created by all those hard surfaces in cities will continue unabated unless people start addressing them right away.
As cities built up and suburbs annexed farms and forests, planners and developers merely repeated a pattern that worked.
But now the diminishing returns are becoming more and more apparent.
Look at the building blocks of development: Concrete, steel, glass, asphalt.
To make a city block, architects, engineers, planners, developers, investors and laborers collaborate to — with various degrees of exigency — slather the place with tons of these impervious materials.
And the result is heat islands, unclean waters, unproductive earth, tense people and a general hostility to the natural order of things.
The key to solving the environmental pressures of the world is not abandoning our existing cities, giving them up as lost, shaking our heads, bowing out, humiliated by the short-sightedness, moving out and never looking back.
The key is softening the concrete and glass landscape, reversing their detrimental effects, taking better advantage of the untapped possibilities.
Fortunately, that also gives humanity plenty of opportunities to improve our cities, because practically every factor of development has been used and abused.
So I, a thoroughly unqualified but enthusiastic and curious civilian, will state a number of simple ideas whenever they occur to me to try and reverse the trend and reclaim the cities in terms of sensible and sustainable development.
While Destiny, Fla., Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and to an extent tornado ravaged Greensburg, Kan., are about designing green communities from scratch, the larger challenge for the globe is making the existing metropolises environmentally friendly.
After all, if we make every new development from now on greenhouse gas-neutral, the pollution causing and energy intensive urban jungles will still continue to generate their Industrial Age problems.
It's not enough to just build communities correctly from here out — the environmental degradation created by all those hard surfaces in cities will continue unabated unless people start addressing them right away.
As cities built up and suburbs annexed farms and forests, planners and developers merely repeated a pattern that worked.
But now the diminishing returns are becoming more and more apparent.
Look at the building blocks of development: Concrete, steel, glass, asphalt.
To make a city block, architects, engineers, planners, developers, investors and laborers collaborate to — with various degrees of exigency — slather the place with tons of these impervious materials.
And the result is heat islands, unclean waters, unproductive earth, tense people and a general hostility to the natural order of things.
The key to solving the environmental pressures of the world is not abandoning our existing cities, giving them up as lost, shaking our heads, bowing out, humiliated by the short-sightedness, moving out and never looking back.
The key is softening the concrete and glass landscape, reversing their detrimental effects, taking better advantage of the untapped possibilities.
Fortunately, that also gives humanity plenty of opportunities to improve our cities, because practically every factor of development has been used and abused.
So I, a thoroughly unqualified but enthusiastic and curious civilian, will state a number of simple ideas whenever they occur to me to try and reverse the trend and reclaim the cities in terms of sensible and sustainable development.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Rising to the top
If innovation is the key to correcting environmental wrongs, then maybe some scientists featured on Discovery's Project Earth have found the answers.
I only got to see one of the series that profiled eight different engineering and scientific experiments to address the planet's ailments, but the hour-long episode left an impression.
It was entitled "Hungry Ocean" and featured a 1,000-foot, wave-powered pump meant to encourage phytoplankton blooms, as the Discovery Channel's website explains.
This would help fight climate change, according to the scientists, including Brian von Herzen of the Climate Foundation, and oceanographers David Karl of the University of Hawaii and Ricardo Letelier of Oregon State University.
Blooms of the tiny living organism would absorb carbon as part of its life cycle, the show explained. When plankton died and sank, it would effectively trap the carbon at the bottom of the ocean.
The role of the pump was to bring up water near the ocean floor already chockfull of necessary nutrients to support plankton, to feed the living stuff and encourage its growth.
These methods were in contrast to other experiments that added iron to the oceans to spark those blooms.
The genius of the ocean pumps is that — as long as they remained intact — they would not require chemicals to go into the water that weren't there already.
They got their energy to pump from natural tides of the ocean, so there weren't any moving engine parts or necessary fuel consumption.
A buoy would float near the ocean surface and the tube would act like a drinking straw to pull up nutrient-rich waters from the depths.
Set up near Oahu, the pumps would take advantage of the abundant oceans to take carbon dioxide out of the global warming equation.
Oceans make up just about three-quarters of the earth’s surface, and Discovery called them “the most important carbon sink" around:
"They have the potential to lock away 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere. Every day, tiny microbes called phytoplankton convert millions of tons of carbon dioxide into living matter."
Though plankton makes up only about 1 percent of the planet's biomass, the living organisms take in "as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as trees, grass and all the land plants combined."
Carbon molecules absorbed by plankton could remain trapped for thousands of years after it falls to the ocean bottom, the experiment notes say.
But the experiment seems even more important with the consideration that plankton appears to be dying off. Researchers attributed that die-off to changes due to climate change, as well.
"Between 1999 and 2004, it killed off 30 percent of the phytoplankton in some parts of the world," according to Discovery. "One of the effects of the oceans warming up, is that they are mixing less and nutrients aren't always getting to the surface."
The pipes could not only increase plankton population, but many kinds of sea life could flourish from higher concentrations of the organism because it is one of the most important links in the food chain.
At the end of the show, scientists found that many kinds of life for which plankton was the main source of nourishment had returned to the area where sea pumps were installed.
While the tubes ultimately stopped functioning due to failed welds, scientists and the show proved the concept worked — that circulating the ocean water better encouraged plankton growth.
The possibilities in restoring life to dead waters alone seems to me enough benefit to continue the experiment, and it appears to open up a new front in the battle against climate change.
This is important because the scientific community has set off alarm bells, in that innovation will be an integral part of the solution, going hand in hand with a reduction in use of fossil fuels.
Maybe the invention that solves the climate crisis isn't ocean pumps, but it does make me wonder what will rise to the top, what will make the cut and become the must-have tool to fight pollution.
And, perhaps more important for us couch jockeys, will there be a television show to chronicle its development?
But it won't just take scientists to end the massive waste and bad practices that's caused pollution.
Even landlubbers can participate and become part of the solution through everyday activities.
Government officials and researchers promote wetland farming as having multiple benefits in improving water quality, protecting habitat and removing carbon from the atmosphere.
For more information, see next week's column.
I only got to see one of the series that profiled eight different engineering and scientific experiments to address the planet's ailments, but the hour-long episode left an impression.
It was entitled "Hungry Ocean" and featured a 1,000-foot, wave-powered pump meant to encourage phytoplankton blooms, as the Discovery Channel's website explains.
This would help fight climate change, according to the scientists, including Brian von Herzen of the Climate Foundation, and oceanographers David Karl of the University of Hawaii and Ricardo Letelier of Oregon State University.
Blooms of the tiny living organism would absorb carbon as part of its life cycle, the show explained. When plankton died and sank, it would effectively trap the carbon at the bottom of the ocean.
The role of the pump was to bring up water near the ocean floor already chockfull of necessary nutrients to support plankton, to feed the living stuff and encourage its growth.
These methods were in contrast to other experiments that added iron to the oceans to spark those blooms.
The genius of the ocean pumps is that — as long as they remained intact — they would not require chemicals to go into the water that weren't there already.
They got their energy to pump from natural tides of the ocean, so there weren't any moving engine parts or necessary fuel consumption.
A buoy would float near the ocean surface and the tube would act like a drinking straw to pull up nutrient-rich waters from the depths.
Set up near Oahu, the pumps would take advantage of the abundant oceans to take carbon dioxide out of the global warming equation.
Oceans make up just about three-quarters of the earth’s surface, and Discovery called them “the most important carbon sink" around:
"They have the potential to lock away 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere. Every day, tiny microbes called phytoplankton convert millions of tons of carbon dioxide into living matter."
Though plankton makes up only about 1 percent of the planet's biomass, the living organisms take in "as much atmospheric carbon dioxide as trees, grass and all the land plants combined."
Carbon molecules absorbed by plankton could remain trapped for thousands of years after it falls to the ocean bottom, the experiment notes say.
But the experiment seems even more important with the consideration that plankton appears to be dying off. Researchers attributed that die-off to changes due to climate change, as well.
"Between 1999 and 2004, it killed off 30 percent of the phytoplankton in some parts of the world," according to Discovery. "One of the effects of the oceans warming up, is that they are mixing less and nutrients aren't always getting to the surface."
The pipes could not only increase plankton population, but many kinds of sea life could flourish from higher concentrations of the organism because it is one of the most important links in the food chain.
At the end of the show, scientists found that many kinds of life for which plankton was the main source of nourishment had returned to the area where sea pumps were installed.
While the tubes ultimately stopped functioning due to failed welds, scientists and the show proved the concept worked — that circulating the ocean water better encouraged plankton growth.
The possibilities in restoring life to dead waters alone seems to me enough benefit to continue the experiment, and it appears to open up a new front in the battle against climate change.
This is important because the scientific community has set off alarm bells, in that innovation will be an integral part of the solution, going hand in hand with a reduction in use of fossil fuels.
Maybe the invention that solves the climate crisis isn't ocean pumps, but it does make me wonder what will rise to the top, what will make the cut and become the must-have tool to fight pollution.
And, perhaps more important for us couch jockeys, will there be a television show to chronicle its development?
But it won't just take scientists to end the massive waste and bad practices that's caused pollution.
Even landlubbers can participate and become part of the solution through everyday activities.
Government officials and researchers promote wetland farming as having multiple benefits in improving water quality, protecting habitat and removing carbon from the atmosphere.
For more information, see next week's column.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Jousting at wind turbines
The fear about birds deaths being generated by wind turbines with their huge blades spinning to create clean energy for the nation is just a lot of empty air.
As the push for safe, clean, non-terror supporting emergent energy sources grows so does apprehension among bird lovers.
I respect the sentiment of wanting to protect winged creatures, and not just birds but also butterflies.
It appears there will be some wildlife conflicts with the admittedly imposing towers. I acknowledge that there will be some bird kills.
And it seems the effect of the vibrations caused by the turbines is even more serious for bats — researchers have noted die-offs in the mammals that never came into contact with the generators. The vibrations were fatal to bats by the animals just flying into the vicinity of the tower.
But to talk about wind turbines as if they will be the main threat to life for birds, a kind of plague on winged wildlife, makes it seem like the worriers are missing some obvious truths.
Probably ever major human undertaking has a negative impact on birds and other kinds of wildlife — impacts that most people are quite willing to turn a blind eye on.
There are reasons in today's society to want to push the panic button in terms of protecting wildlife. Look at the recent report from the Audubon Society that said steep declines have been seen in even the most common birds.
A survey of birds by the nature-watchers had found a "nosedive" in their populations over the last 40 years, as much as 80 percent for some species.
Audubon complied a list of 20 common birds in decline, each of which have seen a 54 percent or greater population loss.
Virginia birds listed as in decline were the Northern Bobwhite, the Loggerhead Shrike, Eastern Meadowlark, the Field Sparrow, the Rusty Blackbird and the American Black Duck.
Audubon laid the blame for these plummeting numbers at the feet of habitat destruction perpetrated by people. There was no mention of wind turbines as being the problem.
And looking at the matter objectively as possible, it's hard to believe even with a proliferation of wind turbines that death-by-blade would even approach the other ways we kill off birds.
Don't believe it? Do what I did and Google the phrase "what kills birds?"
As reliable at the Internet is, the results varied wildly on some numbers of bird fatalities and their causes.
Several results, though, cited a study by Daniel Klem of Muhlenberg College that found windows in our homes, commercial buildings and skyscrapers are much riskier for birds than anything else we do.
Birds flying into the glass die by the hundreds of millions a year, the much-cited study found. The actual number could be from 100 million to close to a billion bird deaths a year.
"Millions of houses and buildings, with their billions of windows, pose a significant threat to birds," as information posted by avian enthusiast David Sibley at http://www.sibleyguides.com/mortality.htm put it. "Birds see the natural habitat mirrored in the glass and fly directly into the window, causing injury and, in 50 percent or more of the cases, death."
But we have created many other ways to kill birds, and while no single cause approaches the number of window strikes, there are hundreds of millions more bird deaths caused by our technology a year, according to figures bandied about the Internet.
Just house cats unleashed on the wild might cause 100 million birds to die a year, though some estimates put it at closer to 500 million.
Collisions with cars and trucks cause an estimated 50 to 100 million bird deaths; pesticides could kill another 67 million; collisions with communication towers could take out four to 10 million a year and collisions with electric lines 174 million.
Nobody knows how many birds deaths that habitat clearing may be responsible for.
In stark contrast, Sibley quotes statistics that wind turbines only kill 33,000 a year. That's less than 100 a day.
Compared to other bird kills, that of wind turbines seems almost statistically insignificant.
True, planners should take precautions to keep the technology from increasing those numbers by carefully considering where they place the turbines.
But I take a dim view of the idea that more wind turbines is Armageddon for birds.
There are plenty of other human behaviors that need correcting with the idea of sparing birds before wind turbines.
Those people objecting to clean energy and trying to stop wind turbine projects for the sake of birds are jousting at windmills.
They could stop every turbine in existence and humans would still be killing birds in the billions.
As the push for safe, clean, non-terror supporting emergent energy sources grows so does apprehension among bird lovers.
I respect the sentiment of wanting to protect winged creatures, and not just birds but also butterflies.
It appears there will be some wildlife conflicts with the admittedly imposing towers. I acknowledge that there will be some bird kills.
And it seems the effect of the vibrations caused by the turbines is even more serious for bats — researchers have noted die-offs in the mammals that never came into contact with the generators. The vibrations were fatal to bats by the animals just flying into the vicinity of the tower.
But to talk about wind turbines as if they will be the main threat to life for birds, a kind of plague on winged wildlife, makes it seem like the worriers are missing some obvious truths.
Probably ever major human undertaking has a negative impact on birds and other kinds of wildlife — impacts that most people are quite willing to turn a blind eye on.
There are reasons in today's society to want to push the panic button in terms of protecting wildlife. Look at the recent report from the Audubon Society that said steep declines have been seen in even the most common birds.
A survey of birds by the nature-watchers had found a "nosedive" in their populations over the last 40 years, as much as 80 percent for some species.
Audubon complied a list of 20 common birds in decline, each of which have seen a 54 percent or greater population loss.
Virginia birds listed as in decline were the Northern Bobwhite, the Loggerhead Shrike, Eastern Meadowlark, the Field Sparrow, the Rusty Blackbird and the American Black Duck.
Audubon laid the blame for these plummeting numbers at the feet of habitat destruction perpetrated by people. There was no mention of wind turbines as being the problem.
And looking at the matter objectively as possible, it's hard to believe even with a proliferation of wind turbines that death-by-blade would even approach the other ways we kill off birds.
Don't believe it? Do what I did and Google the phrase "what kills birds?"
As reliable at the Internet is, the results varied wildly on some numbers of bird fatalities and their causes.
Several results, though, cited a study by Daniel Klem of Muhlenberg College that found windows in our homes, commercial buildings and skyscrapers are much riskier for birds than anything else we do.
Birds flying into the glass die by the hundreds of millions a year, the much-cited study found. The actual number could be from 100 million to close to a billion bird deaths a year.
"Millions of houses and buildings, with their billions of windows, pose a significant threat to birds," as information posted by avian enthusiast David Sibley at http://www.sibleyguides.com/mortality.htm put it. "Birds see the natural habitat mirrored in the glass and fly directly into the window, causing injury and, in 50 percent or more of the cases, death."
But we have created many other ways to kill birds, and while no single cause approaches the number of window strikes, there are hundreds of millions more bird deaths caused by our technology a year, according to figures bandied about the Internet.
Just house cats unleashed on the wild might cause 100 million birds to die a year, though some estimates put it at closer to 500 million.
Collisions with cars and trucks cause an estimated 50 to 100 million bird deaths; pesticides could kill another 67 million; collisions with communication towers could take out four to 10 million a year and collisions with electric lines 174 million.
Nobody knows how many birds deaths that habitat clearing may be responsible for.
In stark contrast, Sibley quotes statistics that wind turbines only kill 33,000 a year. That's less than 100 a day.
Compared to other bird kills, that of wind turbines seems almost statistically insignificant.
True, planners should take precautions to keep the technology from increasing those numbers by carefully considering where they place the turbines.
But I take a dim view of the idea that more wind turbines is Armageddon for birds.
There are plenty of other human behaviors that need correcting with the idea of sparing birds before wind turbines.
Those people objecting to clean energy and trying to stop wind turbine projects for the sake of birds are jousting at windmills.
They could stop every turbine in existence and humans would still be killing birds in the billions.
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