Green Water Infrastructure

Posts Tagged ‘sustainability’

I recently wrote a guest blog  on Sustainability Starts with Your Landscape for Stefan Lubike the owner of SiteLine Design.

Recognizing sustainability as merely reducing energy waste, recycling, or conserving water is a common misconception. In truth, the greatest impact on the environment you can make is right in your own backyard.

Check out the post

Also check out the great work being done by Stefan and his gang at SiteLine Design.

At a recent TEDxMidwest presentation, Majora Carter (@MajoraCarter) talks about three individual who made a difference in their communities. These three individual who implemented practical solutions to community improverishment issues.

It is time to work together to embrace and repair our land, repair our power systems and repair ourselves. It’s time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures. It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility.”

— Majora Carter

Charity Does Not Equal Sustainability

Chicago

Brenda Palms-Farber was hired to help ex-convicts reenter society and keep them from going back into prison. Currently, taxpayers spend about $60,000 per year sending a person to jail. We know that two-thirds of them are going to go back. I find it interesting that, for every one dollar we spend, however, on early childhood education, like Head Start, we save $17 on stuff like incarceration in the future. Or — think about it — that $60,000 is more than what it costs to send one person to Harvard as well . . .

Los Angeles

Water is a big issue for Los Angeles. On most day Los Angeles does not have enough water and too much to handle when it rains. Currently, 20 percent of California’s energy consumption is used to pump water into mostly Southern California. Their spending loads, loads, to channel that rainwater out into the ocean when it rains and floods as well. Now Andy Lipkis is working to help L.A. cut infrastructure costs associated with water management and urban heat island — linking trees, people and technology to create a more livable city. All that green stuff actually naturally absorbs storm water, also helps cool our cities. Because, come to think about it, do you really want air-conditioning, or is it a cooler room that you want? How you get it shouldn’t make that much of a difference . . .

West Virginia

Judy Bonds is a coal miner’s daughter. Her family has eight generations in a town called Whitesville, West Virginia. If anyone should be clinging to the former glory of the coal mining history, and of the town, it should be Judy. But the way coal is mined right now is different from the deep mines that her father and her father’s father would go down into and that employed essentially thousands and thousands of people. Now, two-dozen men can tear down a mountain in several months, and only for about a few years-worth of coal. That kind of technology is called mountaintop removal. It can make a mountain go from this to this in a few short months. Just imagine that the air surrounding these places — it’s filled with the residue of explosives and coal. When we visited, it gave some of the people we were with this strange little cough after being only there for just a few hours or so — not just miners, but everybody . . .

Tom Barrett has recently announced upcoming speaking engagements for January 9-10, 2011. Please see the video below for more information.

For more information or to register, please go to www.nationalgreencenter.org.

Nature Always Wins from Accent On Business on Vimeo.

Note: If you can’t view the video on this page, please click here.

Although the Senate has decided to delay any legislation that fully addresses some of our most pressing environmental concerns, the recent trip to Washington D.C. was a positive step in accomplishing this goal.  Led by Jesse Kharbanda, Executive Director of the Hoosier Environmental Council, we met with our Congressional delegation and shared with them in person some of our greatest personal and social concerns regarding the environment and the government’s stewardship of these crucial issues.

While there is still a long road to travel as we work to improve and renew our environment, it became abundantly clear that regardless of any partisanship, we seem to want the same thing: a cleaner, healthier environment.   It was important for the delegation to hear that green development is not only environmentally crucial, but that it is also an economically viable form of investment that strengthens the whole nation.

Initially we discussed the importance of pushing a “Cap and Trade” concept forward; it became evident that we needed to address the most immediate pressing environmental issues with lifestyle modifications and alternative energy strategies.  The US currently has the largest per capita carbon footprint of any country in the world putting us behind such emerging powerhouses at India, China, and Brazil. Deciding how to overcome that issue is tantamount, but we must also keep in mind the need to re-emerge as a leader by example as we begin to develop and utilize a more responsible awareness of the by-products of our social conveniences.

Through sweltering heat and suffocating humidity, a diverse group of over 250 business and community leaders  from 25 states descended on Washington, D.C. this past week advocating support for a Clean Energy Bill eager to make its way through the Senate before the August recess in a mere two weeks. The bill, which never made it off the ground, was to be an amalgamation of policies and regulations that would reduce carbon emissions from the atmosphere, prevent oil spills, clean up the environment, and address a plethora of other needs to band-aid our ever deteriorating environment.

The Democratic catch phrase of the week was “Cap and Trade,” a term that sends oil companies, auto companies, coal conglomerates and farmers alike running for cover. The idea is that companies emitting pollutants would be responsible for their unhealthy emissions by paying a fee for any percentage of emissions that rose above a government regulated standard. If companies were unable to reduce their emissions by a certain percentage, they could also “buy” more emission” legroom” from companies that were able to produce less poisonous byproduct and therefore have percentages to trade or sell.

Unfortunately, on a per capita basis, the United States has established itself as the largest producer of carbon emissions. The world needs the United States to reduce her carbon emissions if there is any chance of reducing global warming. If this is the best we can do as a country to clean up our act, we may as well embrace the quagmire of biohazard that our children will inherit because if they make it to adulthood, it is hard to predict what they will recognize as an environmental inheritance.

I have recently been honored with an invitation to join a group of Hoosiers traveling to Washington D.C. this week (July 20-22) to talk with Indiana’s Congressional delegation about the importance of federal climate and energy legislation.

I will be traveling with the Indiana Businesses for a Clean Energy Economy.  The IBCEE will be focused on building support for comprehensive climate and energy legislation on the federal level during their time in Washington D.C.

I’m quite excited to sit down with some of the brightest minds in the sustainability movement. Here is the agenda for our trip:

Wednesday:

10:30 am – Emily Hayden (Ellsworth)

12:30 pm – Nathan Bennett (Carson)

2:00 pm – David Bond (Hill)

3:00 pm – Senator Richard Lugar (himself)

3:15 pm – Rep. Pete Visclosky (himself)

Thursday:

11:00 am – Neil Brown (Lugar)

1:00 pm – Scott Morrison (Bayh)

3:00 pm – Andy Boland (Donnelly)