Important note: Foodies can't be Dummies

Please try to keep in mind as you shop this holiday season: Fair Trade doesn't just apply to African villagers and Amazon tribes - it also applies to the folks who grow our food here at home.

An interesting note from a farmer who tried switching from big-breasted flightless corporate turkeys to heritage birds:

Our customers who had eagerly signed up to reserve a heritage bird were not only disappointed about the size, but they also complained about the higher price tag and the noticeable lack of breast meat. So the heritage birds cost 2.5 times the price as chicks, took twice as long to grow out, ate nearly twice the food, and dressed out at half the size. We had to charge $8/lb. and we still made no profits on these birds. What was curiously frustrating was that these self-described foodies still wanted the size and body shape of a hybrid bird, along with a small price tag. Even somebody from a local Slow Food chapter still insists that we should be able to raise heritage turkeys for $4/lb.

That's right. Real food costs more, and doesn't look the same was as crap corporate food (or taste the same way, thank god!)

I've also got a post up over at Ecoble.com about how to live a little greener on Thanksgiving this year... check it out.

Think Green This Thanksgiving

All we have to do this year is look toward Washington, DC, and we've got tons of stuff to be thankful for...

But as we officially enter the season of holiday cheer, holiday shopping and holiday excess, can we all think about the planet, too?

They say that green is the new black, but that doesn't mean you have to get all emo about it. It's possible to be joyful and celebratory - and smart.

10 Great Ways to Green your Thanksgiving

Getting There - Thanksgiving is one of the heaviest travel weekends of the year, and how you choose to get there can make a big difference in your annual carbon footprint. If you’re driving long distances, avoid SUVs and big gas-guzzlers – remember, you can always rent something smaller. Carpooling is also good, although not always an option. And if you’re flying, keep in mind that air miles are about the most damaging mode of travel for the environment. Avoid flying if possible; if you can’t, consider purchasingcarbon offsets from a reliable source.

Set the Scene - Candles are great for creating a warm, homey environment. But paraffin candles are awful for the home environment. They’re made from petrochemicals, they put vaporized parrafin into the air, and they often contain artificial oils and scents that you don’t want your loved ones to be breathing, either. Today, we have better options, made with beeswax and soy wax. Likewise, as you’re buying decorations, think of what’s going to happen to them when the holiday has passed. Try to avoid buying a bunch of paper goods that will go straight into the landfill.

Moderate the Meat - Industrial agricultural poultry farms generate a huge amount of waste; too much to compost (which is how small farms deal with natural by-products in a natural way, returning them to the soil as fertilizer). Instead, all that manure degrades into methane – a greenhouse gas that’s 20 times more potent than CO2. Plus, these birds are pumped full of antibiotics and nasty chemicals to try to keep them healthy in that cramped, hellish environment. This does awful things for the meat – both in terms of nutrients, and in flavor. Go for a free-range organic bird – your taste buds will thank you, as will your arteries. (Or you could try going Vegan…)

Go Local - Transportation is a big part of the CO2 impact of our food. Shipping by water has a modest impact, trucking is pretty bad, and air freight is terrible. Which means that, surprisingly, (ocean-shipped) Peruvian mangoes may have a lower impact than (trucked) Idaho potatoes. Your best bet – buy local. Go down to the farmers market for the most planet-friendly potatoes and yams.

Go Seasonal - Hothouse-grown peppers, tomatoes and lettuce are also not great for the environment – because of the hefty energy used in growing them in cold climates. Think like the Pilgrims, and try to focus on things that grow naturally in your neighborhood this time of year. In the north, that might mean substituting cold-loving crops like spinach, kale and chard instead of a salad.

Go Organic - Industrial agriculature depletes the soil, then uses petrochemical-derived fertilizers to attempt to replenish it. It’s a crazy system that’s accelerating climate change. Organic agriculture, in contrast, actually returns large amounts of carbon to the soil. If all the farms in the US switched to organics, it would be the equivalent of taking millions of cars off the road! Plus, organics are healthier. And your health is always something to be thankful for.

Avoid Packaged Foods - Often, producing and disposing of food packaging takes more energy than it took to grow and process the food in the first place. What can you do about that? Cut back on pre-packaged stuff. Go with fresh local spinach instead of frozen; bake your own pumpkin pie instead of buying one in a plastic clamshell from the market.

Recycle - And of course, make sure the cans, bottles, and packaging you use gets recycled.

Compost - Don’t send your scraps off to a landfill! In that nasty environment, food waste breaks down into methane, which as we’ve noted is a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than CO2. Set up a home composting system; if you can’t, check locally – many cities now have composting programs.

Don’t Say “Yes” to Excess - Don’t go whole hog – or whole turkey. Buy a smaller bird, only make three side dishes instead of six, go for two pies instead of four. You can still eat plenty of food, there will be less waste overall, and when you step on the scale Monday morning, you’ll be able to look at that dial without fear and loathing.

Image credits:

1. Flickr Creative Commons photo by Groovnick
2. Flickr Creative Commons photo by Eschipul
3. Flickr Creative Commons photo by Cyanocorax
4. Flickr Creative Commons photo by NatalieMaynor
5. Flickr Creative Commons photo by KingDesmond1337
6. Flickr Creative Commons photo by Normanack
7. Flickr Creative Commons photo by Darkroom Demons

Paperless Gypsum Board?

(Crossposted at 3rings)

Who wants to breathe mold?

There’s been a growing awareness of indoor air quality, with the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) estimating that 10 percent of Americans are directly allergic to mold.That’s about 30 million people who can potentially be sickened just by walking into a building. Mold is an even bigger concern for at-risk populations, like children (it’s estimated that mold exposure doubles a child’s chance of developing asthma), the elderly, or those already sick.

It turns out mold’s major foothold comes in wallboard, and in particular the organic paper cladding, which in damp environments can provide the perfect home for mold to thrive in. This is why the Oakland children’s hospital went with DensArmor Plus paperless drywall from Georgia Pacific.

Instead of paper, the panels feature a glass-mat surface on both the front and back, plus additional moisture-resistance features. DensArmor Plus® scored a 10, the highest level of performance for mold resistance, under ASTM D 3273 testing.

The panels are recommended for all interior uses, but are especially useful in environments that might be exposed to moisture, including bathrooms, kitchens, and basements, in both residential and commercial settings. And moisture can be a problem anywhere: Georgia Pacific points out that “In today’s tightly sealed structures, inner wall cavities present ideal growth opportunities for mold, simply because of the moisture concentration, the lack of air circulation and the temperature differential from one side of the wall to the other. Thus, mold’s greatest potential for growth is out of sight.”

There are a couple of additional benefits. Because of its low emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), DensArmor Plus® is the first, and so far the only, gypsum drywall to be GREENGUARD Indoor Air Quality Certified®. It also received GREENGUARD Children & Schools Certification, for a product that can help reduce exposure of schoolchildren to indoor air pollutants, which means use of DensArmor Plus® gives LEED certification points two separate ways in school construction.

Another benefit: it’s so moisture-resistant that Georgia Pacific offers a 90-day in-place warranty against exposure damage, meaning wallboard can start going up even before the building is completely closed in. Imagine how much help that can be on a tight construction schedule!

Car Culture and Cul de Sacs

James Howard Kunstler has been one of America's leading curmudgeons for the past 20 years. He was in Vancouver last week, spreading his iconoclastic (or perhaps "autonoclastic") notions that we are at the end of the era he calls "Happy Motoring" and entering the twighlight struggle of "The Long Emergency".

His weekly posts at Clusterfuck Nation are must-reads for anyone who is worried about the current state of America and the world - that is, anyone who has been paying attention.

What's scary about this interview is: It's from 13 years ago. And nothing has changed - the situation has only gotten more critical.

James Howard Kunstler and
The Geography of Nowhere.
Interview with Jeremy Bloom

"Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading...."

Thus, James Howard ("Jimmy") Kunstler begins his new volume, "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-made Landscape." A pithy, gutsy volume that pulls no punches, "Nowhere" develops the idea that the lack of community we feel in America today is, in large measure, because we have failed to build communities.

By looking at how our towns and cities grew - from Long Island to Detroit to Disneyland - Kunstler is doing more than the proverbial "talking about the weather" of our urban environment; he is attempting to do something about it. He points out what he thinks are the mistakes that were made, and also looks to the future with some hopeful changes, some of which are already in motion. It's an important issue: important enough that "The New York Times" has run reviews of "The Geography of Nowhere" in both the Book Review and the regular daily Times, as well as running an Op-ed Page piece by Kunstler.

We chatted with him on a warm summer day, sitting on the wide, carnival-painted porch of his Victorian Saratoga Springs house. Holding a glass of frosty iced tea in one hand, he contemplates the cover of "The Geography of Nowhere," with its pictured vista of Long Island's suburban sprawl.

J.H.K.: I wanted to call the book "Why America is So Fucking Ugly," but my publisher and I settled on "The Geography of Nowhere"

(There's more...)

JB: So we're nowhere, and it's ugly. How did we get here?

J.H.K.: We had an incredible imperial boom from to '50s to the '70s. The Interstate Highway System was going up, everyone was getting a new house with an FHA mortgage. People were making money off this stuff and the horizon seemed limitless. Very few people were thinking of the consequences - and particularly the unforseen repercussions, the hidden costs.

We have done incredible damage to our culture, to our spiritual life in this country, and our civic life. To any notion of the common good.

It boils down to this: we build too many places that are not worth caring about, and we've destroyed our civic life in the process. If we're going to continue to be a viable civilization, we're going to have to build places we can care about - and if we do that, we will enjoy civic life once again.

All these things may seem to be abstractions, but they are no more abstract than, for instance, the concept of justice - which is very important to Americans.

There are some ideals that we are going to have to pay attention to that are different from the ones we've been looking at over the last 20 years.

JB: But this is very abstract and complex: we're talking here of a juxtaposition of questions of natural law, aesthetics, as well as questions of efficiency and economics questions....

J.H.K.: Most people think of this problem only in terms of aesthetics. They drive down some gruesome commercial strip like Central Avenue in Albany, and they go "ewwww, yuck..."

JB: If they notice it at all.

J.H.K.: I think they notice it. And I think they are quite justified in feeling that way. But the outward appearance of our landscape is just a manifestation of deeper problems. And I wanted to find out what they are.

We once had a sense of a community as a functioning, living organism, made up of many other functioning, living things. It's places where people live, where people do business, where people enjoy public gatherings - all these places that used to comprise our civic life.

When we look at these gruesome highway strips and go "yuck" and "bleah,' and our stomachs turn, what it finally comes down to is an apprehension that we have thrown our civic life away, and that's what people feel.

JB: And do you blame the automobile for that loss?

J.H.K.: The automobile has played a very large part in that destructive process, but it's not the only thing. There have been some reviews of the book that have suggested that it is only about the effects of the automobile on the landscape, and that's not true.

(He pauses for a moment, takes a sip of ice tea, gathers his thoughts.)

The troubled townscapes and landscapes that we have created are manifestations of our economic predicament. We have come to the end of a 50-year-long, abnormal war-time boom economy. First it was the hot war economy, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and in between it was the Cold War economy.

From 1945 until the early 70's we could sell any product that we made to any country in the world, because after WWII all the advanced nations were either bankrupt or bombed into ruins.

Japan and Germany weren't going to try selling us cars in the 1950s. But then other countries started to catch up, and in the mid-'70s the Japanese started to successfully compete against our biggest industry: the car industry. Now, the industrial jobs that gave our workers the highest standard of living in the
world are simply gone, and they're not coming back.

So the economy we face in the next 50 years is not going to be the same as it was for the past 50. It is not going to be based on people driving around to the malls buying Guns and Roses posters and plastic trolls.

JB: But how was the "destruction of our civic life," as you put it, the consequence of that boom?

J.H.K.: Unintended consequences. One of the great tragedies of our times is that the great bustling middle class - that used to be out in the public realm fomenting ideas and meeting each other and being involved in cultural life - are the ones who abandoned the cities and are locked in their suburban houses.

The analogue to that is the way we have eliminated the merchant classes from our towns. This has been a great tragedy, because the merchants in small towns and in cities were the people who supported all the civic institutions. They were the people who sat on the library boards and on the school boards, and sponsored the little league teams. We threw them into the garbage cans so we could have K-Marts, where we could buy a microwave oven for $9 less than we would have been charged in a locally-owned store.

People are paying $9 less for their microwave oven, but they're losing a lot more than $9 in public amenity in the process.

JB: How did that happen?

J.H.K.: Mass merchandising in America came about because we have cheap transportation. Truckers pay less for gas in America than they do anywhere else in the world, period. As long as that's the case, you can have huge mass-merchandising corporations that can rationalize their operation. You can't do that in Italy, where gas is $4.50 a gallon and it costs $30 in tolls to drive
100 miles. You couldn't be trucking around 5 tons of trolls every day if the government didn't subsidize the highway system.

I'm not saying this was even avoidable. But what I think is really pathetic is the way people in the towns behaved contrary to their best interests. All the little Rotary Club boosters would do everything they could to get the K-Mart to come to town, and then they would stand there scratching their heads when all their fellow small-businessmen went out of business.

We see this in Saratoga. In 1974 they had a special supplement in the Sunday newspaper that was put together by the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, promoting the hell out of the new Pyramid Mall that was about to open here, and what a wonderful thing it was going to be, and what a wonderful adjunct to downtown Saratoga it was going to be. Well, 98 percent of the stores that existed in downtown Saratoga when the mall opened are gone now.

JB: In "The Geography of Nowhere," you take an in-depth look at the destruction of mass transit in this country, and the corollary that Detroit was given a chance to build smaller and more efficient cars when the oil embargo hit in 1973 with the oil embargo, and basically...

J.H.K.: They blew it.

JB: Or didn't see the possibility that things would change. We tend to look at the life we have, the economic environment we have as being inevitable, a "natural order"....

J.H.K.: Or maybe people are like fish, they don't question the water that they swim in. Our everyday environment is the water that we swim in.

JB: But in fact there were several economic choices that were made that could have gone a different way, with different results. For example, greater reliance on alternate fuels, or electric cars....

J.H.K.: Changing the fueling of the cars isn't going to help the trouble we have with the way places and people relate; it's only going to make the problems worse.

The question really isn't whether we're going to have solar cars, electric cars, propane cars - look, we're going to continue to have cars, I've been misquoted in some newspaper reviews as having said that the automobile is going to disappear; I never said anything of the kind. I do think we're going to have less automobiles in the future, and fewer people are going to be able to own them.

But to try to solve the problem by inventing a different kind of automobile is not going to happen, and it's not going to work, so we might as well forget it. We can get a lot more value out of redesigning the human habitat to get places that are worth living in, without having to redesign the automobile. No amount of redesigning the automobile will give us our civic life back.

JB: You comment in the book about Greenfield Villlage, Henry Ford's "old time Main Street U.S.A." park, and the fact that people visiting there like it very much, but can't quite put their fingers on why it feels good. Americans seem to instinctively like the old Main Street with its shops - and no parking lots full of cars - but somehow, it's not what we ended up with.

J.H.K.: People know what they like, know how to make a good town. The problem right now is that their instincts and their longings are in direct opposition to their building practices, laws and regulations.

JB: In the book, you talk about zoning as a prime villain....

J.H.K.: We invented zoning at the turn of the century, and it was a good idea - that all these factories and their noxious pollutants should go to their own part of the city and be dirty and smelly and noisy over there where they won't harm property values.

JB: Maybe this points a finger at one of the roots of our trouble: rather than deal with a problem, we've tended to just put it somewhere else and pretend it's not there. "Out of sight, out of mind;" put all the obnoxious activities where they'll bother someone else.

J.H.K.: And after WWII we decided that shopping was also an obnoxious activity and we weren't going to let people live around shopping either.

Zoning created the strip mall - which was an obnoxious place to shop. For 5,000 years people built their towns in a different way: You had stores on the first floor, and you had other activities up above; people living, offices, other activities all mixed together. That is the basic pattern for the basic American small town, and it's not a bad pattern. The ironic thing is, people wonder why small towns don't feel like small towns anymore - it's because their laws tell them they can't build them like small towns.

If you look around America, you will notice a curious thing: Every strip mall is one story high. We have an affordable housing crisis in this country, and one of the reasons for that is that we haven't been building any cheap housing for 50 years. We haven't been building any houses over stores.

The only kind of housing we've allowed people to build, for the most part are single family dwellings.

JB: But where did that idea come from, that it's "inhumane" to let people live over stores?

J.H.K.: I don't know. I do think it's funny that we think it's inhumane to allow people to live over a plant store. We also think its inhumane to have grocery stores in housing developments. I don't think I've ever seen a housing development in America that actually has a corner store right in the
development. And most of the people would probably greet the idea with loathing at first glance.

JB: But that makes sense - as you point out, the set-back requirements and lighting requirements would drop that corner store into the middle of a sea of asphalt and all-night mercury-vapor lighting; not exactly a pleasant neighbor.

J.H.K.: But you shouldn't have to have the mercury-vapor lights; you could even live without the parking lot. We have corner stores in the old neighborhoods in Saratoga, and they don't have parking lots, and they function very well, the people who operate them seem to be able to make a decent living. So it can be done. It's a matter of changing the zoning.

JB: In the book, you mentioned one strip mall in the Massachusetts town of Mashpee that had been converted into more of a "town center" sort of place....

J.H.K.: Yes. they took this one-story strip-mall with its sea of asphalt and built apartments on the second floor, took the parking lot and turned it into a street by putting stuff on the other side of it, and infilling it.

By observing a few good rules of urbanism, they took a place that looks like nowhere and turned it into a place that looks like somewhere.

JB: What rules are those?

J.H.K.: Well, for example, in order for a place to have any civic vitality, any life, it really helps if you have people living there. You go to a strip mall at night and it's a dead place; you go to a live downtown at night, like Saratoga, and there are people around. There are shops on the ground floor, they come out to the sidewalk - the rules are really simple. The trouble is they've been zoned out of existence, except in places that are essentially antiques.

JB: Like Woodstock, Vermont.

J.H.K.: Yeah, or any of the places I've mentioned in the book. You go to Georgetown (D.C.) and Beacon Hill (Boston), and people like to be in those places. They recognize the good relationships between things, instinctively. They know that they feel a sense of community there because they can see how nice it would be to be able to walk down that flight of stairs and out onto the street and buy a newspaper, and then go back for breakfast, or go down the street to a corner tavern and have a beer, or actually know the person that you are buying your meat from.

The other way of living is artificial, created by accident, by zoning and government policies, and as long as it's economically feasible for people to maintain this status quo, they are going to. My point is that it isn't going to be economically feasible much longer, because of the hidden costs.

Something that no one seems to think about: Every little town and hamlet in America has to bear the expense of operating a mass transit line that runs only twice a day, and only for people under 18. It's called "a school bus fleet." The costs of these things are immense - we're talking about millions of dollars for every small town in the country. And they sit around most of the day.

The tragic thing is, there's no reason on earth that they couldn't use some of those vehicles the rest of the day for public transport, but they don't. We need to rethink some of these "settled" issues. We're going to have to unsettle them, or we're never going to have decent towns in America.

When Robert Moses built his highway out to Jones Beach in the 1920s, he made the overpasses too short for busses to get under, because he didn't want that class of people coming out to Jones Beach. He wanted only the people who could afford cars - in short, he was a snob.

We do an interesting thing in this country. We pretend that we're the most egalitarian country on Earth. And yet, no other country segregates its people and its activities by category as rigidly as we do. People who make less than $12,000 must live in this concrete can we call public housing; We can't have any shopping or any places where people work around places where they live. So everything is disconnected.

That's not the way it used to be, when poor people lived right around the corner, or right upstairs, from middle-class people, when all the children walked to school together and played together.

We pay a lot of lip service to being a democracy, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it, we really don't allow democracy to exist.

We don't want to live around people who are different. Forget racism - even white people don't want to live around white people who make less money than they do.

JB: One of the standard arguments against the kind of planning that you advocate is that "Americans won't stand for that kind of government interference in business and private property". But you seem to be saying that, in fact, most of the current situation is precisely because of government interference in business decisions, from zoning restrictions to FHA- subsidizing suburban tract-housing and government-subsidizing highways.


J.H.K.: Absolutely. And a few people have benefitted from, for instance, the government giving them insurance on their beach houses.

I had an interview with a very interesting man named John DeGrove, who is a professor at Florida Atlantic University and a major player in the revolutionary new land-planning stuff that's going on down there - They now have what is called a concurrency law, which requires the developers to do all the infrastructure work before they put in the development, so they can't just plop the houses down and then say to the county, "Okay, here's 7,000 new people, build schools for them." Now the developers have to do that, put in sewer lines, and do all the other things that were bankrupting municipalities. And as a consequence you don't have the same kind of development you had before.

The government has not only subsidized a lot of bad building, it has subsidized bad ideas about building.

JB: So, as long as there is still money to be made, what's going to change that?

J.H.K.: It's changing already. The Federal government is bankrupt. The chickens are coming home to roost now. We've out $500 billion from the savings and loan debacle; we're out several billion dollars from Hurricane Andrew, and that's probably just the first of many high-price disasters we're going to suffer in the decade ahead.

In an economy with less money sloshing around, it's not going to be possible to say "Go ahead, build your development on the beach, if anything goes wrong the government will pay for it again." So far we've postponed the reckoning by rolling over the debt. But we can't keep doing it forever.

JB: And yet you are not - despite what some critics have said - a "zero-growth" advocate either.

J.H.K.: The question is not whether we're going to have development or not - we're going to have it. But the development issues of the next decade are going to be different.

What we have been doing in America has been to take the functions of town life and smearing them all over the countryside. This has two consequences: It ruins the countryside, and it impairs and damages the life of our towns.

I think of development in a different way. A town is like an organism: it grows or it dies. The question is, HOW does it grow. Where does the development belong? And we're going to have to rethink that question.

The towns that people like best are the towns that are pedestrian-oriented, but we have built an infrastructure that will only serve motorists. When we discover that our life, based on motoring, is bankrupting us, we are going to build a different kind of environment.

Jared Diamond on Sustainability

Jared Daimond, author of "Guns, Germs and Steel" and the recent "Collapse", has a great article on consumption vs sustainability.

The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that's a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya's more than 30 million people, but it's not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

His conclusion? Because we waste so much, we can actually maintain a fair amount of our current lifestyle while bringing our consumption factor down by at least half.
Worth reading the whole thing...

Arctic Sea Ice Collapse

If you haven't seen this yet, you probably don't understand.

Global Warming isn't something we can casually mess around with. Climate systems are incredibly complex, and can suffer massive shifts with a suddenness that takes your breath away.

Watch the video. Watch what happens to the sea ice. Keep in mind that this amount of melting has never happened within living memory, nor within thousands of years.

And we really have no idea how it will affect other things - like the Gulf Stream current that keeps Europe mild and habitable, or the wider ocean currents that provide food for our fish stocks, or the weather patterns that give us rainfall that waters our crops and provides us with drinking water.

We have no idea how bad it can get, or how fast.

The Cutting Edge is Green

(Published in Luxury Life & Style)

Living on the cutting edge is the ultimate luxury.
And in building, the cutting edge is green.

Some things, it takes a while before the mainstream catches up. For a while - years, even - they remain the purview of the cranks and the hobbyists, folks who dump every spare minute and every spare dime into their crazy projects – and if you aren't lucky, they’ll tell you all about it until your eyes glazed over.

The automobile was like that, until Henry Ford made the it available for everyone. And these days we just take cars for granted.

It’s the same with green building. From the time just a few years ago when it was a specialized field that only a few people were interested in, it’s now exploding into the popular consciousness… and onto the landscape.

(More...)

“People are starting to demand this of the marketplace,” notes architect Peter Barsuk of Hermosa Beach. A member of the Gensler firm in Santa Monica, Barsuk is a board member of the US Green Building Council’s Los Angeles Chapter, and was also involved in setting up Hermosa’s Energy Patnership.

“Ten to fifteen years ago,” he notes, “there were very few architects and contractors that were practicing green building. Nobody understood what it meant or what it was. And if you asked suppliers what materials went into their products, they wouldn’t even tell you.”

What has changed things? In part, it’s pocketbook – as energy costs have risen, people see the impact every month on their bills for heating and air conditioning. And as asthma rates skyrocket, people are thinking more about indoor air quality.
But it’s more than that.

“It may look like an extravagance, but really, it’s spending wisely,” says Peter DeMaria of DeMaria Design Associates and Logical Home in Manhattan Beach.

“Theres a stigma that for something that’s a luxury, somehow there’s waste. But you look at refined designs, like autos, these are as fine as can be. We’re seeing the same thing now that happened with the automobile, or with MP3 players - the market is starting to drive all these alternative materials.”

And there’s an incredible range of options now – so don’t worry if you’re more in the market for a Lexus than a Bentley. The principals apply whether you’re building your dream home, or simply sprucing up your current place.


One thing that’s easy to do, but terribly important for your health and that of your family, is cut out Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOCs. Toxic compounds like formaldehyde are commonly used in furniture, carpet, paint and other building products; we’ve learned that these substances leak out into the air of your home for years, damaging young lungs, and leading to asthma and other respiratory problems, especially in children.

Designer Sarah Bernard recalls, “I was working with a client who had learned that out-gassing from upholstery foam and furniture glue can cause birth defects. She was pregnant at the time, and we were bringing in a lot of furniture – well, that’s a pretty reasonable concern.”

What to do? She works with natural products – hardwoods, linen and wool aren’t processed with chemicals (although you should check for stain-proofing or flameproof coatings). Get furniture that uses staples instead of glue. “Sometimes it’s not even a matter of giving up something,” says Bernard, “but approaching things in a different way.”

And use low-VOC paints, which are now widely available.

“When you use a regular paint,” notes Bernard. “you fill the house with ‘new paint smell’ – those are the gasses being released. With low-VOC there’s minimal gasses, so minimal smell, which is nice for the home-owner. And at this point, there’s almost no price difference.”

VOCs are an issue in new construction, as well. Plywood is notorious for out-gassing formaldehyde into living space. And while there are companies now making VOC-free plywood, many architects are looking at wood as very “last century”.

Patrick Killen, of Studio9one2 in Hermosa, is one of them. “Why,” he asks, “do we build multi-million dollar homes with a material – wood – that expands and contracts with water, attracts termites and mold, and just doesn’t last?”

There are a variety of alternatives, including metal studs – used in commercial construction for years – and a variety of alternative cladding materials.

“Instead of using plywood,” says DeMaria, “we’re using Dens-Guard gold, by Pacific Materials. It’s gypsum-based. Mold proof! Great R value, easy to handle and easy to cut.... With all its benefits, you’ll see this being used more and more often, and then the price will drop.”

DeMaria is also involved in an exciting alternative form of construction – he’s got a residence going up in Hermosa Beach based around four steel shipping containers.
“It’s just an extension of modular construction, really,” he says.

Even so, they had a hard time getting the design approved – it can be tricky, working on the bleeding edge this way - but he thinks it’s a great demonstration project.
“We found this amazing spray-on insulation, SuperTherm. It was used on the space shuttle, the coating is the thickness of a credit card, but has an amazing R value – R30. And at just $1.50 sq ft, it’s not that much more expensive. But in order to get our title 24 report approved, we had to work directly with the State Energy Commission. We must have spent at least 40 hours on the phone. They had never seen anything like this stuff before.”

Several designers are working with prefabricated living spaces, including DeMaria, who is launching a separate firm to deal with prefab. Another is Jennifer Siegal, whose DesignMobile firm is in the development stages to put one of her Swell houses in Manhattan Beach.

“Swell House gets assembled like Legos at your dream spot,” she notes, “and features Biofiber (a recycled cabinet composite made from sunflower seeds), finishing material made from recycled newspapers, and "ply-boo" (renewable bamboo) flooring.”
And where a typical architect-designed residence can cost $400 to $500 per square foot, her Swell Houses go for $200.

Prefab is good for the big-picture environment: it minimizes wasted materials, and also cuts transportation costs (since both materials and workers go to one central location). And it’s great for the local neighborhood environment – instead of months of banging and dust and trucks coming and going, you get one easy delivery.
Another thing that’s hot right now: Tankless hot water heaters, both for new construction and for home upgrades.

“Instead of heating up hot water and then having it sit there, wasting energy, these units flash-heat the water as you need it,” explains James Meyer of LeanArch, a design and build firm with roots in Manhattan Beach. He’s been using these heaters in the South Bay houses he’s been building (including the home of LL&S publisher Todd Klawin). “You save energy, you never run out of hot water, plus you save a lot of space, which in the South Bay with its tiny lots makes a big impact.”

These may cost $600 to $900, instead of $250 for a conventional tank heater – but what’s it worth to add an extra 90 cubic feet of space to your house?

Another new feature is in-floor heating (well, its been in use since Roman Times, but not the way they do it today). Meyer loves to use in the South Bay because it again combines environmental friendliness with space savings.

“With forced air, you kill a lot of space with ductwork,” he notes. “Instead, we build radiant heating into pipes below the floor. Instead of howling fans blowing dry air throughout the house, along with dust, pollen and mold, you have a nice quiet system that puts heat out from the bottom up.”

DeMaria has it in his own home, and notes, “This pays a dividend in the long run. And your feet are warm! My youngest son is 2.5 years old, and he’s rolling around on the bamboo floor, happy as if he’s in the bathtub.”

You can use similar systems for pool heating. Rick White of California Solar has a couple of South-Bay projects that use solar absorption.

“We now have an in-deck system. At one project in Palos Verdes, we’re putting a heat-exchange system under the concrete of the tennis court. The concrete heats up, and we pull the heat off the surface, put it into a medium that then runs it around to the pool. It heats the pool AND cools the tennis court.”

The cost has come down - you can solar heat a pool for $4500-$5500 dollars. Typically that means the break-even point is just 2 to 3 years.
And of rooftop solar has changed in a big way, too.

“I now have solar panels that are terracotta colored, so they don’t stand out like big black panels,” says White. “We specialize in photovoltaic panels that are integrated into roofing tiles. Match the roof right in, so the look is totally integrated.”

Meyer has a project going up at 217 9th Street with a 3 KW array of photovoltaic panels. They cut back on power purchases, and they’re tied into the grid, so when you’re not using power during the day, you feed power back into the grid when you’re not using. Most architects are now working this sort of package into their new designs.

“We have a ways to go,” notes Killen. “We need to put the kind of effort into solar and wind that we put into marketing the iPod. Solar has been around since the ‘70s, so compared with the MP3, progress has been slow. Right now we have the beginnings of building a foundation, but we’re only scratching the surface.”

Almost as important as heating is cooling. At the container house, DeMaria has installed an industrial-sized 12-foot fan – made by the Big Ass Fan company (its mascot is a donkey).

“Air conditioning will suck up 70 percent of your electricity,” he says. “If you’ve got your building properly designed to take advantage of your prevailing winds, you don’t need AC. And the fan keeps everything inside cooled off. The blades are similar to what you’ll find on a helicopter, cast aluminum and aerodynamically correct. You could blow the dishes right off the table if you want to.”
James Meyer’s 9th Street project uses the entire back of the house, which is a three-story open stairwell, to create a stack effect, drawing air up from the ground floor and cooling the entire house.

Likewise, projections over the windows cut their exposure to direct sunlight, making a huge impact on the need for AC.

“The standard Modern design is a big glass box that didn’t pay any attention to appropriate site orientation,” notes Killian, “and had no overhangs to cut exposure of the sun to all that glass. We’re learning…”

Another way to cut the unwanted energy provided by the sun is going with a roofing material that’s light, rather than dark. It’s estimated that dark roofs can get up to 180 degrees on a sunny day; some of that heat leaks into the house, and the rest is radiated back out, heating up the neighborhood. Going light with roofing could cut summer urban temperatures by several degrees – and saving millions of dollars in AC costs.

If you want to go really green in a big way, the ultimate is a Green Roof. Instead of standard roofing material, you have a full environment built on top of the building, complete with soil, grass, trees and shrubs.

The firm of Marmol Radziner is doing one at a project overlooking the ocean in Palos Verdes, which also features a solar deck around the pool and other green features (Marmol Radziner is also getting into prefab and modular building). And Steve Lazar of Lazar Design/Build is working with Anthony Poon of Poon Design to put a mixed-use office and condo building at 838 Manhattan Beach Blvd with 2500 square feet of green roof.

“You can walk from your unit,” says Lazar, “out onto a roof of real dirt, real trees, grass, shrubs. Your own open space that’s alive, organic. Much nicer than a concrete jungle.”

The soil/gravel system is carefully engineered proper drainage, while holding the right amount of water without too much expansion or contraction. Aside from aesthetics, it provides spectacular insulation, there’s less runoff for the sewer system, and it provides a benefit of better air quality to the inhabitants of the home as well as the neighborhood.

One other way to go: think smaller and smarter.

Part of smarter is taking advantage of the great southern California climate by integrating indoor and outdoor space.

“We had a client in Hermosa with a first-floor view from Malibu to San Pedro. They totally fell in love with it. That’s a million dollar view; you don’t mind spending $50,000 on triple-track doors that open up completely to give them that unobstructed view. On the container house, we have airplane hangar doors that open up on two sides to integrate the interior space with the outside.”

Killen has worked a similar magic at his Widmann Residence in Hermosa, where lots of triple-track sliding glass effectively double the amount of living space, and Meyer has used overhead garage doors and triple-tracks to open his houses up.

“It’s like being in a tree house,” he says, “why would you not want to take advantage of this amazing climate? People would never have done this 20 years ago. I think it’s great we’re breaking all these rules and making it possible for people live in ways that never would have been conceived of before.”

Meyer has pushed the envelope in other ways, like building in charging stations for electric cars. “It’s a lot like music,” he says. “The greatest creativity comes when people aren’t afraid to break the rules.”

And just as with music, the most creative periods happen when the patrons – the folks making the commissions, be they emperors, industrialists, or entertainment lawyers – are willing to take risks, too.

“Everything we’ve tried, we’ve gotten a great response to,” Meyer says.
Killen would like to keep pushing the envelope in other ways – and he recognizes that some of them are a little harder for the patrons to hear.

“Thinking green isn’t just about picking some nice materials out of a catalog,” says Killen. “But we’re doing things now that will have a huge impact down the road.
That’s an uplifting feeling. That’s something that some of our clients are very much in tune with. I’m not the only one saying ‘we can make a difference’.’

California Burning

Our friend Kenny videoblogs on Current.

Pretty scary stuff, and he wasn't even close to the worst of it.

Going Solar

(Appeared in the Iranian Jewish Chronicle)

"Going Green" isn't just good for the planet – it's good for the pocketbook, too

We've been hearing a lot lately about "saving the earth". But the Jewish concept is much older. We call it "Tikkun Olam," and halachically, it's the idea that G-d didn't finish creation, but put each of us here to do our small part to complete the work.

One form of saving that's come into prominence this year is solar power. It saves energy, it saves money, and it's a growing part of the work to save the planet.

Technology has been moving forward, but the biggest change in the solar environment comes from the political side: at both the state and federal level, governments are encouraging people and businesses to go solar.

(More...)

Putting money where their mouth is

"California has shown some incredible leadership," says Isaac Hamadan, of Solar Energy Exchange. "The California Solar Initiative makes direct grants that cover 23 percent of your costs."

On top of that, the Federal Government provides direct tax credits for 30 percent of the total bill for homes and businesses (although home use is capped at $2000 right now). Plus, you can depreciate it over five years. And of course, it provides electric power, cutting your power bill by 80 percent or more depending your configuration.

"The cost of electricity is going up every year," says Abe Moradian of Beverly Hills, "so I think I'll get my investment back sooner than they think. Living here, my bills are particularly high. I've had months where my bill is $300, and months when I'm heating my pool where it goes as high as $600."

As president of AMC International, a trade consulting company, Moradian knows how to figure a balance sheet. But, he says, making this decision was about more than the bottom line.

"It's clean energy. And it's good for energy independence, and that's good for everybody."

Moradian is a pretty typical solar customer: he's doing an installation on a pre-existing home, with panels built on to the roof, plus he's getting a passive solar heating system built around his pool.

Pool systems run around $5,000, and can pay for themselves in just three years. Full-house systems run from $20,000 to $40,000, and can pay for themselves in 10 years or less. Plus, Hamadan notes, you can finance them with a home equity line of credit, they add value to your home, and they're property-tax-exempt.

Doing good and looking good

For those who don't relish the though of industrial-looking black panels overlooking their front yard – the past couple of years have seen some amazing new products hit the market.

"I now have solar panels that are terracotta colored, so they don't stand out like big black panels," says Rick White, or California Solar. "We specialize in photovoltaic panels that are integrated into roofing tiles. They match the roof, and they're built right in, totally integrated with the other roofing tiles."

Likewise, for those with shingle roofs, there are now solar panels that match those. The solar becomes just one component to a standard roof. Plus they last longer than standard shingles or terracotta – and unlike standard roofing which bakes in the sun on hot days, these panels take the sun's energy and turn them into power – making a significant dent in air conditioning bills, as well.

"The system panels I install are warranteed for 25 years," says Hamadan. "That's confidence. How long will they actually last? We think 30 years or more."

Becoming part of the system

One of the most exciting things happening now is what's called "Grid-tied" systems. With this setup, your solar system is linked in with the power grid. During the hot mid-day hours when you're generating lots of power, the excess flows into the power grid, actually running your meter backwards! You're credited for the power during the day; after the sun goes down, you pull the power you were credited back in from the grid.

You can also get a system with full battery-backups, so you can store the power yourself. Or, you can combine the two.

"The other cool thing," says White, "it'll manage your energy. Some people, especially businesses, are on time- of-usage charges – buying electricity during peak periods will charge you more than at 3 a.m. when demand is low. This system fills up the batteries in the middle of the night when energy is cheap, and then you use it during the day when energy is expensive."

Becoming part of the solution

It's nice when you can combine doing the right thing with doing the smart thing. Most forms of Tikun Olam are like that, when you look at them closely.

"I believe it's the future," says Hamadan. "It's the only way we can really survive – we can't move forward with all this usage of crude oil. Electrical demand keeps rising – we can meet that with solar, instead of building more plants that burn coal and oil and gas, and pollute the air our children have to breath.

"This is much better for the earth, and for us."

The Mobile Hybrid Experience

Sometimes we wonder how much what we do here ripples out into the wider world.

I was down at the Fiesta Hermosa this past weekend - you'd think that in the chi chi beach cities of LA you'd see greening everywhere, but of approximately 200 craft vendors, I only spotted a paltry two doing anything remotely sustainable; food was of the American Standard burgers and beer variety; and they didn't even have recycling bins for folks to chuck their diet soda cans into.

But just when I was feeling disheartened I laid eyes on a very cool visual - a 53-foot trailer emblazoned with the words "Mobile Hybrid Experience". Inside, a bookish blond in a blue Toyota t-shirt explained that this is part of the company's "Highway to the Future" project, and we're welcome to explore the interactive activities and games.

And as incentive, she handed each of us a little packet of organic basil seeds - there's a bar-code on each packet, and bar-code readers at each of the stations, so you receive 50 to 100 'miles' for each activity you do. Learn about the different energy contributions of hydrogen, gasoline, biodiesel, natural gas and electric vehicles, and you get enough points for a pencil. Hit a couple more stations, and learn about hybrids - how the lithium ion battery works, or how the breaking system pumps electricity back into the battery - and you've got enough points to have a tree planted by the Arbor Day Foundation. Play the driving game - okay, it's not really a game, more of a demo, but you're seated, there are foot pedals and a steering wheel, and a big video-game screen - and you have enough for the coolest prize, a self-generating flashlight that Ed Begley Jr. has made famous (shake it... it charges... it lights up!).

The prize system is brilliant, since most people coming through are motivated to get the flashlight and actually read through all the info, took the quizzes, played the games.

"Our average is 22 minutes spent, which is huge for event marketing," notes Mark Ulbrich, the West Coast road producer. "And we're getting 800 to 1,000 people a day to step back and look at how they're relying on finite resources, to look at other solutions."

And with the scanner system, Toyota is getting a huge amount of invaluable data - on what average people are interested in and what kinds of marketing pushes are effective in reaching them. Logically, they are taking the show on the road. Follow the link to find out how you can get your own Mobile Hybrid Experience.

Tikit to Ride

(Crossposted at EcoFabulous)

Honoring Friday seems like a pretty excellent thing to do and since we haven't talked about transportation in a while, I hope this rolls you into a great weekend. Biking to work is great for the planet and a great workout... but what do you do with the bike all day? Many commuters have problems with parking, storage and theft. So wouldn't it be great if you could just pedal to the office, fold up your ride and stash it under your desk? Now you can.

Bike Friday has been specializing in high-end folding bikes for almost twenty years, guaranteeing staying power. This winter they launched the Tikit, an ultra-compact two wheeler (though ultra compact is still lightly subjective).

Check out the video of it folding and unfolding on YouTube. Not only does it collapse into a nice, tight bundle, but the process takes less than three seconds! Even short-attention-spanners will love this.

Now, before you start making reservations for some extreme adventure, keep in mind that you are not going to be dirtbiking the Tikit up a mountain, or cruising to victory in the Tour de France. The wheels are smallish (they have to be), and because of the frame joints, you don't want to be doing any kind of high-impact riding. But that's not the Tikit's calling. The Tikit loves the supermarket, coffeehouses and bus trips. No need to worry about bike racks, roof racks, or having it stolen off the front porch.

The company is still owned and operated by the Sholz family - Alan and Hanz set up their Wright Brothers-like shop in the '90s, initially building folding bikes with the world traveler in mind. But they realized that they could have an impact on fossil fuels by encouraging folks to switch their commute from "hydrocarbons to carbs", as they say. And pretty chic to boot, minus the elephant-sized sack.

Twisted Sitter

(Cross-posted at EcoFabulous)
"This ain't yo momma's wicker," says designer/architect Bannavis Andrew Sribyatta of PIE (Project Import Export), and it’s so true. The forms of his singular seating are truly organic, from the Tonecoon, a peanut-form based on Thai flower buds, to the Sushi double-loveseat that looks like a thumb-impressed mound of sushi rice, to the womb-like Spacehog.

The materials are all natural and sustainable, including rattan, liana, bamboo and water hyacinth (the latter being an invasive and destructive weed that clogs Florida waterways – how great to find a creative use for that!). There’s an art-out-of-chaos element to his material patterns, and in addition to the standard fabric-like weaves, there’s a frantic fractal irregular interweave that is not only cool to look at, admittedly, to my surprise it is very comfy to sit in!

Doie as I Do

Indie design has been pushing boundaries... and the world has been playing catch-up.

Take Sara Kirsner, a California girl (Marin) who was drawn to New York by the Parsons School. She's worked with Marc Jacobs and Ann Taylor, but was inspired to do her own Asian-influenced line, Doie, while traveling in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Cotton lounge-wear was her thing, but she was moved to start using alternative fabrics when she learned about some of the not-so-friendly effects that conventional cotton has on the environment. When she discovered she could get jersey (a light, breathable fabric) made from bamboo fiber, she was totally blown away.

Why bamboo? It's incredibly soft, it's unbelievably strong, it has naturally anti-microbial properties (it's not so much sweat that gets you stinky, but the bacteria that feed on your perspiration - bamboo blocks that) and it's eco-friendly.

Cotton requires massive amount of water, tons of pesticides and a ridiculous amount of petroleum-based fertilizer. In contrast, Bamboo grows fast and sustainably without artificial assistance, doesn't require pesticides, and provides income to otherwise impoverished folks in the developing world without the kind of nasty monoculture impact that crops like coffee can have.

Oh - and it's cold-water washable.

Kirstner's new line, the Harusame Collection, adds some versatile Asian-inspired dresses to the already-successful loungeware, melding simple black with splashes of accent color; it's available at an assortment of online stores as well as bricks & mortars such as Fred Segal and Whole Foods. Makes me want to slip into something more comfortable.

Congealed Electricity

(Cross-posted at EcoFabulous)

"Congealed electricity"?

It sounds very technical but it's actually the nickname they gave aluminum back in the '50s, since it's so incredibly energy-intensive to create. You'll actually find most aluminum smelters near hydroelectric dams (like those in Washington State).

The good news is that we have become such good recyclers that the volume of aluminum cans going into landfills is actually dropping! About half of the reclaimed metal goes straight back into cans; as for the rest, it goes into some very cool products, like this "Louis the Umpteenth side table" from Johnston-Ready, available at fab new online eco-shop greenwithglamour.com.

In place of the usual rococo gilding, the aluminum finish makes for a chic modern twist to Hollywood's most glam, without sacrificing the essential ornateness of the period.

You can also clean up with Eleek's sleek line of aluminum sinks, from the mod waterbox to the useful waterfalling with its built-in strainer (all available with artist patinas and powdercoats).

Hail, Sigg!

Plastic water bottles.

Before you know it they build up under the back seat of the car, they hide in the corners of the kitchen, they sneak under the couch.

But where do you stow 30 million plastic water bottles? That’s how many bottles Americans are adding to landfills every single day. It’s not just the landfilling – all of those bottles were manufactured (using lots of power and 63 million gallons of oil per year), packed into cardboard boxes (millions and millions of trees – often rainforest trees - cut down), then trucked around the country (more petroleum).

Plus, NRDC discovered that a “third of the tested [bottled water] brands were found to contain contaminants such as arsenic and carcinogenic compounds in at least some samples at levels exceeding state or industry standards.” So, kick the plastic habit - it's amazing how easy it is once you re-train your brain!

You can’t beat Swiss design – Sigg has just added some seriously stylish patterns to their classic line of vibrantly-colored brushed-aluminum water bottles. They’ve even got a tres cute kids line.

Sigg bottles are seamlessly extruded from a single piece of aluminum (no seams=no leaks); a proprietary interior coating is baked on to ensure the bottle won’t interact with anything you choose to swig from it, from apple juice to CO2 drinks to alcohol (think of it as a modern flask); a powder coating is baked on the exterior to attain those cool colors and designs; the tops are guaranteed leak free and are available in several styles. Using a plastic bottle will seem tasteless before you even know it!

And strong? Backpacker magazine fired a cannon at water bottles to test them – Sigg was the only one to emerge unscathed. Even Beckham can’t bend it! (He’s a Sigg fan, too.)

With health concerns about Lexan bottles, it’s nice to know there’s a product out there that looks chic, lasts for years, and won’t harm either you or the environment. (Sigg is also part of One Percent for the Planet) You can get them online from Sigg; they ship straight to you....

Ca-Boom, Baby

Cross-posted at ecofabulous

The West Coast Independent Design Show, AKA Ca Boom 4, takes flight today in the Barker Hangar at Santa Monica Airport. No, you won't find a biodiesel Learjet (sorry, John Travolta) but this is the bleeding edge for making the stationary parts of your life eco-conscious.

There's light power: the incredibly cool built-in LED applications of Element labs. There's solar power: the warm power of the sun from California Solar. And there's star power (if only by association): Willard Ford (Harrison's son) gathers ultramodern sustainable teak furnishings from around the globe. And you'll find much more – including companies and products so fresh they don't even have websites yet!

Ca Boom 4 runs Friday, March 30 through Sunday, April 1, 2007, at the Santa Monica Airport's Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, CA. For more information visit caboomshow.com.

Breakfast in America

It was a Reagan morning.

Forget hot dogs. Forget apple pie. The true American culinary ritual is breakfast at the diner.

As I dipped the corner of my wheat toast into the sunny guts of my over-easies, I listened to the voice of America in the next booth.

"Look at me," the voice was saying, and I looked and saw a balding, mustached man going to fat beneath his jacket, “me, when I was a kid I got part-time work at a factory.”

To look at him now, you could scarcely tell that he had once sweated a factory floor, but he went on, “the pay was all right, and I was working with men, guys that had been there for thirty years. I learned from them. Important lessons, about life, about dames, about the world - about America.”

The implication was clear in his well-fed face: this work made me what I am today, a successful if spreading paragon of the American dream.

“But look,” he sighed, “at what the kids do today. There are no jobs like I had. My son works at McDonald's. For less than I made in the factory twenty years ago. And who does he work with? Not men. Kids. Kids no smarter than himself. And the adults... The only role models in that dump are the failures. I mean, what have you got going for you if you're still working in McDonald's at 25?”

I threw a pocketful of change down on the Formica - funny, how dimes and quarters accumulate the way pennies used to - and got up to face the day. It's morning in America, like Ronnie said. And we're training our kids to make Egg McMuffins.

I wonder if the Japanese like pancakes