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 Special Supplement to the October 2001 issue: A report on the proceedings of the Metropolis West Conference, February 7+8, 2001, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, "Finding the Thread of Sustainability." October 2001
Industrial ecology: the wastes of one industry recycled as feedstocks of another industry. --Sim Van der Ryn Biome: region or area of land that has a characteristic climate, soils, vegetation, topography, etc. --Sim Van der Ryn Ecology and economics both come from the Greek word for "household." --Jerry Brown The gross annual value of ecosystem services (wetlands that purify waste, agriculture, industrial ecology, etc,) amounts to $33 trillion-a figure larger than everything we produce, larger than our Gross National Product. --Sim Van der Ryn The UC Davis Center for New Mobility Studies investigates how to increase people's access conveniently and move away from the traditional auto model. It looks at shared bikes, small neighborhood electric vehicles, use of handheld devices, travel planning services-many different things that are charged and facilitated by electronics and telecommuting. --Susan Shaheen A car uses up about 500 to 600 times as much oxygen as a human being does. An individual burns 2,000 calories (400 BTUs) per day; a car burns 200,000 BTUs during a daily commute. If you look at metabolism-the flow of energy and resources through designed objects-and compare it in scale to the physical system, it starts to make you ask a lot of questions. --Sim Van der Ryn According to Conservation International, 75 percent of American consumers believe that buying green products is a good way to help the environment; 58 percent would like to buy as many green products as possible. However, 73 percent say they don't know how to determine if a product is green. --Mary Jane McQuillen In car-sharing programs individuals have the benefit of private cars, but they don't have the cost and responsibility of ownership. Users have access to a fleet of cars. Sometimes the cars are identical, sometimes they are varied (sports car, minivan, pickup truck). Most of the 250,000 people around the world who are currently in car-sharing programs pay a usage fee only when they use the vehicle. --Susan Shaheen Smith Barney Asset Management opened its first social-awareness account in 1975, primarily for clients who wanted to avoid certain areas for religious reasons. By 1987 there were so many requests from socially-aware investors that a separate investment discipline was established. The program began with $3 million in assets under management and grew to $3.2 billion by December 2000. --Mary Jane McQuillen The EPA Energy Star program, in partnership with building owners, was able to prevent 46 billion pounds of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere, and more than $2.2 billion in energy costs. --Mary Jane McQuillen At the North American International Auto Show in January 2001, every vehicle manufacturer showed something that looked like a Road Warrior vehicle. Can you imagine an NEV next to something like that? --Gary Vasilash Detroit's Big Three have been involved for a number of years in the Partnership for the Next Generation of Vehicles (PNGV), which is supposed to have a vehicle that will get 80 miles a gallon by 2004. PNGV and the federal government have spent more than $2 billion trying to get this program going. It's not a trivial effort. --Gary Vasilash In 2000 Honda sold 3,788 Insights (a highly efficient hybrid electric vehicle-a great car) and they sold 324,528 Civics. --Gary Vasilash Electric vehicles will cut down on noise pollution. Cities will be much quieter, people will start talking to one another and not just drive with their radio on and windows rolled up. --Gary Starr An NEV is allowed to go up to 35 mph on any street anywhere in the United States, as long as it is approved by the state. More than 20 states have already approved it. The vehicle doesn't need doors; a group of high school students could build one. -Dan Sturges Most electric vehicles' batteries would be charged at night, when there is surplus power; a million of them could come on the road without adding to the power grid. --Gary Starr Every day-including today- we will save as much electricity from improved refrigerator energy-efficiency standards as all the nuclear plant output in the United States. --Tim Duane Environmentally sensitive workstations result in a sustained increase in productivity of 3 to 15 percent, reports a study by the Rocky Mountain Institute and Department of Energy. --Mary Jane McQuillen. 250 law-enforcement agencies in the United States are using electric police bikes. In a typical city, police cars travel 20--25 miles an hour, they stop and go, they use a lot of gasoline and release a lot of pollutants. --Gary Starr Ten years ago in the Sierra Nevada the debate was about jobs versus owls; the new debate is about types of job and protecting the owls.--Tim Duane There are just ten classes of patterns, each with a particular function, that make up the entire physical world at all scales: spheres, nests or mosaics, lattices, polyhedra, spirals and helixes, meanders, branching and circulation, waves, symmetry, and the pattern of patterns discovered in chaos theory-the fractal. Every part at every scale of a fractal mirrors the whole. We haven't begun to explore what fractals mean to architecture. --Sim Van der Ryn The typical person in the United States needs about 12 hectares of land to support his or her lifestyle. If everyone on earth lived the way we do, it would take three planets to support them. We've overshot our footprint. --Sim Van der Ryn The microchip has permeated our technology and covered our desktops with gadgets that increase demand for energy-on my power strip there is a PC monitor, printer, scanner, CD-ROM writer, hot sync for my visor, and a cell phone.--Tim Duane The U.S. Green Building Council (www.usgbc.org) has developed a way to think about buildings and evaluate them objectively in terms of their footprints and their impact on natural categories. It's a major breakthrough. People love numbers and they love to compete, so they're going to be competing to be a Platinum building or a Gold building or a Silver building or a Bronze building. In site selection, for example, you get a lot more points for reclaiming a brownfield than going out to a nice piece of farmland in Modesto. We're very excited about this because we think it's going to become the world's standard and people are going to race buildings against each other. American boys love to race cars. We've got to start racing buildings. --Sim Van der Ryn The Internet-rich with information on the environment and the social impact of development on local communities and economies-is contributing to more responsible behavior by large corporations. Some useful sites include the United Nations program Global Compact, www.unglobalcompact.org; the Global Reporting Initiative, convened by the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) in partnership with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), www.globalreporting.org; the Global Sullivan Principles of Corporate and Social Responsibility, www.globalsullivanprinciples.org; and Energy Star, a service of the Environmental Protection Agency, www.epa.gov/nrgystar. --Mary Jane McQuillen Since 1985 the Rainforest Action Network (www.ran.org) has been working to protect tropical rain forests and the human rights of those who live there. It offers information on lumber products derived from old-growth forests and has drawn up a 500-year plan to restructure the wood-product sector of the global economy by such measures as getting Home Depot and others not to sell old-growth wood. --Randy Hayes The Environmental Litigation Clinic (www.pace.edu/lawschool/envclinic) at the Pace University School of Law studies environmental law and represents public-interest groups, primarily the Riverkeeper Inc. (www.riverkeeper.org), a citizens' group organized to protect the waters of the Hudson River system from the Adirondacks to Long Island Sound. --Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution; Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins; Little Brown & Company, 1999 Shaping the Sierra: Nature, Culture, and Conflict in the Changing West; Timothy P. Duane; University of California Press, 1999. Ecological Design; Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cown; Island Press, 1995 "Sustainable Germany: A Contribution to Sustainable Global Development;" Richard Loske and Wolfgang Sachs; www.oaklandnet.com/government/mayor/sustainable-germany.html |
