From LEED, the Cool Roof Rating Council, the ENERGY STAR program, all the way up to the U.S. Department of Energy, there is widespread belief that white reflective roofing systems, even on buildings in northern cities like New York and Chicago, are more efficient and cost-effective than dark roofing.

Based on studies done at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, for the past 15 years white roofing systems have been the system of choice because it was believed that they also reduce global warming and the “heat island effect,” in which dark-colored building materials raise the ambient temperature in urban areas by a few degrees in summer.

But architects, engineers, building owners, and roof system designers, who were not consulted on the Lawrence Berkeley studies, are finding that reflective membranes are not always a panacea for energy savings. Moreover, a study done at Stanford University, which uses the latest advances in atmospheric computer modeling, shows that white roofs may actually increase, not decrease, the Earth’s temperature. White roof membranes have high reflectivity that directs heat upward into the atmosphere and then mixes with black and brown soot particles, which are thought to contribute to global warming.

Other studies show that white roofs increase average space heating use more than they decrease average air conditioning use in northern climates. Since owners have to spend more money heating their buildings with a white roof, they must consume more natural resources, thus increasing global warming. Read more…

I am intrigued by the human resilience angle that Eric Klinenberg uses in making the case for better urban design in his New Yorker article, Adaptation: How can cities be “climate-proofed?” In it he discusses disaster preparedness in general and describes several large-scale engineering solutions to climate change, solutions that are of necessity government backed. He also writes about the role a resilient civil society can play in increasing an individual’s chance of survival in a disaster. A professor of sociology, public policy, and media, culture, and communications at New York University, Klinenberg writes, “Whether they come from governments or from civil society, the best techniques for safeguarding our cities don’t just mitigate disaster damage; they also strengthen the networks that promote health and prosperity during ordinary times.” He mentions Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, who “has been measuring the strength of social ties, mutual assistance, and nonprofit organizations in Chicago communities for nearly two decades. He has found that the benefits of living in a neighborhood with a robust social infrastructure are significant during ordinary times as well as during disasters.”
He adds that “Alonzo Plough, the director of emergency preparedness and response for the County of Los Angeles, says, ‘But it’s not just engineering that matters. It’s social capital. And what this movement is bringing to the fore is that the social infrastructure matters, too.’”

Enter the urban designer and landscape architect. How social infrastructures are enhanced by landscape infrastructure and open space is the focus of studies by the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, and the subject of an earlier social impact design blog post.

We have an opportunity here step up to the plate and play an important role in enhancing and creating the social capital that makes our communities and our society resilient. While I love and value aesthetics and believe fervently that beauty matters, our work as urban designers and landscape architects is more than a matter of creating artful places. We can, and should, learn to design to increase social connectedness. What would that look like?

For me, this brings us to questions of morality, and of shared societal values. Shared societal values are one of the ways that a group can create cohesion and a sense of mutual responsibility. The lack of a shared moral system tears down the sense of social connectedness. In the entry on morality Wikipedia says “The phenomenon of ‘reciprocity‘ in nature is seen by evolutionary biologists as one way to begin to understand human morality.” Reciprocity as in the Golden Rule; remember that “quaint” idea? Read more…

Thanks to extensive research and noticeable changes in weather and storm prevalence, it’s getting harder to turn a blind eye to the reality of climate change. Since the Industrial Age spurred the increasing usage of fossil fuels for energy production, the weather has been warming slowly. In fact, since 1880, the temperature of the earth has increased by 1 degree Celsius.

Although 72% of media outlets report on global warming with a skeptical air, the overwhelming majority of scientists believe that the extreme weather of the last decade is at least partially caused by global warming. Some examples of climate calamities caused partly by global warming include:

Hurricane Katrina

Drought in desert countries

Hurricane Sandy

Tornadoes in the Midwest

These storms, droughts, and floods are causing death and economic issues for people all over the world – many cannot afford to rebuild their lives from the ground up after being wiped out by a tsunami or other disaster.

Evidence also indicates that the face of the Earth is changing because of warming trends. The ice caps of the Arctic are noticeably shrinking, the ice cap of Mt. Kilimanjaro, alone, has shrunk by 85% in the last 100 years, and the sea levels are rising at the rate of about 3 millimeters per year because of all the melting ice. Climate change is also affecting wildlife. For instance, Arctic polar bears are at risk of losing their environment; the Golden Toad has gone extinct; and the most adaptable species are evolving into new versions capable of withstanding warmer water.

Despite some naysayers with alternative theories about why global temperatures are rising – including the idea that the Earth goes through natural temperature cycles every few millennia – the dramatic changes in the Earth’s atmospheric makeup suggests humans are to blame. In fact, 97% of scientists agree humans are responsible for climate change.

Since the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide levels increased 38% because of humans, methane levels have increased 148%, nitrous oxide is up 15% – and the list goes on and on, all because of human-instigated production, manufacturing, and organizations and individuals work hard to promote an Earth-friendly existence, but resistance to change is rampant and actions are slow. For instance, while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is still working on collecting data to support development of greenhouse gas reduction expectations for businesses, most of their efforts feel more like pre-research than actual change. Other countries have made efforts – such as signing to Kyoto Protocol to reduce their 1990 emission levels by 18% by 2020 – but the only solution will require the whole to world band together. Read more…

The word “resilience” is bandied about these days among environmental designers. In some quarters, it’s threatening to displace another popular word, “sustainability.” This is partly a reflection of newsworthy events like Hurricane Sandy, adding to a growing list of other disruptive events like tsunamis, droughts, and heat waves.

We know that we can’t design for all such unpredictable events, but we could make sure our buildings and cities are better able to weather these disruptions and bounce back afterwards. At a larger scale, we need to be able to weather the shocks of climate change, resource destruction and depletion, and a host of other growing challenges to human wellbeing.

We need more resilient design, not as a fashionable buzzword, but out of necessity for our long-term survival.

An illustration of a resilient architecture: fossils of a marine ecosystem from the Permian period, about 250 to 300 million years ago. These ecosystems were resilient enough to endure dramatic changes over millions of years. Image by Professor Mark A. Wilson/Wikimedia

Aside from a nice idea, what is resilience really, structurally speaking? What lessons can we as designers apply towards achieving it? In particular, what can we learn from the evident resilience of natural systems? Quite a lot, it turns out.

Resilient and non-resilient systems

Let’s start by recognizing that we have incredibly complex and sophisticated technologies today, from power plants, to building systems, to jet aircraft. These technologies are, generally speaking, marvelously stable within their design parameters. This is the kind of stability that C. H. Holling, the pioneer of resilience theory in ecology, called “engineered resilience.” But they are often not resilient outside of their designed operating systems. Trouble comes with the unintended consequences that occur as “externalities,” often with disastrous results.

On the left, an over-concentration of large-sale components; on the right, a more resilient distributed network of nodes. Drawing by Nikos Salingaros. Read more…

On a chilly February afternoon I wandered around an unfamiliar part of campus until I found my destination - a small, but grand lecture hall (this is at an Ivy League university, after all). The event was the annual flagship lecture hosted by Yale’s Department of Sociology, and the speaker was Theda Skocpol, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard. The talk was seductively titled “What It Will Take to Mobilize Americans to Limit Carbon Emissions and Fight Global Warming.”

Image courtesy of Harvard’s Women and Public Policy blog

Skocpol has spent six months attempting to answer the question: Why has climate change legislation failed? Specifically, she looks at the downfall of cap and trade in juxtaposition to the legislative success of healthcare reform. Although cap and trade passed through the House of Representatives, the bill could not get enough votes in the Senate. In the aftermath, environmental activists blamed either the economic crisis or Obama’s lack of leadership (i.e. not addressing climate change in his addresses). Not entirely convinced, Skocpol looked deeper at the forces acting on Congress.

She found that the cap and trade movement invested heavily in bringing together moderate environmentalists and big businesses, while only marginally focusing on an effective media campaign to explain the concept of cap and trade. Over time, so many free carbon permits were given to polluting companies to garner support that environmentalists on the left disgustedly rescinded their support of cap and trade. Because cap and trade did not focus on wooing the American public, there was more room for conservative media to befuddle the climate change “debate,” and Skocpol found a strong correlation of public perception to conservative media stories on hoaxes in climate change science (see figure).

So what solutions does Skocpol provide? How do we identify what it will take to mobilize Americans? She identifies a few major players already active: policies encouraging sustainable energy solutions, college grassroots organizations such as 350.org, and regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency. But she also recognizes the need to build coalitions and legislation in Congress, estimating that the earliest opportunity for advocates to shine will be in 2017. Learning from the earlier cap and trade failure, Skocpol declares the need for a policy approach that can be communicated to Americans easily, and one that reaches out to the range of moderate Democrats to moderate Republicans.

As someone who has worked in the climate change movement for several years, I believed myself to be quite well informed on cap and trade. But after hearing Skocpol’s lecture I began to understand the extent of insider bargains that occurred, and the surprising effect of political media outlets. This reaffirms Skocpol’s argument for a better, more effective way to communicate the intricacies of cap and trade to the American public. I do wish the lecture were more focused on mobilizing Americans as her title suggests, and not simply a presentation of her research and conclusions. The solutions she does present, though significant, are macro in scale and specialized to policymakers, which admittedly may be her primary intended audience. However, I personally would have liked to hear more on why we as a nation of citizens, not a nation of policymakers, cannot seem to rally for climate change solutions.

Theda Skocpol’s full pdf report, “NAMING THE PROBLEM: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight against Global Warming” can be found here.

Sheena Zhang is a graduate student at Yale University, pursuing a joint Master of Architecture from the School of Architecture and a Master of Environmental Management from the School of Forestry and Environmental Sciences. She has worked on sustainability initiatives as a campus environmental activist since 2008.

Storms and hurricanes are nothing new for New York City. Some four decades after the European founding of the municipality in 1625, a severe storm was chronicled in Manhattan. Subsequently, the Great Storm of 1693 rearranged the coastline, likely creating the Fire Island Cut. Many more significant storms followed over the centuries. To underscore the lessons of super storm Sandy, there are people alive today who can remember the great hurricane of 1938.

What’s new in recent decades is the relentless development of the coastline, haphazardly accelerated with apparent disregard for protective natural buffers, such as wetlands and dunes. As recently as the 1980s, development exploded in today’s storm ravaged Staten Island, even filling and building on marshland.

Also new to many people is the realization of the human contributions to climate change through our modification of atmospheric gases, a warming climate, and the attendant increases in sea levels, storm frequency and severity, droughts, heat waves, and more. These meteorological changes are real and measurable.

Hurricane Sandy, aside from its tragic aftermath, has done us a huge favor, providing a loud and unequivocal “I told you so!” in the nation’s densest population areas and most developed coastline. The visible devastation of New York City and the Jersey Shore brings tangible urgency to our efforts to take all possible measures to alter the lifestyle and behaviors that have brought us to this critical juncture. We need a paradigm shift in our land-use patterns and energy consumption. Most fundamentally, we must change the ways we interact with the natural systems of the earth.  Massive sea gates and walls might protect against some storm surges, but what will they do to fisheries, sediment transport, water quality—to mention but a few potential repercussions? We need an integrated approach to climate adaptation and mitigation that uses natural systems as ongoing guides.

Wetland Restoration and Mitigation, image courtesy of appliedeco.com

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It’s a warm summers day on Governors Island in 2015. Tourists doze in gently rocking hammocks while a lone musician softly plays to the clinking of coins in his guitar case. Basking in the shade of a nearby tree, a teenager sprawls on the grass pretending to read history while two ballet dancers practice in the long shadow of Liggett Hall. It’s numerous stone balconies full of workers on laptops, the archways and warm lighting fill the heart of Governors Island with quiet contemplation.

Liggett Hall is a former military office and barracks, designed in 1929 by McKim, Mead & White in the Georgian Revival style. Encompassing 400,000-square feet of space, this elegant building of stone and brick serves as an iconic gateway between the park on the south side of the island, and the largest adaptive reuse project in the country.

Liggett Hall, photo courtesy The Trust for Governors Island

Education, art, music, business. These are just some of the pieces of the puzzle of opportunity that is the RFP (Request For Proposal) on Governors Island. With a $260 million investment in park amenities—potable water, 21st century electrical and telecommunication systems, and improved access—New York City is betting on Governors Island as a premier destination for tourism, culture, and business.

Liggett Terrace, rendering courtesy The Trust for Governors Island

Last month I went on a private guided tour of Governors Island. A short 10-minute ferry ride took me from the southern tip of Manhattan to the waiting Leslie Koch, president of the Trust for Governors Island. Two minutes off the ferry and I’m whisked off in an armored gulf cart for a vision filled tour of the future. Koch’s enthusiasm and excitement filled my head with beautiful landscapes, restored relics, creative uses of historic buildings, resilient park spaces, art, culture, advanced business, and great opportunities.

South Battery, rendering courtesy The Trust for Governors Island

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“Wave Signal”                                                                                          Photo:  Joseph G. Brin © 2012

Sweeping ocean vistas display their obvious beauty but waves speak an arcane language all their own. Frederic Raichlen, professor emeritus at Caltech and an expert on coastal engineering and wave mechanics, has a new book Waves (MIT Press). He is a kind of wave whisperer.

A colleague once claimed that MIT Press could take any subject and make it boring. They failed here since this little pocket book, the latest in their “Essential Knowledge” series, is fascinating.

Raichlen presents a specific formula, then suggests measuring wave intervals with a stop watch, “it’s like taking the pulse of the ocean.” The book may not be for the math phobic. But you can still glean a more scientific appreciation of ocean wave phenomena and coastal transformation that will only increase your awe of 50 foot high tsunamis, 80 foot high rogue waves…and tiny ripples lifted by a gentle breeze across a pond.

Raichlen then converts your bathtub into a handy testing tank for wave generation, pushing down and lifting water with the palm of the hand making homemade tsunamis…at scale.

He discusses strategies and limitations of coastal breakwaters, seawalls and the like. His analysis of water and rock erosion by conceptual diagrams is intriguing. Additionally, as the best teachers do, he deftly applies analogy, illustrating an earthquake’s effects by way of a piano keyboard.

Waves gave me a more substantial understanding of the coastal impact of global warming. Surprisingly, though, I don’t think there was a single mention of the term in the entire book.

Photo: Han Singels. Uiterwaarden bij Graaf, 2005 colour print, collection artist

Sweet & Salt, an elegant tome by Tracy Metz & Maartje van den Heuvel, provides further illumination as they outline the history of Dutch attempts to tame the ocean. This is combined with a broad survey of the arts and water, inspiring creative use of landscape design and water. As pioneers and masters of water control and containment, the Dutch have “been there, done that” but are now moving towards a more zen-like philosophy of accommodation.

The cost to render invincible some 3,600 miles of U.S. eastern coastline in the face of impending oceanic doom is beyond both possibility and calculation. A recent, invaluable, short article (for the New Yorker) by Eric Klinenberg, “Adaptation,” provides other perspectives on the problem that may not make for dramatic headlines but is profound, nevertheless.

Social scientists have documented how relative social cohesion of one neighborhood allows its residents to survive natural disasters (like heat waves) as compared to adjacent populations of the same economic status, same demographic makeup facing the same forces of destruction – a prescriptive microcosm for a critically interdependent society.

As Klinenberg’s article indicates, even if the causes of climate change were halted today we’ve already bought decades of rising sea levels and fearsome atmospheric aberrations that will have to be faced.

Across the world, new strategies are cropping up including floating pavilions, smart power grids, wetland restoration, farming new oyster beds, retreating to higher ground, and so on. Debate rages over whether or not to build massively expensive “hard” solutions, that take too long to build and are only temporary defenses against surges, not rising sea levels. A growing “architecture of accommodation” is what Klinenberg anticipates. A more subtle point is that these responses should represent a duality of purpose, enhancing ordinary city life not just thwarting disaster.

Neptune, God of the Sea, just called. And he’s upset. His eternal rhythms are increasingly contorted by strange influences from man-made atmospheres. Those who have camped their civilization at water’s edge now face Neptune’s revenge.

Creativity has to answer his call with optimism across all borders technical, social, and political. Essentially, affirming interdependence, a gift we’ve been blessed with since, at least, the Stone Age.

“Neptune’s Reach”                                                                                    Photo: Joseph G. Brin © 2012

Joseph G. Brin is an architect, fine artist, and writer based in Philadelphia, PA.

My Game Changers profile on Edward Mazria focused on the nature of the architect’s activism. How does an organization of less than five full-time employees have such a big impact? Ed’s genius was in reframing the issue of climate change as a design problem, with easily defined goals (not easy to achieve goals, but with a clear path forward). Just as important, Mazria’s group, Architecture 2030 encourages organizations to take ownership of the issue. There are no better examples than the 2030 Districts popping up all over the country. Each is a local response to a global problem. Recently I talked to Brian Geller, executive director of the Seattle 2030 District about the birth of his organization and the way forward.

Brian Geller, executive director of Seattle 2030 District

Martin C. Pedersen: Ed Mazria calls his group, Architecture 2030 a “seeding organization.” Your effort in Seattle is certainly a good example of that.
Brian Geller: It’s true. It’s interesting to note that when your “Architects Pollute” issue came out in 2003, I was in architecture school in New York, and it was something I vividly remember. That story had a big impact on me, on deciding where I wanted to go with my career.

MCP: How did the Seattle 2030 district begin?
BG: It started about three years ago. I was working as a sustainability specialist at ZGF Architects. I was working at the Seattle office. Bob Zimmerman, the managing partner of the office, had just come back from a conference in Chicago and was telling me about this de-carbonization study that Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill had worked on. Bob said: “It sounds fascinating. I’m surprised that Seattle hasn’t undertaken something like that.” I took that little nugget back to my desk and was thinking it over. It sounded like a great idea. But I thought that if we wanted to do something like that here, it seemed that a study was not the right approach. So I made this map. I started with Seattle’s steam distribution map. We’ve got a small district steam utility here in downtown. They were in the process of building a biomass boiler that would reduce the carbon footprint of their entire operations by 50 percent, and the heating-related carbon footprint of the two hundred buildings attached to them by half as well. There was other great stuff going on, too. There were a number of large building owners undertaking portfolio-wide certification, putting together important tenant engagement programs. The city was about to pass a disclosure ordinance, requiring building owners to benchmark their properties and disclose some of the data to the city. All of this stuff was happening, but it was happening somewhat siloed. So I took their map, put on the ten largest property owners and managers that I knew downtown, who were all doing cool things, and went to a few people in the city, and other architects and engineers, and said, “Look, this is what they’re doing in Chicago. They’re doing a study. But if we did something like this here, and instead of doing a study, invited these people on this map in, we would cover a lot of downtown. We could get all of these large entities measuring their progress the same way, united around one set of goals.” I told them, “You’ll get a lot farther together than you would on your own.” They’d learn a lot from each other. They wouldn’t be duplicating efforts. Hopefully, they’d be generating more work for everybody in the city. People liked the idea.

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In the course of reporting my piece on Edward Mazria, I had a very interesting conversation with Andrew C. Revkin, for years an environmental reporter for the New York Times. Today he writes the paper’s Dot Earth Blog and also teaches at Pace University. A big admirer of Mazria, Revkin has an altogether clear-eyed view of the environmental road ahead. An edited version of our talk follows:

Martin C. Pedersen: First off, what’s your role at Pace?

Andrew C. Revkin: I am Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at the Academy for Applied Environmental Studies.  And I co-teach three courses. One is a new course I’ve launched called Blogging a Better Planet. In the spring I co-teach a documentary production course, where we do films on sustainability topics, and an environmental science communication course.

MCP: You’ve been aware of Ed’ Mazria’s role in the environmental movement for a while. How would you characterize it?

ACR: His case—and it’s a good and simple one—is that buildings really matter. He’s trying to shift how we design them, and how we design architects, as well.

MCP: How does his advocacy differ from someone like Bill McKibben http://www.350.org/?

ACR: I think Ed is focusing on things that are imminently more doable. Bill is very good about building movements around numbers, but has not adequately articulated how you get there. In other words, besides yelling at fossil fuel companies. That may be something that needs to be done, but it’s not a path that will actually change a lot of things. Ed is working in a space where there’s a lot to be done, both on existing structures and on new buildings. There’s huge potential to make big gains.

Read more…