True to their name, Sundance Sheepskin and Leather has installed South Main’s first solar panels- and just in time for Earth Day! Sundance’s Jean Anderson says they estimate that the 3.5 KW photovoltaic array will generate around 80% of the buildings electrical use, and they’re expecting a 12-15 year payback on the investment. Combined with [...] Read more »
With home energy usage accounting for 17% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, South Main has always embraced green building as an important element of what makes the neighborhood sustainable. Particularly in our colder climate, a well-insulated, tight building envelope is crucial.
Last night I was reading David Brower’s Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run. This is a guy who founded the Sierra Club and The League of Conservation Voters, helped prevent the damming of the Grand Canyon, and was designated by the New York Times as ‘the most effective conservation activist in the world.’ [...] Read more »
We love eating local food, and we love that every year we have more sources for delicious, local and organic food in Buena Vista. Aside from the root vegetables, greens, strawberries, peas, onions, tomatoes, peppers, squash and more that we harvest from our urban vegetable garden, we get our food through Weathervane Farm’s community supported [...] Read more »
James Howard Kunstler is one of the most outspoken and well-known critics of sprawl and proponents of New Urbanism. This talk is Kunstler at his best- witty, humorous, inflammatory. Kunstler is a futurist who understands that we’re basically f*$#*d as a country if we don’t abandon our car-centric, sprawling lifestyles immediately and start building places [...] Read more »
I opened the green house door, and old school hip hop filtered through the warm, humid air. A crib sat adjacent to a children’s play area with various toys nestled amongst potted banana and fig trees. Erin was tending her starters which sprout from beds heated by copper pipes carrying geothermally heated water which emerges from the earth beneath the greenhouse.
In a recent post on his Original Green Blog, Steve Mouzon made the excellent point that while it might be gratifying and just to “take the hide off” BP’s CEO Tony Hayward, we are actually to blame, having created a suburban nation which continues to make us slaves to oil. Of course this is easy for New Urbanists to claim, but what else are we supposed to say about the emperor’s nudity? If all we do as a result of this disaster is make one multinational oil corporation pay heavily, we will have missed a huge opportunity to change our ways and begin to implement patterns of settlement that are actually sustainable.
I often wonder when I hear things like ‘change a light bulb, save the world’ just how deep our culture’s understanding of sustainability is. I’ll read an article that discusses how the American lifestyle needs to change, but the answer at the end has more to do with fuel efficient cars than urbanism or smart growth. This article is compelling to me because it demonstrates with solid data how New Urbanism and Smart Growth are a systemic approach to sustainability and dealing with the climate crisis…
The short film “Built to Last” won first place in The Congress for the New Urbanism CNU 17 video contest. I think environmentalism is often focused on symptoms rather than the underlying systemic cause of our global problems. Our automobile/ oil dependence is probably the largest man-made disaster in the world. What’s counter-intuitive is that [...] Read more »
