It’s all about the soil. We’re all connected to the soil; we just don’t know it. If you can’t grow healthy soil, you can’t grow healthy plants. If you can’t grow healthy plants, you can’t grow healthy people. And if you can’t grow healthy people, how are you going to grow healthy communities? We talk about sustainable communities. Without healthy food, you can’t have sustainable communities.
Will Allen, of Growing Power, summing up in an interview in the November Urbanite.
An item this week in Annapolis newspaper The Capital reports a move made in builder-developer cooperation with environment protection interests, toward improved stormwater handling in the area. Only one builder, in only one of its ‘luxury home’ developments, but evidence of a turn to better practices underway, nevertheless. The builder-developer, consulting with a landscape architect and a Baltimore ecosystem conservation company, replaced standard stormwater collector construction for the site with construction adapted from stream restoration methods. The new approach promotes on-site absorption by plants and drainage through soil, rather than funneling large collection volume via pipe directly into a natural stream.
Here’s more on the watersheds issue, one of the things that’s been getting my attention in an increasing way lately. Emphasis, this time, on the practical picture.
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) includes in a recent edition of its weekly news rundown a short account, here, of a study recommending watershed management reform. The study has to do particularly with land development & infrastructure in the urban context — storm runoff controls, in other words, rather than pollution per se. Development & infrastructure in urban context is especially relevant, of course, to the Chesapeake Bay’s problems.
GreenSource The kind of environmental work you do has obviously become much more mainstream in the past few years. What is your perspective . . . ?
John Todd When you work with complex systems like nature, it takes a long time to accumulate enough — I’m going to use the word stories — about how nature works to be able to hold it all in your mental hands. It would have been impossible for me 20 years ago to talk about taking a whole region and using ecological principles to create a new and durable economy. (And I never, ever expected to win the Bucky Fuller Challenge, because I wasn’t offering a magic bullet.) But before then, it was impossible for me to imagine an eco-machine that would take toxic waste and render it harmless. Time is a big factor. I think there is also a shift today in how people perceive our relevance. In the past, people found our work to be . . . quixotic . . . . Everyone knew at the time we could drag petroleum out of the ground forever and that industrial foods were going to feed us all.
From an interview with biologist & ‘eco-designer’ John Todd in GreenSource.
Aside from the provisions designed to improve the financial system, I am pleased to report the new law extends a number of key tax incentives for energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy — long-standing AIA priorities. Specifically, the energy efficiency commercial building tax deduction, a critical federal incentive for green commercial building that was set to expire at the end of the year, will be extended until December 31, 2013. The extension of this deduction has been one of the AIA’s top legislative priorities for nearly two years.
From a letter praising the expansive bailout law just put through, sent yesterday by AIA president Marshall Purnell’s office.
DS Yeah, I’ve said this earlier, I’m hopeful about the tax credits, and I think we’ve got some real momentum on that. I’m more skeptical about off-shore drilling and those sorts of issues.
SR Is this just because there’s not enough time, and the differences are so great, and you’ve got rules in the Senate that uh allow for filibusters, the President’s gonna veto, there’s just too much to do too quickly?
CH Well, that’s certainly the fall-back excuse, but the real reason is that the Republicans really believe that they have a winning issue, politically, in this coming election by hammering the Democrats on their opposition to off-shore drilling.
SR Clearly the Democrats agree, or they wouldn’t be moving this bill.
CH Exactly.
Maryland-regional business & government news service The Daily Record has run a useful little series this past week on the USGBC’s ever more popular, ten-year-old system for establishing buildings’ and builders’ ‘greenness’ — ‘LEED,’ for Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design. There’s no head-page for the series, unfortunately. To read the whole, see the last article — a look at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s very successful headquarters, the first LEED-Platinum certified building — and trace the series back from article to article using links under the series’ ‘Uncertain Savior’ graphic.
Of the articles looking at criticism of the LEED system, this one citing building-performance guru Joe Lstiburek’s public concerns is worth specific notice. His critique is a bit narrow in focus and perhaps doesn’t sufficiently credit the USGBC’s holistic aims for built-environment reform, but it seems an important one for making sense of the green building problem.
Mr Lovins should be pleased, but his satisfaction at having been proved right is tempered by lingering unease that there are echoes of the 1980s in today’s debate. The main problem with the approach to energy in the 1970s, he argues, was that the issue was defined as a supply shortage. “The question they asked was how to get more energy, at any price, instead of asking: ‘How should we use energy, why are we using it so wastefully, and what do people really use energy for?’” he says.
The magazine meets the man — in an article here.
Yesterday General Motors announced it will go solar at a plant it maintains here in Baltimore County. The rooftop installation by SunEdison (a Maryland company to the south, in Washington D.C. suburbs) will be one of the largest on this side of the country. This was noteworthy enough to be local radio news yesterday afternoon. The Sun’s report is here — oddly buried a bit in back pages today.
“‘I can tell all our new customers by all the questions they asked,’ [Harford County farmers’ market seller Cindi] Umbarger said. ‘They asked about how our animals are housed. They asked about hormones and antibiotics. They asked about where our feed comes from.’”
The Sun offers a Baltimore-region picture of the surge this season in consumer interest in locally grown produce.