Housing & urban design – Sept 25
-Rethinking the Street Space: Toolkits and Street Design Manuals
-One day, all houses will be built this way
-Stockton Williams on urban retrofits, Obama, and the sexiness of caulking guns
Buildings
Transition Towns – Sept 25
-Resilience Takes Form – A Handbook for Transition
-A Detailed Analysis of Somerset County Council’s Transition Resolution
-Curry Stone Prize Finalists announced, includes Treehugger fave Rob Hopkins
Original Sin
In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we’ve paid bitterly for some of that. But now it’s our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise.
Solutions & sustainability – Sept 17
-What we need to form Florida’s green economy
-Britain’s first housing co-op leads the way in sustainable living
-No Impact Man and the Pursuit of Happiness
-Enabling Inward Community Investment: insights from the DTA conference
-Squatters’ rights
-One Man’s Trash …
-Real people, real preparation, Part 5, Carolyn Baker Interviews Robin Rucker
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Scale
Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels.
Solutions & sustainability – Sept 4
-How on Earth Can We Feed 8 Billion People?
-Solar Power from Space: Moving Beyond Science Fiction
-Johnson announces awards for ‘low carbon zones’
-The Cruel Cost of Clunkers
-How to Grow Democracy
-Bike-o-rama: A Roundup of the Best in New Bikes, Bike Infrastructure, Blogs, Books and More
The show must go on
It is a sign that the world may be upside down when French tourists in Las Vegas take pictures of themselves in front of the Paris Las Vegas hotel and casino complex which includes a half-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower. And, yet this is not the strangest behavior I observed recently during a trip to southern Nevada, an area that along with the much of the West is suffering through the worst drought on record.
Solutions & sustainability – Aug 13
-Apocalypse Later? I’m Going Local Now.
-Local Future: Peak Oil, Climate Change & the Economic Crisis
-LOOK: Lanefab Microhousing
A thing of beauty
For those concerned about a sustainable future, changing the reigning industrially-conditioned aesthetic–which is now deeply ingrained in the public mind–will be as much of a challenge as changing the underlying system that created it.
Viva 1910…or…You can’t go home again but you can live in the same neighborhood
Resistance to changing the culture we now possess (or possesses us?), a culture that is arguably fatally destructive to the biosphere, includes the argument that we can’t go back to the way we used to live 100 years ago or some other harsher time where we tied our shoes, cleaned floors with mops, and (God forbid) churned butter.
