GreenCogBlog

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It has been a long time since I posted to this blog but after a year of pandemic many things have changed and something moved me to get back to it. Recently I saw a photo of Sim Van der Ryn in the local paper with the caption saying he would be speaking about his life along with his son Micah at a Shabbat Friday night so I thought I should get on the invite list. The Farallones Institute (1974 through 1990), is not yet in Wikipedia but it was long an inspiration to me. It was a non-profit sustainability training center and an outpost for forward environmental thinkers where ideas were put into action and tried out in a living community. There was both the integral urban home in Berkeley and a rural center in Occidental, CA (now the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center). Sim Van der Ryn was one of the founders. This was my first Shabbat; after everyone introduced themselves, and the reciting of blessings, and lighting of candles, Sim's son gave a presentation called "From Refugee to Refuge Creator."  Sim was born in 1935 in Holland and his family fled in 1939, the same day Germany invaded Poland! Nine months later the Nazi's invaded the Netherlands. His family had a non-ferrous metal business in the Netherlands. Sim's grandfather lost the business to the Nazi's and died with many other family members in Achwitz. A very sad story. Sim grew up in Queens NY and found nature in the vacant lots and puddles. He has 3 siblings and they were all in attendance via zoom, along with a few other family members. He went to a music & arts high school but pursued architecture to meet the family requirements of studying something practical, and studied at U of Michigan Ann Arbor. Apparently flat roofs were in when he was in college but he liked pitched roofs, which put him at odds with his professors. He was captivated by Buckminister Fuller's ideas. In 1958 he moved to CA. His first publication was a post occupancy evaluation of dorms. A new concept, to look at the performance of buildings after they were in use. He developed the accordion house for migrant farm workers, which unfolded like an accordion. He encouraged people to design their own environment and was a proponent of collaborative design. He also was a supporter of Berkeley's People's Park. The National Guard takeover of People's Park (under Gov. Reagan) was an experience that shook him enough that he fled Berkeley and moved to Inverness (West Marin). 1975 - 1978 he was State Architect under Governor Jerry Brown. During that time he spoke at Humboldt State when I was a student there. The audience included many back-to-the-Land folks, as they were abundant in those days and he said if you could build something without a permit you should do it, and if you quoted him as saying that he would deny it! Back in those days we talked about “appropriate technology,’ today we just call it “Green building.” He taught at Cal for a long time and has long been an advocate of biomimicry. Before  moving to the Bay Area I would come visit and the trip always included a stop at the Farallones Institute for insight and inspiration. Shalom Sim!

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The carbon footprint of a Californian is 10 tons per capita per year. I recently learned this from Ken Alex while he was giving an introductory talk about Governor Brown’s “Under 2 MOU” initiative. It got me thinking, if a person wanted to address their carbon footprint through sequestration (the backend, rather than reducing it on the frontend) probably the best way would be to plant trees. Being a coastal northern Californian I wondered how much a coastal redwood weighs. According to Redwood Empire, a Division of Pacific States Industries, Inc. a typical farmed Redwood tree will weigh approximately 50,000 pounds, or 25 tons. A packet of redwood seeds can be purchased for less than most of the coffee drinks at Starbucks, and a redwood sapling can be had for less than some of the more expensive coffee drinks. That means that if you planted one redwood tree for every 2-1/2 years of your life and nurtured them until they got big enough to survive on their own you would be carbon neutral. Over the course of a 75 year lifespan you would have planted 30 trees and created a nice grove (assuming you had the land).  For more information on Governor Brown’s memo of understanding agreement to limit the increase in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius, please visit: www.under2mou.org. The full text of the agreement signed today can be found here. 

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This 71-story highrise was completed in March 2011. The architects, SOM, had hoped to achieve net zero energy but it proved elusive. Still, it is very energy efficient and kudos for that!

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The modern solar cell just celebrated its 60th anniversary. This is a photo taken in 1983 when I, Ed Schuman, Russ Beebe, and Craig Benton installed these photovoltaic panels to power Ed's off-grid trout farm near Willits, CA.

Here is a nice article recapping progress of the photovoltaic cell. 

http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/History-of-the-modern-silicon-solar-cell-5428325.php#photo-6213785

(For some of us, Ronald Reagan's removal of the White House solar system in 1986 did not pass unnoticed.)

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The lavender cosmos in this photo sprouted through my concrete patio during the summer of 2012 - from some seeds spread by the previous year's garden flowers. I placed the potted plants around it so I wouldn't step on it. It intrigued me as I am always amazed by nature's resilience. 

The 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens offers a stunning example of nature's resilience here:  http://io9.com/a-stunning-example-of-natures-resilience-1450259093 

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Sea Change: The Seattle Times' ocean acidification special

Ocean acidification, the lesser-known twin of climate change, threatens to scramble marine life on a scale almost too big to fathom.

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What is the biggest challenge facing environmentalist? Climate Change? The hole in the Ozone? Or is it how to speak to non-environmentalist? Indeed it will take all of us to overcome the challenges of climate change and not everyone is interested in “saving the world” (even though they should be). Margaret Mead may have said "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has" but people forget that that small group found a way to change the attitude of many many others so what used to be normal became no longer OK. So it is up to us who do find it an interesting and a time-worthy challenge to create a world where most individuals can carry on in their normal daily tasks in a sustainable manner without having to give much thought to it. With that in mind I suggest a book: The Green Marketing Manifesto by John Grant and I offer this link for a Climate One audio discussion on how to communicate environmental issues. It contains a couple or particularly nice gems like – “speak truth to power, but not to harm.” I also like the tale about one speaker’s father who was a climate change skeptic until he got solar panels on his roof, and that act somehow allowed him to accept the truth about climate change science – interesting how the human psyche works.  The idea of drawing a line and making one side the good guys and the other side the bad guys is too limiting for an issue as big as climate change. We need to work to create collaboration over competition (I recently heard the singer Linda Ronstadt rail against American Idol because it pits musicians against each other, when music is all about working together) . We need to make sustainability as integrated into our society as flushing the toilet (or whatever the new equivalent is). People and companies should want to join in because doing otherwise would be seen as just unacceptable. Maybe we need to emphasize aspects of environmentalism that promote weight loss.

Here’s the link: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2013-12-10/skeptics-and-smog

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A Date with Destiny: 2036

Most scientists concur that two degrees C of warming above the temperature during preindustrial time would harm all sectors of civilization--food, water, health, land, national security, energy and economic prosperity. "equilibrium climate sensitivity" (ECS) is a common measure of the heating effect of greenhouse gases. It is a guide to when that will happen if we continue emitting CO2 at our business-as-usual pace.

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California drought: Solar desalination plant shows promise

Quietly whirring away in a dusty field in the Central Valley is a shiny solar energy machine that may someday solve many of California's water problems. [...] within a year, WaterFX intends to begin expanding that one small startup plant into a sprawling collection of 36 machines that together can pump out 2 million gallons of purified water daily. [...] that makes it a more economically attractive option than any of the 17 conventional desalination plants planned throughout California. If Mandell can pull it off, the tiny farming town where he is starting his enterprise could be known as ground zero for one of the most revolutionary water innovations in the state's history. "Eventually, if this all goes where I think it can, California could wind up with so much water it's able to export it instead of having to deal with shortages," Mandell said, standing alongside the 525-foot-long solar reflector that is the heart of his machine. Most use drip irrigation instead of water-intensive sprinklers and are hooked up to an unusual drainage system that captures used irrigation water and directs it into fields of wheatgrass, a salt-tolerant crop sold for cattle feed. [...] that drainage system is little more than a creative way to get rid of irrigation water that's too salty for most uses once it leaches through farm soil. Water that dribbles down from nearby hills, and through the soil in the Central Valley after being used for irrigation, collects so much salt, selenium, boron and other minerals that it's not fit for human consumption. The solar plant captures the foothill runoff and sucks in used irrigation water from a French drain-style system 6 to 8 feet under the crops, and sends that tainted water through a series of pipes and tanks that heat it. The heat comes from the plant's huge, parabolic-shaped solar reflector, which focuses the sun on a long tube containing mineral oil. More conventional desalination plants - such as a $1 billion operation being built near San Diego - use a reverse osmosis process, in which brackish water is forced through screens to filter out the contaminants.

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‘The Sixth Extinction’ by Elizabeth Kolbert

I was once told there is a Chinese curse that translates to "May you live in interesting times." Apparently Elizabeth Kolbert thinks we live in such times. 

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Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet By Bill McKibben. Let me say that I admire Bill McKibben and 350.org; if it wasn’t for his work I probably wouldn’t know that the safe target for CO2 in the atmosphere is 350 PPM. But I hated this book. Half of this book presents a very convincing argument that we have altered the earth to the point that it is no longer the planet we were all born into so we might as well rename it – Eaarth. I’m sure there are plenty of doomsday books out there covering climate change but I prefer books that offer plans for salvation and hope (as I once heard said: “It is too late for pessimism”). There wasn’t much in this half that I haven’t heard before, mostly from Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization by Lester R. Brown. There were a few interesting tid-bits like one barrel of oil yields as much as 25,000 man-hours – more than a decade of human labor; but by the time I got through it I’d decided to hide under the covers until the End-of-Days. Bill attempts to offer us some hope. He gives us a history of the American revolution that he recalls from his youth as a tour director in Lexington MA; pointing out that you can be a dissident and still be patriotic. From there we are told about Vermont’s unique history and how it offers the model for the needed form of government (really, your home state, little Vermont is going to save the world?). This book echoes that there is no silver bullet solution, but maybe a “silver buckshot.” We need to conserve, we need more decentralized energy sources, including replacing petroleum heating with wood heating (really? I was convinced we shouldn’t emit one more molecule of CO2!); more decentralized farms and farmers markets. Community is important (Think globally, act neighborly), and the internet will help us to accomplish all this. Good, I guess I should blog about it. 

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Zero Net Energy Buildings are coming. Are you ready? Here is an introductory article defining the nomenclature and organizations involved; 

ABCs of ZNE (Zero Net Energy)

http://www.thinkdovetail.com/theloop.php 

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Do you have a connection to nature? Aldo Leopold, in his book A Sand County Almanac, encouraged ordinary citizens to develop a connection with nature where they live. Liam O'Brien was a successful actor just back in San Francisco after years of performing in "Les Miserables" on Broadway when he became entranced by a butterfly fluttering in his backyard. That butterfly -- a Western Tiger Swallowtail -- sparked an obsession that would change the course of his life. O'Brien has spent the last few decades learning everything about local butterflies and moths, and championing their preservation. Here is an interview of O'Brien on the Bay Area's KQED. http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201402071000

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My friend John in front of his new all-electric Leaf holding the bumper sticker I bought him. When I talk up the idea of getting an all-electric car with people I sometimes get one of two negative comments. One is, "they are not really that green" - well they are, unless you power them with coal-produced electricity. In California a grid-powered electric car has the equivalent carbon footprint of a 70 MPG gas car (more than 40% better than a hybrid). But with a higher manufacturing footprint of 70g CO2e/km for the electric vehicle vs a gasoline car with just 40g CO2e/km (see http://theenergycollective.com/lindsay-wilson/234736/electric-cars-aren-t-green-myth-debunked). The other comment is "what about the battery disposal?" Batteries like in this car will be transformed into scrap commodities like cobalt, copper, nickel and lithium carbonate; and probably end up in a laptop battery like the one I am using now. Though lithium currently fetches very little on the open market, other components in lithium-ion batteries, such as nickel and cobalt, will make the batteries far too valuable to send to the landfill. (see http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lithium-ion-batteries-hybrid-electric-vehicle-recycling/)

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I love this cartoon!

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The Bullitt Center is the New Standard

I went to Seattle for some fun but made sure I toured the Bullitt Center on MLK Jr Day. This past week I was at the Living Future Institute's Net Positive Conference where Denis Hayes gave the opening keynote address. He talked about the challenge to run a mile in under 4 minutes, which was first achieved in 1954 (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-minute_mile). The 4-minute mile was thought to be unattainable, physiologically impossible until Roger Bannister did it. And once he set that new record it only took two months for others to break it. So it is with the Bullitt Center. Now that it has been shown to be possible other net zero energy and net zero water buildings will be built. Here is a nice video tour of the Bullitt Center: 

http://youtu.be/kHtgie2t5UI 

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Tonight I heard Melanie Fitzpatrick speak, she is a climate scientist with the UCS Climate and Energy Program, and an expert on local and global impacts of climate change. She had a great analogy when talking about the earth's CO2 levels over the last 800,000 years fluctuating between 180 PPM (ice age) and 280 PPM (milder climate). She said its like the earth has always been staying comfortable using 2 - 3 blankets; but now that we've surpassed the 400 PPM level, its like we've added another blanket. Click the link for the graph correlating atmospheric temperature and CO2 levels. She also pointed out that after 100 years only a third of the CO2 released into the atmosphere will be gone, with the remaining 2/3's still there in 1000 years.