Image credit: National Geographic

Another Bad Week, Or a Really Good One? Good news grows as slow as a tree, but bad news flows like a broken oil main. That seems to be the lesson from this week as BP, the U.S. government and an armada of ships and volunteers tried but mostly failed to contain the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Though BP had some success at slowing the spigot, oil is pooling in the wetlands of the Mississippi Delta and resides at unmeasured quantities in the deeps. There it has joined the Loop Current with a probable next stop in Florida.

Meanwhile, 1,500 miles north, an equally momentous event drew little attention: an agreement to curtail or end logging on 72 million acres of Canada’s boreal forest, an area roughly the size of France. An unlikely consortium of logging companies and Greenpeace agreed to halt the chainsaws altogether for three years in an area as big as Montana, and to develop a sustainable-forestry program for the remainder. The accord might be the forerunner to permanent protection for an area that encompasses two-thirds of Canada’s logging concessions.

The Week’s Best Green Ideas: This week, GreenTech TV took a look at how Rush University Medical Center has become one of the greenest hospitals in the country. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

At Cleantechies, Chuck Colgan told California building owners, brokers and managers how to prepare for AB 1103, a California law that asks for 12 months of energy-consumption records when a building is sold, re-leased or financed.

Triple Pundit produced a field guide to the three organizations that can help a company develop a framework for its  energy use: The Climate Registry, the US EPA Climate Leaders program, and the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Also, the U.S. Green Building Council told President Obama how his administration can make America’s buildings far more efficient without asking permission from those squirrelly congressmen.

Too Hot? Bring Your Own Water. Last month was the warmest April in recorded history, according to the United Nations. If you’d like to contemplate this alarming news from the shores of Walden Pond, carry your own hydration — the city of Concord has become the first in the country to ban plastic water bottles.

Will Nissan Leaf You Out? Pre-orders for the hit Japanese electric car reached 13,000 this week, a thousand more than Nissan planned to make. If you’d rather not crash the dealership, wait ’till next year and rent one from Hertz.

Quiet Excitement: At Infineon Raceway in California, the TTXGP race pitted electric motorcycles against each other in the first — and the quietest — race of its kind.

Price Check, Aisle Nine: At the Lightfair International convention in Las Vegas, Sylvania, Toshiba and Philips debuted their new LED bulbs for use in home lamps. Each bulb, as well as General Electric’s, will retail by early 2011 or sooner, for $40 to $60.  Also, at the National Hardware Show, Honeywell announced that its $6,500 home wind turbine would arrive at Ace Hardware stores by August.

A Tweet that Really Matters: Populations of 150 North American bird species are plummeting as their habitat is destroyed. Could one source of their salvation reside as an app on your phone?

The Weekly: Oil Spreads, Forest Are Spared, and Green Ideas Sprout is a post from: The Ferris Files

The standard has been in the works for years and more than 200 test sites are already built or underway, including the Olympic village that opened in Vancouver this winter.  Now any neighborhood or large development is eligible to apply.

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards have been widely adopted because they don’t dictate how to build, but assign points for every smart step a project takes. The U.S. Green Building Council, sponsor of LEED, took the same flexible approach in creating the new ND (Neighborhood Development) benchmarks. Certain actions, like avoiding floodplains and cutting energy use, are required, but a builder garners other points by developing walkable streets and bike paths, locating near public transit and schools, orienting buildings to make use of the sun’s heat, or managing wastewater and re-using historic buildings.

At a launch party, the creators of LEED-ND said they hope that the standard gives building developers, not just guidance, but recognition and even profit for doing the right thing. They hoped to close the chapter on sprawl in the world’s suburbs, and develop neighborhoods that are more compact, with work, play and shopping all right nearby.

“We in the environmental movement have been very good at identifying the problem, as with the problems of sprawl. We environmentalists have not been so adept…at identifying solutions. This LEED-ND closes that gap,” said Kaid Benfield, director of smart growth for the Natural Resources Defense Council and co-creator of LEED-ND.

The announcement was made at The Alaire, a LEED-ND project underway in surburban Maryland off Rockville Pike, “a sprawling and segregated office corridor,” as developer Tony Greenberg described it.

The Alaire is an example of what LEED-ND is trying to accomplish. Rising from 26 acres of former parking lots instead of from virgin land, the complex has taken many uncommon measures to reduce its impact and earn more LEED points.

It uses 30 percent less water than other projects of its size, assisted by a stormwater management vault and low-flush toilets in all of its common bathrooms. From a top-floor unit, with its energy-efficient appliances, one looks down on the saline swimming pool and a rooftop garden with three-foot-tall grasses planted in a matrix made from recycled plastic bottles.

But some of the most important innovations are at street level. Every street is connected to every other street – no cul-de-sacs here – which will make the entire two-million-square-foot complex walkable.

On one corner, right next to the curbside solar-powered trash compactor,  four storefronts are under construction. They include a nail salon, a Chevy Chase bank, a Subway sandwich joint and a sushi restaurant.

Most important of all, the apartments are adjacent to the Twinbrook commuter rail station. The access to public transit, combined with storefronts and offices dotted throughout, means that people may someday be able to live in the Alaire without ever needing to suffer the congestion of Rockville Pike.

LEED Takes It to the Neighborhood is a post from: The Ferris Files

As I walk around to its stores and restaurants,  I ask myself: Could I see living in a big city, not as a lark, but forever?

The concentric squares and cul-de-sacs surrounding my childhood home in Sunnyvale, California.

The rectangular and diagonal grid around my apartment in Washington, D.C.

This is an unsettling question for a guy who grew up in the suburbs and just kind of assumed that, like it or not, back to the suburbs he would eventually return.

At the same time I’ve been reading about how to make suburbs a “greener” place to live. One way is to get people out of their cars. When city dwellers emigrated to the suburbs in the second half of the 20^th Century, they gained a lawn but lost the ability to shop or worship or play without driving long distances. Now that we have all these suburbs, how can they be modified so the carbon-spewing car stays in the driveway, and the people walk to schools and shops?

One of the writers I came across was F. Kaid Benfield, who explores how a neighborhood’s design influences whether people walk or drive. It’s not just a matter of exercise or personal virtue. Benfield did schematics of a cul-de-sac neighborhood and a traditional street grid.

Which do you think encourages a person to walk?

This got me thinking: How does the design of my neighborhood change the way I move through it? And if it’s important to me to be able to walk my community, how do the city and the suburb stack up?

I turned to Google Maps to find out. I asked for the route from my home to local landmarks, and set it to “Walking” rather than “By Car.” Of course Google doesn’t find a route as well as a local person might, but at least it gives a common reference point.

Here’s the route to the nearest high school:

The route from my childhood home to Fremont High School. Distance: 0.8 mile. Walk time: 15 minutes.

The route from my D.C. apartment to Cardozo High School. Distance: 0.5 mile. Walk time: Nine minutes.

Check out how many cul-de-sacs the suburban route has to go around!

Here’s the walking distance to the closest supermarket:

Distance: 0.9 mile. Walk time: 18 minutes.

Distance: 0.1 mile. Walk time: 2 minutes.

Everyone knows that in the suburbs, the store and the school are farther away. The surprising part is that those destinations are made even farther away by the suburbs’ design. No wonder the suburban streets are full of cars but empty of people!

Of course, walkability is only one part of the decision about where to spend my life. But I imagine a lot of people would like to have the spaciousness of the suburbs while still being able to walk to get a quart of milk. Doing so would involve some novel changes to the suburban landscape. We’d have to punch walking routes through the cul-de-sacs and change zoning laws so a subdivision could have its own mini-downtown, with a hardware store and market, and maybe a restaurant or two.

Surburb or City? A Shoe-Leather Perspective is a post from: The Ferris Files