planted city

Here are a few photos of rain soaked lupins, grasses, and a bright, red ladybug. I love life in macro. It’s amazing.

Changing Paradigms: New vs. Old Thinking

Last week I went to a talk on “leadership and creating a sustainable future” out at UBC’s brand new and ultra green Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability. (I’ll post some shots of the building in another post).

Above is a slide from Göran Carstedt’s presentation highlighting the “new logic” central to creating large-scale, transformational change. If it’s the type of thing that floats your boat check out his 2010 TEDxAthens talk, which covers much of the same territory. 

A good thing about rainy cities: puddles become mirrors.  

In this case it was a slightly flooded sidewalk out at UBC this afternoon.

From the Vancouver Sun:

Since retrofitting buildings to make them sustainable is both more expensive and less effective than building them right in the first place, we create 50- to 100-year consequences when we construct buildings without consideration for sustainability.

Such buildings are leading sources of greenhouse gases, guzzle up our natural resources and are expensive to maintain for their century-or-so-long lifespan. The encouraging news is that many of these 100-year consequences are avoidable. Next-generation green buildings can be built now with mostly off-the-shelf technology at a cost similar to equivalent conventional buildings over their life cycles (in other words, higher construction costs are offset by lower operating and capital renewal costs). The University of British Columbia’s new Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) is one such example.

CIRS captures energy from the sun, the ground and a neighbouring, less-efficient building. In doing so, it not only covers its own heating requirements, but returns energy to the less-efficient building, thus reducing the campus’ natural gas consumption. Its wood structure — much of which utilizes pine beetle-affected wood from B.C. and Alberta — sequesters more than 600 tonnes of carbon and offsets greenhouse gas emissions from other non-renewable materials used in the building’s construction. It satisfies its own water needs by collecting Vancouver’s abundant rainwater and treats it on-site, leaving it cleaner.

Why are such best practices, increasingly adopted in Europe, still not universally adopted by developers and construction companies in North America? The barriers are not technical and rarely are they purely economic. Rather, they are institutional: codes of practice, regulatory requirements, performance criteria, even job descriptions push us toward less sustainable choices. To give one example, it is very difficult institutionally to transfer the benefits of lower operating and capital renewal costs from the operating side of the ledger to the capital side. As a result, sustainable buildings that have higher capital costs but actually cost less on a total cost of ownership basis are typically not built.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Inhabitat via UBC)

Sustainability: ‘The Story of Bill Rees and the Ecological Footprint’

“Do you know your ecological footprint?”  You can measure it here.

(Graphic credit: Global Footprint Network)

Bill McKibben: ‘Notes on the Climate Fight’ 

From The Terry Global Speaker Series @ UBC:

Though many have come to accept the scientific consensus around climate change, political realities still stifle the hope of real climate action. To help address this political impasse, Bill McKibben will share his invaluable experience mobilizing global grassroots activism. He will share stories from the front lines of the climate fight – from every corner of planet, including our own backyard. Of particular interest to Canadian university students, he will address the Keystone XL pipeline and Alberta Tar Sands development. Some stories are hopeful, some are not, but one thing is certain: we finally have a movement, and Bill would like you to be a part of it.

You can read about his UBC talk and visit to Vancouver here.