planted city

Seen around town: a bird’s eye view of the Stanley Park seawall this past weekend. The seawall is grade separated with lanes for folks on bikes and foot.

Source: Cottage Country & The David Suzuki Foundation

Earlier in the summer we hiked the Ripple Rock Trail near Campbell River on Vancouver Island. It’s a short, 3-hour hike that ends on a rocky bluff overlooking Seymour Narrows. In 1958, it was the site of the largest non-nuclear human generated explosion of all time. It’s a beautiful place to eat a sandwich, feel the breeze, and watch birds of prey flying overhead. We were lucky enough to see a pod of transient orcas swimming up the Narrows while we were there.

Some morning light in a great little park on the other side of the Laurel Street overpass here in Vancouver.

A big ol’ drop of water on a hosta leaf. It rained a lot yesterday.

First sighting of cherry blossoms this year! C’mon Spring, show me what you got!

Some early glimpses of #Spring here in Vancouver, Canada

From Fast Company:

Ever since the invention of the skyscraper, the contest between cities to see who could be home to the tallest building has had a symbolic potency on par with the space race. Now two of America’s “greenest” cities are engaged in a whole new sort of architectural cage match, and in the process they’re inverting the dated priorities of the profligate, fossil-fuel soaked 20th century and instead designing buildings based on the harmonious functioning of ecosystems.

Within weeks of each other, groups in both Seattle and Oregon announced that they were building the world’s “greenest” office building. These structures go way beyond the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Gold standard, aiming instead for the much more stringent and results-oriented Living Building Standard.

The defining feature of the Living Building standard is that, true to its name, a building must behave like a living organism. And not just a wasteful, unsustainable individual, but an entire, self-contained ecosystem. A Living Building must produce all of the electricity it uses, and collect 100 percent of the water it consumes. Both requirements mean that a living building must be extremely efficient with both energy and water in addition to being especially good at collecting both.

So far only three buildings in the world have attained Living Building certification, in part because a structure’s performance must be measured for a full year to establish its bona fides. So it will be some time until we know whether—and by what measure—Seattle or Oregon is home to the “world’s greenest building.”

Check out the details of each building and the rest of the article here.

Trevor Hancock, senior scholar at the University of Victoria’s school of public health and social policy, quoted in the article, ‘Soaking up nature may help cure what ails you’.  

(Photo credit: NRDC)

Here’s a pic of some water laden Old Man’s Beard (‘Usnea’) in Vancouver Island’s Pacific temperate rainforest. The Sucwoa River is out of focus in the background. I was up in the area in early August to go kayaking in Nootka Sound. The place is teeming with life.