Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest and WiserEarth

Paul Hawken speaking at a Bioneers event about his book, Blessed Unrest. Worth a look, about 5 minutes.

technorati tags: bioneers, wiserearth, paulhawken, blessedunrest

International Day of Peace

This past Friday, September 21, was the International Day of Peace. Here in Chatham, NY a group of us gathered for poetry, a bit of song and a bit of prayer- T'was a lovely thing.



Paul Nowak is holding a sign made by Jillian O'Connell.

technorati tags: idp, internationaldayofpeace, peaceday

All Edibles

Sara Weihman and Kirk Saunders set up a display at Dwell on Design, San Francisco, representing their company, All Edibles. Revolutionary idea of making planting an edible garden into a business. Leave it to Berkeley!! This is an idea that could spread. It's a good one.

technorati tags: alledibles, dwell

MAD at Dwell

Have to post some images of my booth. With huge thanks and hugs to Liz McIlvaine for help with the dotted backdrop fabric, George Gruel for the stunning photographs and large prints of them, Jan Gruel for her lighting expertise and John Wallner for his lights and friendship. Thanks also go out to Millie Rossman-Kid for help with new business card and look, Sara Weihman and mostly, Doug Cohen, who helped me set up and continues his networking magic....

Michael McDonough

Michael McDonough spoke this morning and what an amazing guy! He has a project called e-House. He has been working on the project for 7 years and said he'll probably continue developing it for the next 30. For the first 5 years he sourced everything. "Invent nothing, Google everything". He also said that "in the past 15 years, more building innovations have been made than in the past 15,000".

To consolidate what he has learned from this project, he boiled down 5 learning points:
1. Conventional building materials are good conductors - bad for insulation.
i.e. metal, glass, ceramic; all materials we use to cook with. Better to use aerated auto-clave concrete or other high insulation product whose inherent quality is to insulate.
2. Remove dampness.
3. Light - daylight combined with artificial light - use a dimmer. Watch where natural light falls and take advantage of good exposures. Be conscious of what you want to see.
4, Be where you are.
5. How do you want to live? Think about the site and what is there.

He also mentioned that many Leed certified high rises have an r-factor (insulation defense) of 2-3 (40 is optimum, 10 is barely hanging on). I found this confusing so asked him abut it later. He told me that Leed certification, the US Green Building Standard, does not do post occupancy studies. Building Science is a rigorous scientific study team which analyzes post occupancy r-rating and determines, though physics, the long term insulation standard of buildings.

Fascinating stuff, this.

Dwell on Design

Dwell on Design has just opened in San Francisco. As an exhibitor, I am currently sitting in the audience listening to John Hockenberry and others talk about architecture and social change, with a particular focus on sustainability, bubbling up as the highest levels of leadership are abandoned. It is a promising start to what is clearly going to be an exciting weekend. I will be blogging more than usual in the next 3 days, so stay tuned...

Social Networks

There is a lot of really cool social networking going on online. Unfortunately there is also some major creep stuff happening too. I joined Quechup at the invitation of a trusted contact, only to find out the site will spam your entire address book, possibly after you quit! Sorry if you got an invite, please disregard. I do like Facebook, though.