> "Steve Sauer, Seattle resident and Boeing aircraft interior designer, was simply looking for some storage space when he found the tiny room that would become his home. But at just 182 square feet, these DIY living quarters required a decade of work, countless hours of wrangling with city planners, and just about all of Sauer's engineering expertise.
Fair Companies recently toured the micro-apartment, dubbed the "pico dwelling," with Sauer offering insights into his design process. "When I very first started designing this thing and started thinking about it, I was thinking 'bicycle messenger:' a 22-year-old bicycle messenger with eight pieces of clothing and a bicycle and almost nothing else, just living in the city," he explained.
Moreover, he said, "I like pushing the limit to see what I can do with the smallest kind of thing, I guess, in all ways. I guess being an engineer I like pushing the limits of efficiency all over the place. It's just interesting to me." Indeed, the way he was able to not only design but build virtually everything himself, mostly using re-purposed IKEA tables, is some Tony Stark level genius."
New York's Resilient House entry.
>"AIA (American Institute of Architects) Presents ‘Designing Recovery’ Awards. The AIA has concluded an ideas competition aimed at designing disaster-responsive homes for New York, New Orleans, and Joplin, Mo. The AIA has announced the three winners of its Designing Recovery competition, which was launched this year in collaboration with Architecture for Humanity, Dow Building Solutions, Make It Right, and St. Bernard Project. The ideas competition solicited visions of sustainable homes capable of withstanding natural disasters specific to three regions: New York, New Orleans, and Joplin, Mo. With recent meteorological events leaving swaths of destroyed houses in their wake within each of these areas—Superstorm Sandy, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and a series of tornadoes, respectively—the competition’s aim is to foster new strategies both for rebuilding sustainably in post-disaster relief situations, and for ensuring that new structures in these vulnerable areas can remain standing during future weather-related disasters."
>"Geoff McDonald: Two Ways HR Can Aid the Sustainability Agenda. When strategy and culture collide, culture wins. If your sustainability strategy grinds against the existing culture within your organisation, your people will carry on with old behaviors despite it. So what can Human Resources do, as custodians of that culture, to play an active part in the sustainability agenda and help the success of sustainability strategies?
1. Build an infrastructure that requires the business to do well by doing good. Policies and processes within your organisation have huge influence on the way employees behave. It’s hard work, but reviewing HR policies and processes under a sustainability lens will have huge impact on your organisation’s culture.
2. Deliver future and current leadership that is truly engaged with and advocating the sustainability agenda. There are too many leaders who are aware of and understand sustainability. Make sure you’re bringing in leaders who live the sustainability agenda. These are leaders who advocate the change, who behave, say and do as per the new way of doing business – where having purpose is at the forefront. Hunt for courageous leadership, someone prepared to put his or her reputation on the line to deliver a more sustainable future for your organisation."
>"George Washington University's Virginia Science and Technology Campus is now home to the world's first walkable solar-paneled sidewalk with the completion of a 100 square foot solar walkway, dubbed (what else?) the Solar Walk.
As part of the University's "sustainable Solar Walk" project, 27 walkable solar PV panels were installed as an extension of a public sidewalk on the campus, along with a solar trellis.The semi-transparent solar panels have a peak capacity of 400 Watts, and is designed to power some 450 LED lights to illuminate the solar pathway after dark. The panels, which were designed by Onyx Solar, are said to be slip-resistant and able to stand up to regular foot traffic."
> "Social sustainability is one of three pillars of sustainability. These three pillars of the sustainability model include Environmental Sustainability,Economic Sustainability and Social Sustainability. Out of these three pillars, Social Sustainability seems to receive less attention publicly. Social sustainability includes aspects such as livability, human rights, labor rights, social responsibility, community development, etc.
Why do we need social sustainability?
We need social sustainability in order to provide equality and a good quality of life within communities, particularly communities of the less fortunate. The basic notion of sustainability is taking responsibility for the fact that our actions have an impact on others, including the world at large, and also taking future generations into account while doing so. Social sustainability considers the entire worldview in relation to globalization, communities and culture."
> "Simply stated. walkable is good, but sit-able is better. And it's time for the next big focal point and the next big idea, The Sit-able City.
Why would this shift lead to an enhanced understanding of place?
The sit-able realm is a place of human universals, broader than the walking that transports us there or passes through. And the sit-able is about far more than street furniture and sidewalk dining, pop-up urbanism and Parking Day.
Rather, sit-able places are key, interdisciplinary focal points where the delight of "placemaking" and cultural traditions of "watching the world go by" merge with the sometimes conflicting domains of law and politics, economic development, public safety, gentrification and the homeless.
Sitting, in order to rest, converse, beg and sell is what people have always done, and captures a major part of urban life. Sitting with style, grace, safety and reflection is a major element of "place capital" -- an increasing buzzword for urban success.
In summary, a greater focus on the sit-able is an invitation to rich discussion and ready illustration based on human tradition. The sit-able is where those walking home meet the homeless. It embraces parks and park users, places to read and those benches where we offer a place to rest to someone who has a better reason to sit down than you, or me."
>How IBM, SAP, PepsiCo and MTV link sustainability to career development.
"Which approach do you think is more effective for learning a language quickly: hours of classroom grammar drills or a concentrated period of immersion in the country where it's the native lexicon?
With all due respect to academics, most of us would guess the real-world experience, and increasingly, the same can be said about employee engagement initiatives.
No matter their original philanthropic or sustainability purpose, pro bono work experiences at home and abroad or programs such as social sabbaticals that combine business experts with non-profits in emerging markets are becoming valuable tools for professional development and workforce retention. TD Bank's quest to embed environmental awareness across its entire U.S. banking organization is one vivid example, and this theme was sounded loudly and often by a wide array of corporate sustainability and human resources executives speaking during the Commit!Forum conference this week in New York."
>Standing in his flatbed truck, Marc Goss touches “take off” on his iPad 3 and a $300 AR Drone whirs into the air as his latest weapon to fight elephant poachers around
Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve.
Besides the almost 2 foot-long drone, Goss and other conservationists are using night-vision goggles and Google Earth to halt the decline of Kenya’s wildlife, which helps attract $1 billion a year in tourism. With elephant ivory sold for as much as $1,000 a kilogram in Hong Kong, Kenya is facing its most serious threat from poaching in almost a quarter of a century, according to the United Nations.
At least 232 elephants have been killed in the year to Sept. 30, adding to 384 last year from a population of 40,000. Demand for illicit ivory from expanding economies such as China andThailand has doubled since 2007, according to the UN Environment Programme.
Goss and his team have put collars with global positioning system devices on 15 elephants so they can be tracked on a computer overlaying their paths on Google Earth. That way the animals, who have names such as Madde, after Goss’s wife, Fred, Hugo and Polaris, can be followed to see if they’ve strayed into areas at risk of poaching or human conflict.
Goss hopes to buy 10 more drones and to modify them by adding a mechanism that releases capsaicin, the active component in chili pepper, when elephants stray near dangerous areas.Paint balls loaded with chili pepper are being used in Zambia’s lower Zambezi region to deter elephants from high-risk zones.
“Drones are basically the future of conservation; a drone can do what 50 rangers can do,” said James Hardy, a fourth-generation Kenyan and manager of the Mara North Conservancy. “It’s going to reach a point where drones are on the forefront of poaching. At night time we could use it to pick up heat signatures of poachers, maybe a dead elephant if we’re quick enough.”
>"It's not an accident that most major metropolises are situated on or near bodies of water. Cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles all boast beautiful views, robust economies, and ... atrocious traffic. Which is why it's also not an accident that all four of these cities are trying to become more bike friendly, with San Francisco in the lead, New York impressively innovating, and LA pedaling to keep up.
But what if these cities could go even further? What if they could promote bike transportation while also using their coastal conundrum to their advantage?
Enter Judah Schiller and his water bike.Schiller started the BayCycle Project, an organization bent on “creating a new aquatic frontier in biking” by developing affordable, practical water bike kits by 2015. Through an IndieGoGo campaign, Schiller wants to raise $50,000 for the project. To kick it off, he vowed to be the first person to water bike across the San Francisco Bay.
