Archive for September, 2007
Event - 3rd International Solar Cities Congress 2008, 17-21 February
Posted in Events by fedwards on September 19th, 2007
17 - 21 February, Adelaide SA
The world’s leading lights in sustainable urban development, solar technology and the built environment will speak over three illuminating days. The diverse and inspiring program will feature over 90 speakers from 30 countries, a mayoral forum, panel discussion and field tours.
For more information visit the website: http://oncreative.cmail1.com/e/242235/0/
Tags: Carbon-neutral, climate change, energy, Urban Design and Built Form
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Developing world - Poisoned city fights to save its children, Peru
Posted in Uncategorized by fedwards on September 7th, 2007
Many of the articles I post on this blog are of a positive nature - they showcase people’s action to progress urban sustainability, providing hope, models and a virtual, supportive community as a base for others to do the same. The SustainableCitiesNet.com site also strives to represent cities in the developing world who can offer simple solutions often are overlooked in our economically- and development- driven Western worlds. The article below illustrates the other side of the coin, which provides an important reminder about what some city-dwellers face in their drive to live in environmentally and socially sustainable places.
Poisoned city fights to save its children: Families in a Peruvian valley choked by toxic gas from a smelter are taking on a US metals giant
Hugh O’Shaughnessy in La Oroya, Peru, Sunday August 12 2007, The Observer
Extract below from: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2147039,00.html
“At an altitude of 13,000ft the Andean air is clear. A plume of white smoke rises from the chimney at the La Oroya smelter, hard at work refining arsenic and metals such as lead, cadmium and copper. But today the company is not discharging any gases over this city in central Peru. ‘It’s a nice day, so the
company won’t be letting off any gases,’ says Hugo Villa, a neurologist at the local hospital. ‘They keep the worst emissions to overcast days or after dark.’
When the gases are released, they make this one of the most polluted places on the planet, with La Oroya ranking alongside Chernobyl for environmental devastation, according to a US think-tank, the Blacksmith Institute.
The company is a US corporation, Renco Doe Run. The gases are the product from the main smelter a mile or two down the valley. The high mountains around keep out the cleansing winds, meaning that airborne metals are concentrated in the valley. Neither humans nor nature can escape the company’s outpourings of poisons. And, despite evidence that gases have been behind the premature deaths of workers and residents young and old, the business-oriented, pro-US government of President Alan
Garcia is too afraid of foreign investors to do anything about it.
Now, however, the townspeople, once muted by their worries about losing their jobs with the valley’s biggest employer, are turning their attention towards Ira Rennert, Renco’s proprietor.”
For the full article visit: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2147039,00.html
Tags: Health, Provocations, waste
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Model & Launch - “A Growing Movement: A Decade of Farm to School in California”
Posted in Models, Movements, Research by fedwards on September 5th, 2007
The Center for Food & Justice at Occidental College is pleased to announce the release of a new report on ten years of Farm to School in California.
“A Growing Movement: A Decade of Farm to School in California” is a brand new resource from the California Farm to School Program at the Center for Food & Justice. The farm to school movement began in California more than 10 years ago. This report tells the story of work undertaken by farm to school proponents in California and chronicles the emergence of the program, and the impacts it has had on students, farmers, and communities around the state.
Visit the website to download the report: http://departments.oxy.edu/uepi/cfj/index.htm (report is listed in right-hand side bar)
Tags: Food, Resource
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Model - Article on Localism in New Yorker
Posted in Models, Movements, Research by fedwards on September 3rd, 2007
Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker writes on procuring and eating a meal entirely produced in the five boroughs of New York City, featuring markets, rooftop honey, and a slaughterhouse. Below is a brief extract from the article.
“I was arranging to kill a Bronx chicken as part of a project that I had begun a month or so before—to spend a week eating only food grown or raised within the five boroughs of New York City. “Localism” (or “locavore” eating, as it’s sometimes called) is, as many people now know, a movement that has rules, Web pages, and books devoted to it. Its central idea is that one should try to eat only things grown within a narrow “foodshed” around one’s own home, and in the past year localism has been the subject of a couple of folksy, how-we-did-it books, records of how their authors nailed down their diet to the local goods: “Plenty,” by Alisa Smith and J. B. Mackinnon, which recounts the authors’ yearlong experience of eating only from a foodshed around their Vancouver home, and “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” by Barbara Kingsolver, which tells of a similar dogmatic diet, undertaken for a year around Kingsolver’s house in southwest Virginia.
The point of localism is to encourage sustainable agriculture by eating things that nearby friends and farmers grow or raise and that don’t have to be shipped halfway around the world, guzzling fossil fuel, to get to your table. The rules generally involve eating within a radius of a hundred or sometimes three hundred miles, and are undertaken in places, like Berkeley and the Pacific Northwest, that have a lot of nice produce and plump animals within their circles.”
For the full article visit: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/03/070903fa_fact_gopnik
Tags: Carbon-neutral, energy, Food, Health, Urban Design and Built Form, waste
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Seeking ideas - Satchi & Satchi World Changing Ideas Competition
Posted in Events, Research, Visions by fedwards on September 2nd, 2007
Every two years, The Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas recognises outstanding thinkers whose world-class innovations could change the world as we know it. It’s free to enter and the prize is worth US $100,000 ($50,000 in cash and equivalent $50,000 for Saatchi & Saatchi marketing consultancy).
The winning idea will have the potential to provide the greatest communication benefit to the greatest number of people or to a group of people with a particular need. Since the initiation of the Award in 1998, many outstanding and wide-ranging innovations have been short-listed. From self-adjusting spectacles that enable people in the developing world to communicate with their environment, to a New Age Rosetta Stone project designed to record and preserve 1,000 world languages for posterity.
Through a high profile award event in New York and international media coverage, The Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas can help bring extraordinary innovations into the light of public acclaim, and can help transform vision into reality.
If you think you have a potentially world changing idea, get your entry in by 28 September 2007.
Downloadable entry packs can be found online at: http://www.saatchi.com/innovation.
Tags: Provocations, Resource
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Resource - Launch of UN Climate Change website
Posted in Uncategorized by fedwards on September 2nd, 2007
The United Nations launches new climate change internet site
A new United Nations Internet site, “Gateway to the UN System’s Work on Climate Change“, that highlights the wide-ranging work of the various parts of the United Nations system on climate change has been launched. The new website makes it easier for Internet users to find information on climate change from across the United Nations system.
Visit: http://www.un.org/climatechange/
Tags: Carbon-neutral, climate change, Resource
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