online green city guide created by a community of passionate members dedicated to living a sustainable lifestyle. Ecovian city guides are a comprehensive sources of regional green living information, covering topics such as where to find organic & local food (CSA programs, farmers markets, organic restaurants, grocery stores, etc.), natural clothing & baby stores, eco-friendly cleaning services, solar system installers, and many other green resources & local businesses. City guides also provide an up to date calendar of upcoming green & environmental lectures, talks, and events, and a community discussion group where the latest regional environmental news & policy issues are posted and discussed.
a site about eco-friendly living. Laurel and Kate are dedicated to bringing green living to your home through useful tips, resources, and reviews. You will want to visit everyday for green ideas on your clothing, home, personal care, and everything in between.
Sightline Institute is a not-for-profit research and communication center--a think tank--based in Seattle. Founded in 1993 by Alan Durning, Sightline's mission is to bring about sustainability, a healthy, lasting prosperity grounded in place. Our focus is Cascadia, or the Pacific Northwest.
It's a slow-motion revolution, but it's happening. Since 1993, we've equipped northwesterners with the research and tools they need to make progress on a range of solutions, from creating a regional market-based system for slashing global warming pollution to banning toxic chemicals that have shown up in our food and our bodies to defeating ruinous land-use ballot measures across the Northwest in 2006 and 2007.
I've recently been walking a lot. I have a city bus line that passes directly in front of my house, another one a half block away, and yet another one a couple blocks away. The buses have good connections to other bus and train lines and it's real convenient to walk over to the bus, take the bus, and walk around. It occurred to me while walking to ponder what makes a city walkable or not, and what can be done to advocate for cities to be more walkable.
A walkable city encourages positive changes like less pollution, and healthier people. Unfortunately the U.S. cities I'm familiar with have layout and construction that interfere with walkability. And, hey, looking around me I see a lot of people who drive everywhere and think that walking a mile is an impossibly long distance. I believe a large part of why a 1 mile walk is thought impossibly long is due to unwalkability.
For example roads (especially high traffic roads) cut neighborhoods and presents a walkability barrier. A pedestrian having to cross a high traffic road is in a risk from the traffic (at worst) or simply delayed waiting to cross the road, and while it's not insurmountable it is a barrier that degrades the walking experience.
While I was wondering I had a great brainstorming of a website which would crowdsource a walkability score. It would utilize a mapping service (like Google Maps) and ask people to put in walkability observations. Perhaps the collected data could be used to lobby governments for increased walkability.
Fortunately this exact service already exists. Whew, I don't have to implement it. Walk Score is this service. "We help you find a walkable place to live by calculating a Walk Score for any address."
Back to the Future: Walkable Urbanism gives an interesting explanation of how walkability used to be how our cities were organized, and it was the car based transportation in suburbia that made cities unwalkable.
Walkable Neighborhoods goes over their picture of what makes a place walkable. They have an interesting side by side comparison of the feasible walking radius for a one-mile walk based on different city designs. A city designed in a grid pattern is more walkable than the modern suburban design involving lots of quiet culdesacs.
Complete the Streets is an advocacy website meant to encourage that are designed and operated to enable safe access for all users. Pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and bus riders of all ages and abilities are able to safely move along and across a complete street. HOW TO GET TO COMPLETE STREETS is an overview of the process.
What's Walkable? is research and ideas on walkable neighborhoods.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian-friendly - In urban design, walkability is the measure of the overall walking conditions in an area. The definition for walkability is: "The extent to which the built environment is friendly to the presence of people living, shopping, visiting, enjoying or spending time in an area". Factors affecting walkability include, but are not limited to: land use mix; street connectivity; residential density (residential units per area of residential use); "transparency" which includes amount of glass in windows and doors, as well as orientation and proximity of homes and buildings to watch over the street; plenty of places to go to near the majority of homes; placemaking, street designs that work for people, not just cars and retail floor area ratio. Major infrastructural factors include access to mass transit, presence and quality walkways, buffers to moving traffic (planter strips, on-street parking or bike lanes) and pedestrian crossings, aesthetics, nearby local destinations, air quality, shade or sun in appropriate seasons, street furniture, traffic volume and speed. and wind conditions. One of the best ways to quickly determine how walkable a block, corridor or neighborhood is is to count the number of people walking, lingering and enjoying a space. The diversity of people, and especially the presence of children, seniors and people with disabilities, denotes the quality, competeness and wholesomeness of a walkable space.
walkinginfo.org is another advocacy site aiming to improve walkability. It has information covering the basics and solutions of implementing walkability improvements.
An online community of people who believe a little innovation can make a big difference to combat climate change. The site offers tools to help you measure your current carbon footprint and create tailored goals to reduce it. You can track your goals over time and see the effect in your own personal ‘Carbon Timeline’.
A search engine and directory for green services, products and information. Green Search. Green Directory: Search the green web! Support the environment. Think green. Be Green. Greengamma.com
A new way of thinking about real estate. It is the process of taking everyday real estate problems and breaking them apart and looking at them from different vantage points and then reassembling them to form new, creative solutions. Seeks to provide new and innovative ways of looking at real estate projects and strives to better understand and promote the relationship between the built environment and the natural world.
Unconventional Logic is a real estate consulting company that provides creative solutions for everyday real estate projects.
Services: Financial and Feasibility Analysis / Entitlements / Due Diligence / Project Management / Market Analysis / Sustainable Development / Corporate Green Real Estate Strategy / LEED Management / Sale Leasebacks / Green Leasing / Alternative Energy Assessments / Real Estate M & A Analysis / DQI Services
Brings design, construction and development services to communities in need. Building a more sustainable future using the power of design. A charitable organization that seeks architectural solutions to humanitarian crisis and brings design services to communities in need. We believe that where resources and expertise are scarce, innovative, sustainable and collaborative design can make a difference. Through the power of professional design, we build safer, more sustainable and highly innovative structures--structures that become assets to their communities and ongoing symbols of the ability of people to come together to envision a better future.
The Open Architecture Network is an online, open source community dedicated to improving living conditions through innovative and sustainable design.
The U.N. Millennium Development Goals aim to "achieve improvement in the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by the year 2015." Reaching this goal will require a profoundly new approach to improving the built environment. The Open Architecture Network aims to be just such a catalyst for change.
Part of the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) which broadly explores how the content of information relates to its physical representation. Fab labs provide widespread access to modern means for invention. They began as an outreach project from MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). CBA assembled millions of dollars in machines for research in digital fabrication, ultimately aiming at developing programmable molecular assemblers that will be able to make almost anything. Fab labs fall between these extremes, comprising roughly fifty thousand dollars in equipment and materials that can be used today to do what will be possible with tomorrow's personal fabricators.
An ambitious interdisciplinary initiative that is looking beyond the end of the Digital Revolution to ask how a functional description of a system can be embodied in, and abstracted from, a physical form. These simple, profound questions date back to the beginning of modern manufacturing and before that to the origins of natural science, but they have revolutionary new implications that follow from the recognition of the computational universality of physical systems. We can no longer afford to ignore nature's capabilities that have been neglected by conventional digital logic; it is at the boundary between the content of information and its physical representation that many of science's greatest technological, economic, and social opportunities and obstacles lie.
ChangeMaker is a not-for-profit organization with global links and far-sighted vision for development. It is a remarkable forum of local initiative and strategic partnerships that enabled us to grow quickly, yet comprehensively in a pinnacle of development practice where vision and action meets together to shape development models and strategies.
Economic Growth / Peace and Security / International Projects / Rights and Governance / Environment and Climate Changes / Children and Youth / ICT4D
Technology is a critical driving force that changes the economic, social, cultural and political life. The current era of ‘globalization’ is strongly driven by progress in technologies such as those of information and communication as well as productivity and the life sciences. ApTech Village is a supportive measure that plans to “show-case” technology to enable transfer of necessary know-how as well as building up of economic, technical, and managerial capabilities for the efficient use and further development of the transferred technology. ‘Appropriate Technology Village (ApTech Village)’ plans to involve Private Business Enterprises, the Governments, and the Civil Society Organizations as suppliers and disseminators/users of technology.
With the release of hard-hitting documentaries such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Leonardo DiCaprio’s The 11th Hour energy consumption and its relationship to global climate change has become a prominent issue. What people often fail to understand is that the best solutions are not great actions on the part of a few, but rather small actions taken by the many. For example, if everyone in the U.S. were to replace incandescent lights with fluorescent ones, it could eliminate the need for Middle East oil.
LED Grow lights are another example of a small thing that can make a great difference. If you are growing your own food hydroponically, you’re already taking a step toward saving the planet. The use of LED Grow Lights allows you to take the next step in reducing your footprint on the planet. Not only to they operate at a fraction of the voltage of conventional bulbs (less than 20 VAC as opposed to 120), but they are free of mercury – a highly toxic metal used in metallic vapor and fluorescent lights.
LED Grow Lights are efficient and economical in other ways as well. Unlike fluorescent bulbs, LED Grow Lights require no ballast that will eventually burn out. They also emit “targeted light;” whereas most standard grow lights emit a broad spectrum of light that includes light wavelength that is useless to plant life, LED Grow Lights emit only that part of the spectrum actually used for photosynthesis. This also means far less waste heat, which requires extra ventilation to carry away. It also means less glare; while this useful light is very bright to plants, humans perceive such light as relatively dim. This also eliminates the need for troublesome shades and reflectors.
Although they can represent a greater upfront investment, LED Grow Lights cost substantially less in the long run. In the first place, they are not nearly as fragile as conventional bulbs and fluorescents. Best of all, they are extremely durable – the average lifespan of an LED Grow Light is 100,000 hours – which is as much as fifty times as long as that of conventional bulbs. This adds up to nearly twelve years under normal conditions.
Because LED Grow Lights are environmentally friendly, they will result in healthier, more productive plants. Because they emit very little in the way of heat, LED Grow Lights allow your plants to keep cooler. Plants thrive at room temperature, receiving all the light they require without growth-stunting excess heat. In addition, your plants will suffer less from heat-related root damage that can occur when hot conventional grow lights heat the soil. With LED Grow Lights, your plants will also require less watering.
Across the board, LED Grow Lights allow you to grow more economically and in a more environmentally-friendly way.
Susan Slobac operates a hydroponics garden store. She has detailed knowledge of what grow lights are best for hydroponics gardens. Susan is also concerned with the environment and sees LED grow lights as one alternative solution to the traditional energy consuming grow lights most often used. Susan promotes LED grow lights based on efficiency and performance.
Maker of LED lights for growing plants, using "super bright CREE LED's".
"This technology works, the problem is that it isn't as simple as throwing a bunch of red and blue LEDs on a board and calling it a grow light. The LEDs must be extremely high output, have the correct wavelengths at the correct ratio, and must be powered and cooled effectively. "
Builds LED Grow Light Panels, using only high powered LED's in the exact spectrum plants need for increased vegetative growth, and higher yields for fruiting/flowering. At Go Green Grow Lights, we also understand that growers may need Grow Lights unique for their grow room, which has led us to offer Grow Lights that are custom built with the same high quality materials.
Safe To Sprout Seeds ... Targeted Light Spectrum For Increased yields of Fruiting/Flowering
A question on yahoo!questions about the value of LED grow lights. The answer is you have to be careful to make sure the LED system has the right spectrum for plants, and this comes from the spectra to which chlorophyll responds.
Makers of a range of LED lights meant for indoors plant growing operations. Their product line includes lights for aquariums, tissue culturing, greenhouses, and orchids.
An article describing NASA research into a salad machine that could enable station crews to grow and harvest their own greens within the next three years. NASA's space farming efforts are ultimately aimed at developing artificial light sources that promise to help make future explorers self-sufficient at space colonies on the moon, Mars or beyond.
LED Grow Lights are revolutionizing the way we grow indoors! They consume less power by delivering only the light your plants need. They produce much less heat than a conventional "HID" light source. Their LED lights save 75% on power over HID lights.
Makers of 'grow lights' for growing plants. They use LED's to combine the gentleness of fluorescents with the growing power of HIDs. Our lights are warm to the touch and have a minimum useful lifetime of 50,000 hours- the equivalent of 18 hours a day for 71/2 years.
Information on becoming carbon neutral, how to build a sustainable house, organic clothing, delicious organic food, clean energy resources, an organic farm, a sustainable community or eco products, etc... The Sustainable Living Directory was created to give people green resources and tools for making positive contributions.
