Hello Readers,
Enjoy this TED Talk about sustainable/shareable cities...
Showing posts with label Transition Town. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Transition Town. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
Cities Solution to Climate Change
Hello Readers,
This weekend, I came across an interesting New York Times article about the joint efforts of Bill Clinton and Mayor Bloomberg in combating climate change from a city level. Mayor Bloomberg's private organization has donated 3 years of funding to a Clinton Foundation initiative: C40. C40 is a group of 40 of the world's largest cities working together to combat the effects of climate change.
The mayors of all 40 of these cites will be meeting in São Paulo, Brazil this week to discuss topics such as energy efficient buildings, renewable energy in urban settings, next generation buses, and other pertinent topics. The American cities involved in C40 are New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles.
As the NYT article points out, more than half of the world's population now lives in cities. These city dwellers are now using 70% of the world's energy and are responsible for 70% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Or as Mayor Bloomberg puts it: "If you address the problems of the cities, there will be no need for China and India to sign onto some international accord. And thank God, because that’s not going to get done. It’s time to say it."
While the efforts of the C40 - a top-down approach to combating climate change at a local level - are amazing and long overdue, it seems that they could be much more successful if they are complimented by citizen actions in the Transition Town model. This compliment will be especially important in smaller towns and cities, which do not necessarily have the capital or population density to organize their own public transportation and other initiatives.
Thank a soldier today!
Sean Diamond
This weekend, I came across an interesting New York Times article about the joint efforts of Bill Clinton and Mayor Bloomberg in combating climate change from a city level. Mayor Bloomberg's private organization has donated 3 years of funding to a Clinton Foundation initiative: C40. C40 is a group of 40 of the world's largest cities working together to combat the effects of climate change.
The mayors of all 40 of these cites will be meeting in São Paulo, Brazil this week to discuss topics such as energy efficient buildings, renewable energy in urban settings, next generation buses, and other pertinent topics. The American cities involved in C40 are New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles.
As the NYT article points out, more than half of the world's population now lives in cities. These city dwellers are now using 70% of the world's energy and are responsible for 70% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Or as Mayor Bloomberg puts it: "If you address the problems of the cities, there will be no need for China and India to sign onto some international accord. And thank God, because that’s not going to get done. It’s time to say it."
While the efforts of the C40 - a top-down approach to combating climate change at a local level - are amazing and long overdue, it seems that they could be much more successful if they are complimented by citizen actions in the Transition Town model. This compliment will be especially important in smaller towns and cities, which do not necessarily have the capital or population density to organize their own public transportation and other initiatives.
Thank a soldier today!
Sean Diamond
Friday, March 4, 2011
Transition Town 1.0 Video
Hello Readers,
Here is an interesting video about Transition Towns. It is informative, but a bit cheesy. Enjoy.
Cheers,
Sean Diamond
P.S. If the video does not load immediately, try refreshing the page... vimeo appears to have some trouble embedding into blogger.
In Transition 1.0 from Transition Towns on Vimeo.
Here is an interesting video about Transition Towns. It is informative, but a bit cheesy. Enjoy.
Cheers,
Sean Diamond
P.S. If the video does not load immediately, try refreshing the page... vimeo appears to have some trouble embedding into blogger.
In Transition 1.0 from Transition Towns on Vimeo.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Rob Hopkins TED Talk
Hello Readers,
After my last post, I stumbled upon this video. For those of you unfamiliar with the idea of the Transition Movement, this should fill you in!
Thanks,
Sean Diamond
Friday, July 23, 2010
The End is Nigh!
Hello Readers,
Admittedly, the title of this post is a bit dramatic. What I mean to say is that I am (knocking on wood) nearly finished with my master's degree. It is less than two weeks until my dissertation is due, and I am working furiously to finish it despite some minor setbacks.
Despite the coming transition, I have every intention of continuing this blog as a way to stay mentally connected to the sustainability-related causes that I have been pursuing for the past year. In fact, I hope to post information and ideas more frequently once my dissertation is complete, so please check back regularly or add me not your RSS feed or whatever it is that blog-readers do.
Finally, for the past year I have been developing the idea of founding a community-based non-profit that promotes sustainable lifestyles and choices. In particular, I was inspired by my volunteer work at the Greenhouse Trust and what I've learned about the Transition Movement. When I return to the US, I would be very interested in visiting any organizations or communities that are based on similar principles. If you are associated with such a group, please send me an email and tell me about your experience!
Thanks for following along!
Sincerely,
Sean Diamond
Admittedly, the title of this post is a bit dramatic. What I mean to say is that I am (knocking on wood) nearly finished with my master's degree. It is less than two weeks until my dissertation is due, and I am working furiously to finish it despite some minor setbacks.
Despite the coming transition, I have every intention of continuing this blog as a way to stay mentally connected to the sustainability-related causes that I have been pursuing for the past year. In fact, I hope to post information and ideas more frequently once my dissertation is complete, so please check back regularly or add me not your RSS feed or whatever it is that blog-readers do.
Finally, for the past year I have been developing the idea of founding a community-based non-profit that promotes sustainable lifestyles and choices. In particular, I was inspired by my volunteer work at the Greenhouse Trust and what I've learned about the Transition Movement. When I return to the US, I would be very interested in visiting any organizations or communities that are based on similar principles. If you are associated with such a group, please send me an email and tell me about your experience!
Thanks for following along!
Sincerely,
Sean Diamond
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Doom or Transition
Hello Reader,
If you are looking for dissertation links, please see the top-left corner of the page.
Today, I stumbled across a news article about peak oil. The bulk of the article focuses on how people are expecting the worst, but the last bit actually discusses a tiny bit about the Transition movement. I do not have too much to say about this article. It is what it is. I just hope that enough people look into the Transition US movement so they are able to distinguish between the survivalist mentality and the transition mentality.
Thanks,
Sean Diamond
This post refers to:
Imagining Life Without Oil, and Being Ready
By JOHN LELAND
Published: June 5, 2010
From the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/us/06peak.html
If you are looking for dissertation links, please see the top-left corner of the page.
Today, I stumbled across a news article about peak oil. The bulk of the article focuses on how people are expecting the worst, but the last bit actually discusses a tiny bit about the Transition movement. I do not have too much to say about this article. It is what it is. I just hope that enough people look into the Transition US movement so they are able to distinguish between the survivalist mentality and the transition mentality.
Thanks,
Sean Diamond
This post refers to:
Imagining Life Without Oil, and Being Ready
By JOHN LELAND
Published: June 5, 2010
From the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/us/06peak.html
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Back Again and a Recommendation
Hello Reader,
I have returned to my blog after an intense couple of weeks of essay writing, followed by a brief holiday trip home, and week of final exams. Now, as I set out on a new semester at the University of East Anglia, I am hoping to maintain this blog with some degree of respectability. A few housekeeping notes for those of you who have decided to read this blog from start to finish: I'm no longer in the Sustainable Consumption class, so I won't have the weekly prompts any more. Instead I'll be flying solo with my own topics. Even so, I'm hoping to keep up the same type of academic, semi-professional style that I hope you've enjoyed and found useful. Of course, since the other students are no longer expected to be looking after their own blogs and likely not following mine, I will certainly appreciate any comments that let me know you are there. Otherwise, I will just content myself to know at some point my musings may be rediscovered with a note of nostalgia when I am rich and famous. But seriously, I will appreciate any feedback, because more likely than not the ideas I put forward will not have been fully developed to their greatest potential.
Also, in my free time over the break and partially to alleviate my eco-guilt about flying, I read a healthy portion of the Transition Town Handbook by Rob Hopkins. So far it has been a good read and seems like it will be useful for my life after university. As such, I highly recommend finding a copy if you are at all serious about making a local or regional impact related to sustainability.
Sincerely,
Sean Diamond
I have returned to my blog after an intense couple of weeks of essay writing, followed by a brief holiday trip home, and week of final exams. Now, as I set out on a new semester at the University of East Anglia, I am hoping to maintain this blog with some degree of respectability. A few housekeeping notes for those of you who have decided to read this blog from start to finish: I'm no longer in the Sustainable Consumption class, so I won't have the weekly prompts any more. Instead I'll be flying solo with my own topics. Even so, I'm hoping to keep up the same type of academic, semi-professional style that I hope you've enjoyed and found useful. Of course, since the other students are no longer expected to be looking after their own blogs and likely not following mine, I will certainly appreciate any comments that let me know you are there. Otherwise, I will just content myself to know at some point my musings may be rediscovered with a note of nostalgia when I am rich and famous. But seriously, I will appreciate any feedback, because more likely than not the ideas I put forward will not have been fully developed to their greatest potential.
Also, in my free time over the break and partially to alleviate my eco-guilt about flying, I read a healthy portion of the Transition Town Handbook by Rob Hopkins. So far it has been a good read and seems like it will be useful for my life after university. As such, I highly recommend finding a copy if you are at all serious about making a local or regional impact related to sustainability.
Sincerely,
Sean Diamond
Thursday, September 24, 2009
The College Sustainability Movement
I wrote the following post during June of 2009; however, I never ended up submitting it to anyone to be published, so I thought that I would share it here:
While I was delighted to read about the many excited money-saving, sustainability initiatives being undertaken by colleges and universities in the recent article For Colleges, Small Cuts Add Up to Big Savings by Tamar Lewin on June 18, 2009, the tone of the article was disheartening. Prefacing the list of cuts that the colleges are putting into place as "smaller, quirkier economies" indicated that the initiatives were obscure or perhaps even nonsensical. This type of article offered an opportunity to highlight a major shift in business practices that is occurring throughout higher education institutions. That is, of course, the sustainability movement.
The term sustainable is often used synonymously with green, environmental, eco-friendly, and other such generic terms on which marketing and PR offices have recently capitalized. Fortunately, most college and university administrators have realized that sustainability requires more than just good intentions and the odd press release. Instead, they have started to understand that economic, social, and environmental concerns are all inextricably linked to one another and the overall viability of a business.
As an example, a poorly managed or inefficient HVAC system at a college will cost more money to run, create an uncomfortable work and study environment, and produce far more atmospheric emissions (either directly through combustion or indirectly through purchased electricity). All of these factors in turn affect the viability of the college in ways ranging from decreased employee productivity and lower customer (student) satisfaction to increased insurance premiums due to more severe weather associated with climate change.
Evaluating the economic, social, and environmental implications of a budget is commonly referred to as evaluating the "triple bottom line". This principle was actually explained reasonably well in When Balance Sheets Collide With the New Economy by Denise Caruso on September 9, 2007.
As noted implicitly in the results of the College Sustainability Report Card 2009, many higher education institutions began to take a triple bottom line approach to their budgets and operations prior the economic meltdown in 2008. In fact many colleges and universities had already begun to take on purely environmental initiatives such as the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, which commits the signatories to developing a plan for climate neutral operations.
This is not to imply that economic pressures have no bearing on such initiatives. On the contrary, economic difficulties have forced schools to reprioritize their projects. This typically means putting simple, cost effective measures such as energy efficiency and behavioral programs first on the list and shuffling the big-hype, more expensive projects such as installing photovoltaic solar panels toward the end of the list.
In the same way that "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra puts waste management in the correct order, "efficiency, behavior, source" (although not as catchy and often in different words) has become the mantra of sustainability officers at schools (and for-profit businesses) across North America. As the analogy follows, trying to put up solar panels without replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lights is like recycling paper while setting the printer to only print in the top-left quarter of the page.
Student environmental organizations have been notorious for championing behavioral changes on and off campuses for decades, but student groups have recently been joined by college administrators enacting efficiency initiatives in what may ultimately be considered the tipping point in campus sustainability.
Efficiency programs save money and moderate environmental impacts regardless of user habits, so even though they have a higher up front cost than behavioral initiatives they tend to have a quick ROI and returns often far exceed the initial costs several times over. This allows the school to either save money or at the very least avoid the effects of an ever increasing energy load and variable utility costs. In either case the schools are able to devote more money to future energy initiatives (known as a revolving loan fund) or to their primary mission (educating students).
With all of this in mind, it seems that many of the programs mentioned in Tamar Lewin's article are not so quirky after all and are likely part of the larger sustainability movement. A movement that requires all involved to stop assuming that conventional methods are correct and to begin valuing environmental and social benefits at least as much as economic benefits.
In response to:
For Colleges, Small Cuts Add Up to Big Savings
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: June 18, 2009
In the New York Times
While I was delighted to read about the many excited money-saving, sustainability initiatives being undertaken by colleges and universities in the recent article For Colleges, Small Cuts Add Up to Big Savings by Tamar Lewin on June 18, 2009, the tone of the article was disheartening. Prefacing the list of cuts that the colleges are putting into place as "smaller, quirkier economies" indicated that the initiatives were obscure or perhaps even nonsensical. This type of article offered an opportunity to highlight a major shift in business practices that is occurring throughout higher education institutions. That is, of course, the sustainability movement.
The term sustainable is often used synonymously with green, environmental, eco-friendly, and other such generic terms on which marketing and PR offices have recently capitalized. Fortunately, most college and university administrators have realized that sustainability requires more than just good intentions and the odd press release. Instead, they have started to understand that economic, social, and environmental concerns are all inextricably linked to one another and the overall viability of a business.
As an example, a poorly managed or inefficient HVAC system at a college will cost more money to run, create an uncomfortable work and study environment, and produce far more atmospheric emissions (either directly through combustion or indirectly through purchased electricity). All of these factors in turn affect the viability of the college in ways ranging from decreased employee productivity and lower customer (student) satisfaction to increased insurance premiums due to more severe weather associated with climate change.
Evaluating the economic, social, and environmental implications of a budget is commonly referred to as evaluating the "triple bottom line". This principle was actually explained reasonably well in When Balance Sheets Collide With the New Economy by Denise Caruso on September 9, 2007.
As noted implicitly in the results of the College Sustainability Report Card 2009, many higher education institutions began to take a triple bottom line approach to their budgets and operations prior the economic meltdown in 2008. In fact many colleges and universities had already begun to take on purely environmental initiatives such as the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment, which commits the signatories to developing a plan for climate neutral operations.
This is not to imply that economic pressures have no bearing on such initiatives. On the contrary, economic difficulties have forced schools to reprioritize their projects. This typically means putting simple, cost effective measures such as energy efficiency and behavioral programs first on the list and shuffling the big-hype, more expensive projects such as installing photovoltaic solar panels toward the end of the list.
In the same way that "reduce, reuse, recycle" mantra puts waste management in the correct order, "efficiency, behavior, source" (although not as catchy and often in different words) has become the mantra of sustainability officers at schools (and for-profit businesses) across North America. As the analogy follows, trying to put up solar panels without replacing incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent lights is like recycling paper while setting the printer to only print in the top-left quarter of the page.
Student environmental organizations have been notorious for championing behavioral changes on and off campuses for decades, but student groups have recently been joined by college administrators enacting efficiency initiatives in what may ultimately be considered the tipping point in campus sustainability.
Efficiency programs save money and moderate environmental impacts regardless of user habits, so even though they have a higher up front cost than behavioral initiatives they tend to have a quick ROI and returns often far exceed the initial costs several times over. This allows the school to either save money or at the very least avoid the effects of an ever increasing energy load and variable utility costs. In either case the schools are able to devote more money to future energy initiatives (known as a revolving loan fund) or to their primary mission (educating students).
With all of this in mind, it seems that many of the programs mentioned in Tamar Lewin's article are not so quirky after all and are likely part of the larger sustainability movement. A movement that requires all involved to stop assuming that conventional methods are correct and to begin valuing environmental and social benefits at least as much as economic benefits.
In response to:
For Colleges, Small Cuts Add Up to Big Savings
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: June 18, 2009
In the New York Times
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