GreenBuildingAdvisor.com offers up another free webcast on June 29 at 4 p.m. Eastern. Rob Moody, consultant at Organic Think, LEED Faculty member, and partner in the National Center for Sustainability will be talking about current and future funding opportunities for green building projects courtesy the economic stimulus package. Rise above the recession!

Register here.

Find out about more webcasts from GreenBuildingAdvisor (like Trade Contractor Management for High Performance Homes, and Smart Strategies to Market Your High Performance Homes, and Inspiring Sustainable Residential Interiors...)

It takes place outside. You bring a tent to sleep in. Meals are provided (vegan). You get to be with good, mostly laypeople who care deeply about sustainability in the built environment, learning from world-class practitioners about things like strawbale, cob, cordwood, timber framing, straw-clay infill, permaculture, community-supported agriculture, small-scale living roofs, thatching, natural plasters & finishes, and more. You get your hands in the dirt. You go swimming. Evening presentations as good as any I've seen at mainstream green-building conferences — and often better — are given in a circus tent. Then, exhausted, you either relax around a bonfire or hit the sleeping bag to get ready to do it again the next day.

The sixth annual family-friendly Northeast Natural Building & Living Colloquium — Seven full days! — Sunday, July 26 through Saturday, August 1, 2009 — once again hosted by The PeaceWeavers :: Thunder Mountain — Bath, New York

A hands-on event with an emphasis on natural building and sustainable living in the northeastern climate. From natural building and permaculture to water and energy conservation... from alternative fuels to sourcing your food locally... this event is for everyone concerned about how their lifestyle impacts our Earth.

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A design competition for professionals and students, the Lifecycle Building Challenge is sponsored by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, the American Institute of Architects, and West Coast Green. The competition is focused on design for adaptability, material reuse, and minimizing lifecycle impacts from products.

Registration and participation is free. Submission deadline is August 30 2009.

From the website:

Lifecycle building is designing buildings to facilitate disassembly and material reuse to minimize waste, energy consumption, and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Also known as design for disassembly and design for deconstruction, lifecycle building describes the idea of creating high-performance buildings today that are stocks of resources for the future.

• Create designs that facilitate local building materials reuse
• Consider the full lifecycle of buildings and materials — from resource extraction through occupancy and, finally, deconstruction and reuse
• Focus on quality and creativity of designs and concepts
• Develop strategies that maximize materials recovery
• Reduce the overall embodied energy and greenhouse gas emissions of building materials through reuse
• Decrease environmental and economic costs
• Address real world issues

Enter the third year of the Lifecycle Building Challenge competition, to shape the future of green building and facilitate local building materials reuse. Submit your innovative project, design, or idea for reducing to conserve construction and demolition materials and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by designing buildings for adaptability and disassembly.

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Who could be more qualified than one of the principal authors of LEED for Homes to provide insight on the best ways to make the program work?

LEED for Homes, like other rating systems, is an assessment tool. This means that while it provides some "how-to" information (at the level of individual strategies or "credits"), it doesn't offer any guidance for how to approach the design and construction of a high-performing home differently than a conventional project. Ann Edminster will offer some of that missing guidance in this webinar.

It gets better. Not only do you not have to jet off to some city to sit in some auditorium during some high-priced conference to take this in... it's free. Just sign up and it's yours for the taking on June 2, at 2:00 pm Eastern (1:00 pm Central, noon Mountain, 11:00 am Pacific), right on your computer. A gift from GreenBuildingAdvisor.com.

The presenter, Ann Edminster, is a longtime green building mover and shaker. In addition to being one of the main people who developed LEED for Homes (she was its co-chair through most of its making), she's also a past member of the LEED Steering Committee, and a member and past co-chair of the USGBC's Materials and Resources Technical Advisory Group. She co-authored Efficient Wood Use In Residential Construction: A Practical Guide to Saving Wood, Money, and Forests, has written bunches of technical papers and articles, and has been an invited speaker at dozens of regional, national, and international green building conferences over the past 15 years. She's the founding principal of the environmental design consulting firm Design AVEnues.

Even though there are extant and occupied earthen homes scattered throughout the northern states and Canada from the mid-19th century, raw earth as a building material is overlooked in most of the USA. See Richard Pieper's article, "Earthen Architecture in the Northern United States" and these photos of earthen houses in upstate New York that I took in 2004, following Pieper's trail.

Those are the tip of the iceberg, of course. The Earth Architecture website notes, "Currently it is estimated that one half of the world's population — approximately three billion people on six continents — lives or works in buildings constructed of earth."

The Adobe Association of the Southwest hosts a biannual conference, which is now just a week away.

The 5th Adobe Conference of the Adobe Association of the Southwest, AdobeUSA 2009, will take place May 15 and 16, 2009 in El Rito, New Mexico on the campus of co-sponsor Northern New Mexico College in Cutting Hall Auditorium.

Engineering and Architect Professionals will be eligible to obtain Continuing Education Units (PDH) during the conference.

Check out the abstracts, including great-sounding titles like:
   · Adobe 2030
   · ASTM earthen building standards
   · Mechanical performance of nonindustrial building materials manufactured with clay as a natural binder
   · The Effect Interior Earthen plasters and Exterior Lime plasters have on Controlling Temperature and Humidity in Building Envelope

What other natural materials can we use?

On Wednesday, April 29, Alex Wilson presents The Future of Housing — "leading-edge strategies for achieving net-zero-energy homes, transportation energy use associated with where we live, the looming challenge of water, passive survivability as a residential design criterion, and thoughts on incorporating food production into the built environment. Today's economic crisis makes this discussion all the more important and points to the need to focus on our existing housing stock, which will also be discussed."

Then on Monday, May 11, Alex is back with What's New in Green Products, in which he will "discuss how BuildingGreen assesses products for its GreenSpec directory of green building products and review some of the more exciting new products that have come across his desk recently. Though he has been reviewing and reporting on green building products for more than 20 years, Alex is still excited when he comes across innovative new products. This is a chance to share in that excitement."

Tuesday, June 2, a great treat: Ann Edminster — nationally recognized expert on green home design and construction; a principal author of the LEED for Homes Rating System; consultant to builders, owners, developers, supply chain clients, design firms, investors, and public agencies — addresses LEED for Homes: Tips for Successful Projects. "LEED for Homes, like other rating systems, is an assessment tool. This means that while it provides some 'how-to' information (at the level of individual strategies or 'credits'), it doesn't offer any guidance for how to approach the design and construction of a high-performing home differently than a conventional project. Ann Edminster will offer some of that missing guidance in this webinar, highlighting the role of energy modeling, the value of teamwork both among design professionals and across the traditional design-construction divide, and some useful tools for streamlining the certification process."

Also coming on Thursday, June 18: Navigating ANSI 700 with Michael Chandler, president of Chandler Design-Build of North Carolina and a certified Green Professional '08, NAHB University of Housing.

All this week, webcasting service BrightTALK is honoring Earth Day by providing five days of free green building presentations. Many of the presenters are world-class. If you can't fit it into your schedule, the recorded sessions will be available on-demand later.

Monday addresses Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability — the highlight is likely to be the Executive Director at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Center for Responsible Business, Jo Mackness, speaking on Corporate Social Responsibility and the Next Generation of Business Leaders.

Tuesday is Water Management day, and there a couple programs that are particularly intriguing. Jonathan C. Kaledin of The Nature Conservancy introduces the Alliance for Water Stewardship, which is building an international certification organization akin to the Forest Stewardshp Council (FSC); and Linda Hwang, Manager of Environmental Research & Innovation at BSR (Business for Social Responsibility), will speak on Global Water Trends and the Corporate Response.

Wednesday's topic is Green Building. There are ten presentations that day and half of them look like real winners — check them out — but if you only do one, don't miss BuildingGreen's own Residential Program Manager, Peter Yost, with a session titled Sustainability Requires Durability.

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I wasn't able to attend last week's BuildingEnergy conference, sadly. Most particularly, I wasn't able to get to Tuesday night's public forum, "What's Right and What's Wrong With LEED," featuring panelists Henry Gifford, USGBC's LEED Technical VP Brendan Owens, Steven Winter Associates' Maureen Mahle, IBACOS' Duncan Prahl, and energy modeler Maria Karpman of Karpman Consulting. It was moderated by Nadav Malin.

(Why was I so hot for that presentation? For a refresher, see Lies, Damn Lies, and... Another Look at LEED Energy Efficiency, and the terrific comments that follow it.)

At least we can all hear about the forum second-hand. The Boston Globe's green blog — which they call "The Green Blog" — posted How best to determine a green building? with the opening line, "A rant or a mugging?" (That piece is an edited version of the one on Michael Prager's blog.)

Read either or both of those to get to the "Least informative forum yet" reference.

More goodies: Fred Unger's thoughts at NESEA's blog, and Sitephocus weighs in on the controversy. There's another blow-by-blow at Green Real Estate Law Journal, but the reporting is based on Michael Prager's piece; however, the final three paragraphs pull some threads together in a way that's well worth a look.

Despite the economic downturn and the trend toward smaller crowds at building trade shows, Efficiency Vermont's 2009 Better Buildings by Design Conference was a great success and actually increased attendance this year. The enthusiastic response is a tribute to the sustainable building community at large and to Efficiency Vermont, which put on a conference that was well organized, informative, and pragmatically optimistic. The quality of the presenters and workshops was impressive. William Miller from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Steve Selkowitz from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Kevin Dowling from Philips Solid State Lighting Solutions, John Straube from Building Science Corporation, and others, spanned topics ranging from high-performance roofs to the latest in LED technology.

I attended a commercial kitchen ventilation (CKV) workshop featuring Don Fisher, co-founder of Fisher-Nickel and the Food Service Technology Center (FSTC). Administered by Pacific Gas and Electric, FSTC is a pioneer in the testing of water- and energy-efficient commercial kitchen appliances. (Anyone interested in commercial kitchens has to visit www.fishnick.com). Fisher's presentation was geared toward experienced kitchen and/or HVAC professionals and discussed his company's work improving the efficiency of existing ventilation systems. For background information, commercial kitchens require massive CKV systems to remove heat and fumes generated by gas ranges, broilers, fryers, and — the biggest emitter — the grill (think of a large, white-hot barbecue burning indoors for 12-18 hours a day).

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The Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA), a Washington D.C. bicycle advocacy organization, along with America Bikes, the D.C. District Department of Transportation, and Dero Racks (they're listed in GreenSpec), provided free valet parking — for bicycles — at the presidential inauguration last week.

Cyclists were already in line before the 7 a.m. opening. All told, about 2,000 bikes were parked at two locations on either side of the secure area around the White House. By the middle of the day, one of the lots ran out of room and another enclosure needed to be improvised from security barricades to accommodate the volume.

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