What do over a thousand protests around the world last weekend in support of Occupy Wall Street have to do with Green Building?

When NYC Mayor Bloomberg was speaking via video-link at Greenbuild, and while the Toronto Airport security strike delayed green building practitioners from returning home, a growing group of "occupiers" continued a now one month old occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York City. There are many attempts to explain what's going on there, but the best I've seen comes in the words of those on the ground–-this is no simple single-issue movement to be cordoned off as a faction. Nor is it a "left" or "right" movement; the call has appeal to original tea party members, greens, labor, and so many others who count themselves among "the 99%."

I won't attempt to create my own container to box-in what's happening there. I was there Sunday, and it's very clear to me that attempting to do so would do a disservice to the passion, creativity, community, diversity, and collective seeking found in Zuccotti Park. But I came away mulling over the links to what the green building community is trying to accomplish.

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If you thought making substantive change by 2030 was a challenge, how about by 2014?

A new initiative launched last week and getting spread around the Internet today, 'fouryears.go' says "There is still time to act, but no time to waste." Started by Pachamama Alliance and Wieden+Kennedy--the ad agency behind Nike's 'just do it' (they're donating their services to do a major communications campaign for this)--it's about waking people up to urgency we face in these times and helping each member group meet its most ambitious goals toward a just, thriving, and sustainable world.

The video asks--"could we spend the next four years growing our cities?" and shows green roofs on everything; it asks, "in four years, could Manhattan look like this?" and shows the street filled with bikes.

It's nice to set aside the usual reality concerns and just watch the video and dream. Given how many solutions we really do already have at our fingertips, and how much substantive change really does depend on mustering collective will from a wider spectrum of society, maybe a kick in the pants from left field along with a major ad campaign can help. C'mon, stop and dream for a minute. Pass it on.

Ok, coffee break is over. Time to get back to hammering out the hard, pragmatic details of greening our buildings and neighborhoods step by messy step.

Over the years I've held a lot of job titles and have done most kitchen jobs, from cleaning a large supperclub's grease traps in mid-July after the obligatory upper-Midwestern Friday fish fry (I don't recommend that as a career path) to picking herbs and edible flowers from the garden that I'd use in lobster salads at a Relais & Châteaux restaurant (that was a pretty good job).

So when I started writing the article Commercial Kitchens: Cooking up Green Opportunities for Environmental Building News I knew there wasn't enough space to adequately cover all the stories, equipment, and processes encompassing sustainable commercial kitchens.

Kitchen size and demands vary enormously; each piece of equipment is worthy of a feature article; and don't get me started on menu choices and sustainable agriculture. Yet I hoped to give at least a cross section of the some of the more important issues.

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Interesting how it's at once forward-looking and backward.

Here's a tool that tries to connect the best available science directly to the international climate change negotiations and commitments, and the politicians are using it!

Perhaps that, in itself, is progress.

"How Does It Work? In the run-up to COP-15, we are scanning UNFCCC submissions and news sources from around the world to collect a list of what we call 'current proposals' — possible scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions by UNFCCC parties. We share our compilation and use the C-ROADS-CP climate simulation to calculate the expected long-term impacts (in terms of GHG concentration, temperature increase, and sea level rise) if those proposals were to be fully implemented." For more info, see the Climate Interactive website.

Bill Steen

One of the results of that exhibition — besides the huge public exposure — was a Congressional briefing about straw bales as a building material.

Last winter (after the inauguration), the demonstration building was lifted in one 8-ton piece by crane and trucked to a new location where it now lives on as a studio. And there's video of that, too.

Even though you've missed the little strawbale house, there's more natural building on the next block. Always Becoming is an art installation on the grounds of the National Museum of the American Indian. "The five sculptures range in height from seven and a half to sixteen feet tall, and are made entirely of natural materials: dirt, sand, straw, clay stone, black locust wood, bamboo, grass, and yam vines." Here's some pictures I took while it was going up in 2007.

Steven Chu, Ph.D, the U.S. Energy Secretary, has a Facebook page. I have no idea if it's actually him posting, but I'm still a fan, meaning I get regular updates.

Yesterday, he posted this chart that shows exactly where the 40% of energy used in the U.S. by buildings goes. This is not new information to me--I've heard it several times before in various ways--but it is an unusually powerful graphical representation. You can see immediately that while heating is a big energy hog in residences, lighting is the big deal in commercial buildings.

I love this kind of graphic: it's simple, straightforward, and contains a whole lot of information that easily accessible. Now, if only the psychrometric chart were this easy!

In the wake of the pictures of that 13-story apartment building that fell over, here's video of a multistory factory building rolling over and coming to rest upside-down, largely intact.

Success and failure are often matters of perspective.

Link to video

(No relation to the post B'eau-Pal Bottled Water - Dichlormethane, Carbon Tetrachloride, Chloroform... and kudos to our prescient commenter Matthew, who last September predicted the 2020 headline, "Bottled Water Outlawed Worldwide.")