The press release says, "Yosemite black bears select minivan as 'Car of the Year'":

An article in the October 2009 issue of the Journal of Mammalogy examines the number of vehicles, by make and model, that black bears broke into from 2001 to 2007 in California's Yosemite National Park. In all years, minivans had the largest or second largest number of break-ins by bears.

Based on a survey of the types of vehicles visitors to the park drive, it was found that "only minivans were broken into at a rate higher than expected based on their availability."

According to the article, titled "Selective Foraging for Anthropogenic Resources by Black Bears: Minivans in Yosemite National Park":

Black bears forage selectively to balance energetic and nutritional gains with foraging costs. Selection of minivans by bears in Yosemite National Park was the likely consequence of efforts to maximize caloric gain and minimize costs by targeting vehicles with higher probabilities of payoff. Potential costs to bears came in the form of energy spent breaking into vehicles and considerable risk because park rangers were deployed nightly for surveillance and bears detected in or around campgrounds and parking lots received aggressive negative conditioning. The trade-off between food acquisition and penal actions by humans likely pressured bears to target vehicles with the highest probability of attaining food.

Cost-benefit analysis. Bears aren't so different from us.

I received an email from a Design student at Kingston University (London) writing a dissertation on "why people are drawn to design inspired by nature." Three questions were sent; I went overboard answering the first one, and basically wussed out on the second two. I'd be interested in your takes on this highly subjective stuff, and will be sure to let our dissertation author in on the discussion.

1. Why in your opinion are people so drawn to design inspired by nature?

2. What in your opinion is the finest example of design inspired by nature in the field of product and furniture design (my course)?

3. Do you think there are psychological benefits to design inspired by nature, and what do you think they are?

1. Why in your opinion are people so drawn to design inspired by nature?

I don't think everyone is drawn to design inspired by nature. Some like Le Corbusier's buildings at their boxiest, and contemporary glass and aluminum offices and homes, and Danish Modern furniture, while others like nature-inspired design... simply because they do. There's no accounting for taste. I know that speaks to the shallowest part of peoples' immediate and visceral reactions to aesthetics, but I think that most of the time — especially in this day and age — that's all there is to it. It's certainly not true of everyone, but most people in these harried times never have any need or desire to consider why some fashion appeals to them while some other fashion doesn't. It is what it is, and there are ten thousand other urgent things to attend to. If pressed, they'll tend to latch onto any available notions that support their position without actually considering them. Look to politics as an independent example of that. Trying to detangle rationalizations from pure impulse is a tricky business. (But it would probably be a much better world if more people tried.)

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The living space in this new home built by Global Green in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans is elevated four feet (1.2 m) to keep it above expected flood level. Numerous other "passive survivability" features are included.

We need to continue these efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon dioxide, but the reality is that it's too little, too late to prevent climate change. Even if the CO2 spigot were turned off tomorrow, the earth would still see significant warming and the other predicted impacts of climate change: more intense storms, flooding, drought, wildfire, and power interruptions. It's time to design our buildings and the built environment to adapt to the very different climate that scientists say is going to be with us.

That's the subject of the feature article in our September 2009 issue of Environmental Building News: "Design for Adaptation: Living in a Climate-Changing World" (requires log-in) (no login required — see Alex Wilson's note in the comments, below).

Andrea Ward and I interviewed some of the nation's top climate scientists, including Stephen Schneider, Ph.D., of Stanford, and Jonathan Overpeck, Ph.D., of the University of Arizona, to establish context for the article — making the case that not only is climate change happening, but it's happening more rapidly than the best climate models predicted just two years ago.

We address the question of mitigation vs. adaptation — whether we should put effort into preventing climate change or adapting to it — and argue that we must do both simultaneously. "The bottom line is that you've got to adapt to what won't get mitigated," says Schneider in the article.

Moving on, we focus on measures for adapting to climate change. We describe 36 strategies, organized into five categories, providing context for each of the categories and succinct explanation for each strategy. These strategies are listed briefly here (details appear in the full article):

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As a follow-on to the previous post (Natural Building in the Shadow of the U.S. Capitol), the strawbale journal The Last Straw — which started publishing right around the same time as Environmental Building News — has expanded its web presence in a donation- and ad-supported bloggish setting at http://tls.buildearth.org.

A number of articles have been posted, including Earth Plastering Guidelines for Finishes, Figuring the Hidden Costs in Your Building Plans, Native to Place: Sustainable Design Can Forge Stronger Communities, Finishing Bale Walls with Siding, and more.

In what must be a marketing oversight, it's difficult to find a link from the blog to the journal's actual 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.

Men should pee sitting down.

Now before you call me a strident feminist, let me say that I'm backed up on this one by male colleagues and the reasons aren't what you think. I'm not arguing for toilet equality here.

I'm talking about urine-separating toilets, which are much easier to use for men and women when sitting down. The bowl of these toilets takes urine in the front, feces in the back. It's hard enough to aim for the whole bowl (or so the evidence of many bathroom floors tells me), much less the front part of the bowl. One guy put a pee can in the corner, but that seems inefficient: pee in the can, then pour it down the toilet. Why not just pee in the toilet?

Why should you care? Because urine contains up to 90% of the nitrogen and 50% of the phosphorous in domestic wastewater. Those chemicals make for great fertilizer — stuff we have to use a lot of energy to produce artificially. In healthy populations, urine is sterile, and removing it from feces makes composting the solids easier and more effective.

Two models of these toilets are available in the U.S., both from Ecovita. But before you rush out to buy one and change your life, remember that composting solids and using urine to irrigate your tomatoes isn't legal in most places. You might be able to get special dispensation from the building code folks, but like most things involving wastewater treatment alternatives, it won't be easy.

Watch for the coming article in the September issue of EBN.

Update - the article is online (members only, though). Urine Separation: The Next Wave of Ecological Wastewater Treatment

The label says:

Bottled at Source — Hand Pump #1, Atal Ayub Nagar, Bhopal, Madya Pradesh, India.

And in tiny print:

Not suitable for human consumption.

The nutrition label says:

Total Fat 0g Cholesterol 0g Sodium 22mg Dichlormethane Carbon Tetrachloride Chloroform	0% 0% 1% -400% -200,000% -250%

The website says:

The unique qualities of our water come from 25 years of slow-leaching toxins at the site of the world's largest industrial accident.

The Yes Men's website says:

Twenty Bhopal activists, including Sathyu Sarangi of the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal, showed up at Dow headquarters near London to find that the entire building had been vacated.

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This morning, at 33rd St and 7th Ave in the middle of New York City — right outside of Madison Square Garden and Penn Station — a 70-foot-tall digital billboard displaying a real-time running total of atmospheric greenouse gases was unveiled. The display reflects a measurement of 24 long-lived greenhouse gases (not including ozone and aerosols) named in the Kyoto and Montreal Protocols, and is based on Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research. The Carbon Counter is part of a "Know the Number" awareness and education campaign by Deutsche Bank's institutional climate change investment and research business, the DB Climate Change Advisors group (DBCCA).

In a press release, MIT Professor of Atmospheric Science Ronald Prinn is quote as saying:

"It is useful to have an up-to-date estimate of a single integrating number expressing the trends in the long-lived greenhouse gases contributing to that change. This number can help convey how fast these greenhouse gases are increasing, and the progress, or lack thereof, in slowing the rate of increase. The number on the Counter is based on global measurements. It shows the total estimated tonnage of these gases expressed as their equivalent amounts of carbon dioxide, with seasonal and other natural cyclical variations removed to more clearly reveal the underlying long term trends driven by human and other activity."

The carbon footprint of the billboard, which includes nearly 41,000 LEDs, is offset using carbon credits.

As a company, Deutsche Bank is working to reduce its carbon emissions annually by 20%, with a goal of carbon-neutrality from 2013. Carbon credits? RECs? It's still noteworthy and praiseworthy. How does your company compare?

The Carbon Counter Number is also available anytime at www.know-the-number.com — or right on your own computer via a free downloadable widget.

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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It has become a truism that the U.S. is addicted to foreign oil. Heck, even George Bush owned up to it a couple years back. As we're trying to climb out of that addiction, are we about to fall into another?

As a Greenwire.com article points out, a boom in clean and renewable energy sources in the U.S. could lead to a new dependence on imported minerals and metals. We may shed our need for oil from the politically treacherous Middle East, only to replace it with a need for gallium and indium (ingredients in photovoltaics from central Africa, China, and Russia -- places with their own foreign-policy problems.

Says the article:

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