Going Green on Black Friday

I found myself near Washington, D.C., on the day after Thanksgiving. Rather than try to prop up the economy at retail outlets or lounge in a hotel room all day, I headed to the National Building Museum to see its "Green Community" exhibit with my mother and sister. Appropriately, we took the light rail system into the city. Coming up an escalator from the subway tunnels, we saw the museum framed perfectly: an old brick building designed with grand proportions and deep windowsills to keep out the summer sun. Having heard about other exhibits at the museum, I was expecting "Green Community" to be larger than it was. The exhibit, which will remain up through October 2009, took up a single room in the museum. That room, however, contained a wealth of information on how communities can be greener, presented in both statistical and case study form. I was already familiar with much of the information in the exhibit, but thought it was presented quite well. My mother and sister, less familiar with the concepts, found the exhibit very interesting--it even provoked lunch conversation about sustainable communities! My favorite part of the exhibit was a solar panel in a window hooked up to a meter showing how much energy it was producing. It was only a sample of what could be done in the building, and would never produce much energy, but it made the implications of retrofitting solar power very real. I wish the exhibit had included more examples of technologies that could be used to green communities: a model of a proposed transit system, for example, or a model of a cogeneration plant showing how it could be used to heat and power homes. It's one thing to note that such technology has been used in several places throughout the world, but it's quite another to teach a visitor how the technology really works. If a visitor understands the actual technology, it's easier to bring the concept back to his or her hometown and (hopefully) implement it there.