USGBC Educator Summit

I attended the USGBC Educator Summit this morning with a great group of green design educators. The opening speaker was Rachel Gutter, manager of the LEED for Schools program I believe. Rachel told us that children, especially the children at green schools, are "Sustainability Natives" while we are all "Sustainability Immigrants." She says that we all have to remind ourselves to do such things as bring a to-go cup to the coffee shop or ask for no bag at the store, while it is second nature to these children. Jim Wasley from University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee spoke about the Society of Building Science Educators Carbon Neutral Studio initiative. Basically, a bunch of really wonderful and intelligent architecture studio professors are sharing resources to design a carbon neutral design curriculum. Their goal is to achieve the goals of the 2010 Imperative, I am really excited to see what comes out of this. Jim showed a great slide put together by Ted Shelton from University of Tennessee of the carbon footprints that they calculated for a group of models. These are the designers of tomorrow, and I am really excited to how they influence the design world. The final speaker was Forrest Meggers, an architecture student in Switzerland with a BS and MS in mechanical engineering. I was happy to know that I wasn't the only one in the room with a BS in engineering, but unfortunately my electrical engineering background didn't go enough into thermodynamics and one of his topics: exergy. He explained that exergy takes into account the quality of energy, not just the quantity. He explained just enough to grab my attention and I have been pondering it all day.