In a unique effort, a native-plant nursery, landscape architect, and Habitat for Humanity affiliate have teamed up to salvage native plants and use them for landscaping low-income houses. For a year-and-a-half, Roy Beaty and his Willowell Nursery in Tigard, Oregon, have specialized in native plants, and beginning last... Read more

First prize in the Van Alen Institute’s competition for a design for reuse of New York Harbor’s Governors Island was awarded to University of Pennsylvania graduate student Peter Hau for his plan to transform the Island into a regenerative garden. Entitled: “Open Narratives: Reconfiguring the Air, Land and Waters,” Hau’s proposal includes plants... Read more

The country’s first commuter bike station has opened in Long Beach, California, according to the Urban Land Institute’s June 1996

Land Use Digest. The Bike Station, modeled after similar facilities in Japan and the Netherlands, provides secure parking for 150 bicycles, along with bike rentals, repairs, and accessories. It is located in... Read more

At the Fourth Congress for the New Urbanism, held this past May in Charleston, South Carolina, more than 200 participants signed a charter that defines, for the first time, exactly what new urbanism is. The charter was developed in part to dispel criticism that new urbanism is really just a mild form of suburban... Read more

was a finalist in

Utne Reader’s 8th Annual Alternative Press Awards this year. While we were not a winner, we were pleased to be recognized in the “Service” category.

On-site photovoltaic panels supply much of the electricity, heating loads are met in part with... Read more

The city of Portland, Oregon, is doing its part to promote the use of electric vehicles by installing free charging stations in the downtown area. Two such stations have been installed in city-owned parking garages. Electric vehicle owners will have to pay the parking meter charges, but they can plug in and recharge their vehicles for free.... Read more

With great interest, I read your well-researched article on cork flooring in the January/February issue (Vol. 5, No. 1). As you concluded in the article, the harvest of commercial cork from the cork oak (

Quercus suber) tree is a relatively benign extraction that is one of nature’s best examples of a renewable, non-timber forest resource... Read more

Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, have achieved a new world record in thin-film photovoltaic cell efficiency. A record 17.7% “sunlight-to-electricity” efficiency was achieved with a compound semiconductor called copper indium gallium diselenide. While this efficiency is 60% higher than the... Read more

The world’s first independently certified, “well-managed” redwood lumber is now available from the Big Creek Lumber Company of Davenport, California in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Big Creek sells redwood, Monterrey pine, and Douglas fir from its 6,800 acres (2,750 ha) of forestland. The Scientific Certification Systems evaluation team called Big... Read more

U.S. greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise in 1994, totaling 1,666 million metric tonnes carbon equivalent according to the report

Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-1994 published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, November 1995 (this figure does not include the net effect of carbon “sinks” in... Read more

castellated I-beams—essentially, regular I-beams with much... Read more

When homebuilder Barbara Harwood stumbled across the quote for a new mechanical system for a grocery store owned by her husband, she knew that the loads were out of line. The quote called for a system... Read more

Now that we at

EBN have finally the caught up with the trends and have created our own website, we can slow down long enough to ask: Why are we doing this, anyway? Didn’t we have enough to do just publishing on paper? At least the courts have struck down Internet censorship, so we don’t have to worry about getting in trouble for... Read more

In an exciting breakthrough for energy conservation measures in residential development, Roger Perry has announced that all homes in his Meadowmount development in Chapel Hill, North Carolina will be built to guidelines from the Alternative Energy Corporation (AEC). The project will contain 715 houses, and total of 1298 residential units. AEC’... Read more

Expanded polystyrene (EPS) manufacturers representing 70% of the EPS industry recently joined together in April 1995 to form a trade organization, the EPS Molders Association, to more effectively promote their products. According to the May 1996 issue of

Energy Design Update, this development should help solve one of the biggest... Read more

Christine Hammer, editor.

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