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

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

Among the first set of fifteen grants announced by the recently created North American Fund for Environmental Cooperation (NAFEC) is an award of CAN$94,000 for a project by the International Institute for Sustainable Development of Winnipeg, Manitoba, for the evaluation of sustainable development plans in three... Read more

With recent restrictions on logging in some publicly owned forests in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., the pressure on forests in Canada’s British Columbia (B.C.) is increasing. A broad array of environmental groups is increasingly vocal about the fate of B.C.’s temperate rainforests, and coalitions... Read more

An adobe house under construction in a Lakota Sioux community in South Dakota, with assistance from the Yestermorrow Design-Build School. Material for these adobe... Read more

This is a great tale, but I don’t believe it. The article [

Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 10-11] implies that insulation and airsealing dropped 30 tons (106 kW) of peak load from this 17,000 ft2 (1,600 m2) building. Nor do I believe the peak load of only 20 tons (70 kW) for this building. Indiana has hot... Read more

Canada’s largest energy producers have formed a nonprofit alliance, the Greenhouse Emissions Management Consortium (GEMCo), to manage the companies’ carbon emission offset activities. GEMCo president Aldyen Donnelly was quoted in the 28 June issue of

Global Environmental Change Report that the formation of GEMCo highlights a growing... Read more

Stratospheric levels of chlorine should peak by the year 2000, according to the 14 June issue of

Global Environmental Change Report. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, have been measuring levels of various CFCs and HCFCs in the lower atmosphere (troposphere) since 1991 and... 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

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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I’ve worked the last 25 years on developing parts of what is now called “Eco-design,” under the belief that healthier buildings, lower energy use, and less ecological impact were important. This was only to discover recently that all this time I was still looking at things in isolation rather in their ecological interconnectedness!

The April 1996 issue of the well-regarded British publication

Green Building Digest reports that Malaysia—one of the world’s largest plywood exporters—now stamps all of its plywood with the label “Sustainable Timber” even though, according to the Malaysian government, the country will be a net timber importer by the end of the century... Read more

A newly formed organization is now developing standardized testing protocols for indoor air quality related products and materials. The Product Emissions Testing Lab (PETL) Network is bringing together representatives of academia, government, and industry to achieve consensus-based procedures and to certify laboratories to test products... Read more

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

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1996. 445 pages, hardcover, $34.95.

Near the top of that list is Ian McHarg, a Scottish war hero who went on to found the landscape architecture program... Read more