Hybrid Living: Selling Green Lifestyle to the Lexus Crowd


If you want to see how to make "eco-design-lifestyle" sexy and aspirational, have a look at Lexus's gorgeous website "hybrid living". It "explores new ideas of how we can experience our lives in such a way that minimizes our impact on the earth without sacrificing comfort and luxury" with the emphasis on luxury.
Evidently if you drive a Lexus hybrid, you will want to live in Steve Glenn's Living Home, and you will want to tour San Francisco, LA and New York, dining in fine vegetarian restaurants and going to organic spas. The green lifestyle never looked so good. Nor expensive.

Jin Yanni

(Resource:　http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/10/hybrid_living_s_1.php)

Technology Course


One aspect that makes this photo eye-catching is the lovely layout and plant diversity -- much more appealing than the usual green roof monoculture found in North America. Who's behind the mystery roof? Did architects and engineers suddenly get into plants? Nope, this is in the Horticulture Department in Penn State University.
Here's an excerpt from the course syllabus for Penn State's course EcoRoof Technology: "The course objective will be to examine the fundamentals of green roofs their origins, installation, maintenance, and relationship with other green building technologies. Their use in stormwater mitigation as well as their ancillary benefits will be discussed. Practicum periods will be hands-on, with field trips to local green roofs as well as the installation of a green roof on a small building".
Get a look at some student "hands on" below.

Students propagating plants for a green roof project.

Resource:　http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/10/center_for_gree.php

Jin Yanni

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things.

Cradle-to-Cradle is a new housing competition aims at turning ideas of sustainability into reality. Designs of C2C will lead to actual construction with the goal of achieving the new standards of sustainability set up in Cradle to Cradle: Remarking the Way we Make Things.
The honor of the first cradle-to-cradle house is given to the architects from a Seattle-based team led by Matthew Coates and Tim Meldrum who are passed over in favor of a design that would be more economically viable.
"The result is a house that conjures images of mom and apple pie, backyard barbecues and front porch swings. There is nothing about this house that says 'gray water treatment happens here'" says the author Allison Milionis, and that's exactly the point, according to Gregg Lewis, the C2C Home organizer "We want to show that a green home doesn't need to cost more or look different from its neighbors," he says in the article.
For more about the C2C competition: http://www.c2c-home.org/#

Jin Yanni

(Resource: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/10/first_cradletoc.php)

EU Governments threatened with Legal Action over Climate Change Plans

According to the Associate Press, 15 EU nations are facing potential punishment for not being able to submit their environment plans.
The European Commission threatened its 15 member states with legal action recently if they do not provide full information on plans to reduce pollution emissions.
All 25 EU nations must get their greenhouse gas reduction statistics into the EU's head office for approval but 15 states including France, Germany, Italy and Spain have given only partial information on pollution plans.
The European Commission said it sent warning letters to these nations, urging them to inform the EU of its environmental measures and to explain why they missed a June deadline. The EU head office warned it would take them to the EU high court, where they could face fines for failure to implement the climate change law.
EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said reporting the plans is a "crucial part" of fighting climate change.

Jin Yanni

(Resource: http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=11426)

Greater Diversity of Life in Tropics


In past centuries explorers found that the further you go from the tropics, the fewer different kinds of life there are. The question became, is it because more species originated in the tropics or because older ones can persist there longer?
A team of paleontologists who studied a large group marine animal recently gave the answer: it’s both.
About three-quarters of today’s types of these creatures originated in tropics and spread toward the poles, while only one-quarter originated at higher latitudes.
As they traced the marine animals back in time, the researchers found that only 30 varieties had lived in tropics went extinct in past 11 million years, while 107 outside the tropics died out.
“The tropics are the engine for global biodiversity,” said co-author Kaustuv Roy. “What this means is that human-caused extinction in tropics will eventually start to affect the biological diversity in the temperate and high latitudes.”

Jin Yanni

(Resource: http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=11396)

Eco Expo Asia @ Hong Kong
27 - 30 October 2006


Companies from Hong Kong and all over the world are due to exhibit at Eco Expo Asia, Hong Kong's first environmental protection trade fair.
Issues on environmental systems and technologies will be discussed during the three-day Expo which will be divided into three main areas of Green World, Green Enterprise and Green Living.
Organizations exhibiting from 19 countries and regions such as Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Singapore, the UK and the US will exhibit wide range of products and services including solar heating, recycled stationery, composting techniques, biodegradable food packaging, biochemical oil, air purifiers, waste water treatments, solid waste solutions etc.
Eco Expo Asia will run from 27 - 30 October 2006 at AsiaWorld-Expo in Hong Kong.

Jin Yanni

(Resource: http://earthhopenetwork.net/News.htm)

There's No Such Thing As Eco-Tourism

You pack up your baggage, take off on the plane, get abroad and begin the trip in mysterious unknown countries and come back bearing photos of sharks and storms and sunflowers bigger than your head. "Man, it was great." maybe you say.

But here, Anneli Rufus, who’s an author for several books, tells us stop these kind of "eco-tourism" or "adventure travel". These planes transporting 207 million of us to giant-flowerland are causing global warming, Anneli says. Carbon emissions from aircraft into the higher atmosphere are thrice as potent as those rising from ground level. "We would need to ration the carbon dioxide produced by traveling to an allowance of no more than half a ton a year for every human being alive today." That translates to 1,000 kilometers by car a year with a round-trip international flight once every 15 years.

And as a result of the tourism boom and globalization there's "nowhere left to go," Anneli says, because "tourism has made the planet into a uniform spectacle".

(Resource: http://www.alternet.org/story/40174/)

Jin Yanni