[lit-ideas] Re: Massive Change

The latest update to my ongoing series on bestoftheblogs.com.

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_Massive Change_ is a collaboration involving 32 experts from a wide 
variety of fields. Beyond the big ideas, this means lots of delightful 
details. Here, for example, is architect and designer Michael McDonough 
writing about his e-House in upstate New York.
>
> In e-House we collect rainwater to irrigate our garden. We also ue it 
> to store energy from sunlight and earth, and that energy isused to 
> heat or cool a hyper-energy-efficient house. If you extend this 
> thinking to other building systems, you can engineer a geothermal 
> field for maximum efficiency by backfilling it with clean, 
> well-drained, fertile soil, and get both a heating and cooling source 
> for your home and a productive organic garden.  The more people start 
> doing this community-wide, the more open space and forest can be 
> conserved. This, of course, is an alternaive to suburban sprawl. If 
> government encourages this tendency through tax policy, you get large 
> organic districts with hyper-energy-efficient homes...Imagine that new 
> home-building in this vast area [the 1,900 square mile New York City 
> watershed] was encouraged to have organic microagricultural uses. New 
> York City and its surrounding areas would be tethered to each 
> other--clean, pure water from organic watersheds and urban markets for 
> local organic produce.

The really good news is that when McDonough built his e-House, he was 
able to find everything he needed on the Internet and have it delivered 
directly to the site.

Also, as someone whose father planted the bamboo that half-surrounds 
the lot of the house in which I grew up, I especially love this 
comment,

> I like bamboo a lot. The more you use it, the better things get. It's 
> deeply versed in cultures all over the world, it's stronger than steel 
> in tension, it's stronger than concrete in compression, and it's more 
> stable than red oak, which is a very stable flooring. When you plant 
> it, it acts as a bioabsorber, cleaning pollutants out of the soil; it 
> simultaneously stabilizes the soil and prevents erosion. While it's 
> doing all of these good things, it returns more oxygen to the air 
> through photosynthesis than any other deciduous plant.

Utopian vision, sound engineering, respect for nature, too. Why rant 
when we can build?


John L. McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama, Japan 220-0006

Tel 81-45-314-9324
Email John.McCreery@xxxxxxxxxxxx

"Making Symbols is Our Business"

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