Wouldn’t it be great to extend the growing season from 3 months to 10 or 11 months? What if there were a way to garden year-round OUTSIDE without building an expensive greenhouse?

There is a way and the answer is lying in the middle of the St. Laurence river: the Buckminister Fuller designed Biosphere.  The structure of the dome mimics the Platonic solids and sacred geometry found throughout nature, including our bodies.

The geodesic dome is an amazing design because it is very strong and yet light. It needs no permanent foundation and thus could be easily moved to another site, if required.

Source: Growing Spaces

“While winter winds & snow sweep the length and breadth of the ranch at Hummingbird Living School, inside the dome it’s a cozy 65º and rising as the morning sun shines into the translucent geodesic greenhouse.

Our 42-foot dome was erected in four days, but that was only the beginning.  It’s an ongoing community effort to set up the water tank, build the loft and haul many wheelbarrows of rich soil into the structure for the beds.  And we love it all! The peripheral ring of beds is complete and already home to tender sprouting plants.”

Resource Links:

• Professional Dome Plans
• The Buckminster Fuller Institute
• Simply Differently Dome site
• Build a Geodesic Dome Solar Greenhouse to Grow Your Own Food (Slideshow)

While we all enjoy new technology such as solar panels and geothermal heat pumps, the easiest thing any homeowner can do to use less energy and be more sustainable is insulate. And then insulate some more!

Source: Mother Nature Network

I went to visit one of North America’s first “net zero” multi-unit residential dwellings – a three-story apartment building in the east end of Montreal that generates all the energy it needs over the course of a year. The development is called “Abondance,” and it’s the product of a young, ambitious architect named Christopher Sweetnam-Holmes…

…Sweetnam-Holmes’ Abondance development is an elegant example of how sustainability reorders priorities in ways that are hard to see from within the confines of our current paradigm. It’s not a conventional Montreal apartment block with solar panels on the roof; it’s a thorough rethinking of the conventions of the conventional apartment building top to bottom, often using the same materials and processes but in much different ways.

Sweetnam-Holmes gave me a tour of the project the other day – first the three-unit Phase 1 building, in which he lives, then the still-under-construction 17-unit apartment block next door. Abondance stands in a working-class neighborhood just south of downtown Montreal. I was following the beacon of the site’ s address on Google Maps on my iPhone, and the building was so inconspicuous I walked right by it. If I was further back from it, I might’ve spied the silhouette of the solar array on the roof, but otherwise it was a brick low-rise seamlessly integrated into the rest of the block.

The really radical thing about Abondance is not the solar PV and hot-water heaters, not the geothermal heat pumps in the basement that warm and cool it or the wireless master kill switch at the door of each unit that lets you turn off all the lights and everything sucking juice on “sleep” mode in one poke as you leave. No, what’s radical about Abondance is how little energy it needs – something like 23 percent of the Montreal average – and how it reduced its required load.

The main answer: insulation. Lots of it. More than double the norm, including exterior layers of spray-foam insulation to avoid heat loss at the wooden studs. Abondance isn’t an energy-generating marvel so much as an obsessive experiment in R-value and what they call “tightness” in the building trade. Abondance takes in heat very well, and it traps it zealously. It’s ridiculously well-insulated box masquerading as a cleantech showcase.

If there were no suburban office “parks” then there would be less incentive to live in the suburbs and less incentive to drive EVERYWHERE. There would be more incentive to live in urban, energy efficient communities where daily interaction with people and a sense of community was common.

Source: NY Times

IN an era of concern about climate change, residential suburbs are the focus of a new round of critiques, as low-density developments use more energy, water and other resources. But so far there’s been little discussion of that other archetype of sprawl, the suburban office.

Rethinking sprawl might begin much more effectively with these business enclaves. They cover vast areas and are occupied by a few powerful entities, corporations, which at some point will begin spending their ample reserves to upgrade, expand or replace their facilities…

…suburban offices are even more unsustainably designed than residential suburbs. Sidewalks extend only between office buildings and parking lots, expanses of open space remain private and the spreading of offices over large zones precludes effective mass transit.

These workplaces embody a new form of segregation, where civic space connecting work to the shops, housing, recreation and transportation that cities used to provide is entirely absent. Corporations have cut themselves off from participation in a larger public realm.

Rethinking pastoral capitalism is integral to creating a connected, compact metropolitan landscape that tackles rather than sidesteps a post-peak-oil future. This requires three interrelated strategies. State and federal governments should stop paying for new highway extensions that essentially subsidize the conversion of agricultural land for development, including corporate offices. Existing infrastructure needs maintenance and renewal, not expansion.

Source: Ecohouse.co.nz

Research Credit: Cryptogon

This is a success story of Montreal innovation leading the world!

Source: Montreal Gazette

Located close to work or public transit, on narrow streets not yet planned for car traffic, in areas with high enough density of population to foster thriving, busy commercial streets nearby, Montreal’s original narrow houses are living examples of sustainable city living.

Friedman has spent much of his career espousing skinny spaces as an antidote to the three-car, suburban dream house. He grew up in a narrow house in Israel and now lives in a narrow house in Notre Dame de Grâce. In the early 1990s, he and his colleague Witold Rybczynski developed the Grow Home, a small, inexpensive and energy-efficient narrow-front house that won international acclaim and myriad awards for its efficient use of space. Builders from Pointe aux Trembles to the Czech Republic and Mexico built houses based on the Grow Homes design.

Despite the accolades, Friedman’s 14-foot-wide, 1,500-square-foot houses were seen as an oddity back then. But fast-forward 20 years and thin is in. Narrow homes aren’t just a product of necessity meant to fit a tight budget or a sliver of land. For a long time, only people who couldn’t afford bigger houses lived in small ones. But that’s changing. Growing numbers of homebuyers seek smaller houses that better fit the changing demographics of smaller families, single-parent households and aging couples. Around the globe, homes are cropping up in the tightest of spaces as a new generation of space-savvy architects finds bold and creative ways to redefine “cozy.”

“Urban planners talk about the importance of density in building vibrant, healthy neighbourhoods. And they are constantly looking for ways of halting sprawl. Well, right here in these old Montreal neighbourhoods are to be found some tried and true century-old solutions,” Friedman explained as he took a visitor on a guided tour through Verdun and the Point. In Pointe aux Trembles, more than 10,000 narrow homes, based on his original Grow Home design and built in 1991, have matured into a leafy, livable community where ivy grows up the sides of houses and kids skateboard through the streets.

When an architect builds sustainable housing in North America, she is faced with bureaucratic rules and regulations. When she takes the same technology to other countries, she is welcomed with gratitude.

This touching documentary traces the work of sustainable architect extraordinaire, Michael Reynolds… best of all, it has a happy ending!

Source: Garbage Warrior web site

Imagine a home that heats itself, that provides its own water, that grows its own food. Imagine that it needs no expensive technology, that it recycles its own waste, that it has its own power source.

And now imagine that it can be built anywhere, by anyone, out of the things society throws away. Thirty years ago, architect Michael Reynolds imagined just such a home – then set out to build it.

A visionary in the classic American mode, Reynolds has been fighting ever since to bring his concept to the public. He believes that in an age of ecological instability and impending natural disaster, his buildings can – and will – change the way we live.

Shot over three years in the USA, India and Mexico, Garbage Warrior is a feature-length documentary film telling the epic story of maverick architect Michael Reynolds, his crew of renegade house builders from New Mexico, and their fight to introduce radically different ways of living.

A snapshot of contemporary geo-politics and an inspirational tale of triumph over bureaucracy, Garbage Warrior is above all an intimate portrait of an extraordinary individual and his dream of changing the world.

Watch the trailer:

2011 Vermont Permaculture Design Course

Utilizing the incomparable Whole Systems Research Farm permaculture site in Vermont’s Mad River Valley, our design studio resources, and a team of leading facilitators, Whole Systems Design, Keith Morris and Lisa DePiano present the first of many permaculture design courses to be offered in the coming decades.  This certification course will be held July 31st to August 12th, 2011 at the Whole Systems Design Studio and Research Farm site. 

This course offers an unparalleled opportunity to gain hands-on applied permaculture skills immersed within one of North America’s most diverse and intensive permaculture research sites.  Participants will engage with high-performance home and community resource systems that will be more resilient in the face of problems posed by peak oil, climate change, environmental toxicity, and the inability of existing economic and social systems to deal with such challenges.

This course includes the standard certificate curriculum but goes way beyond the typical Designer’s Certification Course by utilizing the background of skills-based trainings offered in Whole Systems Skills, and information-based study.  Students in this course will not walk and is filled with practice-based, learning-by-doing experiences, not only concept away from the experience without basic post-peak oil resiliency literacy including: how to plant a tree, fell a tree, split firewood, harvest biomass with a sycthe and sharpen it, sharpen and maintain other basic tools, perform earthworks, plumb basic waterworks and harvest water, inoculate mushroom logs and spread mushroom patches and innumerable other hard skills available to us via our working homestead, farm and practitioner-teachers.

Unlike at many permaculture course, we will actually be practicing these techniques on the farm throughout the course.

Course Highlights

• Immersion and practice in one of the most sophisticated permaculture sites in North America.

• Living at a beautiful site in the heart of Vermont, in the Mad River Valley.  See more here.
  

• Ecological design and engineering pioneer John Todd anchors a team of guest instructors and visiting presenters.
  

• Field trips to regional sites to see models of permaculture strategies in action.

There will be a first-come-first-served opportunity for a 3 day applied permaculture practicum after the course where a small group of course students will have the opportunity to practice permaculture all day, each day, on the research farm site.

Course Instructors

Keith Morris – Propect Rock Permaculture

Lisa DePiano – Montview Neighborhood Farm

Ben Falk, M.A.L.D. - Whole Systems Design

Cornelius Murphy – Whole Systems Design

To learn more and register for a place in the course, please visit our website.

This seems strange coming from Southern California, one of the most unsustainable areas in North America, but this is an offering for the richest of Orange county including Newport Beach and Huntington Beach. These folks can afford the high up-front costs of sustainable homes.

Source: Permaculture Properties

Green is great, but thinking about how the actions we make today will echo into the future is something we’re not doing nearly enough of. Worshiping resource intensive technologies instead of following nature’s path to abundance.

It’s not all that smart to ship flooring with a thin veneer of bamboo from a distant location to cover your living room floor that won’t last more than a decade instead of harvesting a much more durable, local wood or stone that will out live yourself. These are the short sided, reactionary decisions that we’re hoping to influence. We feel the ideas associated with permaculture are the most efficient and appropriate way to define the change that’s needed in our community.

Source: Ottawa Citizen

Source: Montreal Gazette

The Centre for Sustainable Development (better known by its French name, the Maison du développement durable) will soon begin to emerge on the corner of Clark and Ste. Catherine St. W.. The centre will house headquarters of eight non-profit organizations dedicated social or environmental causes.

The building will be huge –  its promoters are calling it “65,000 square feet of hope” –  and it is expected to be one of the greenest buildings in Canada. Green roof, geothermal heating and cooling…the works…

Here is a very cool video developed by lg2, the folks who produced the Centre’s website. “Using nothing but garbage, waste materials and recycled objects, André Dubois (lg2) and Éric Parizeau (director) built a magical universe where the world evolves in mysterious ways. The execution is an animation, created frame by frame, where people and animals embark on a journey to an extraordinary place where they view the very beginnings of the Maison du développement durable, represented by a growing tree.”

Here are the eight partners who will be finding new digs at the Centre:

1. Options consommateurs (a non-profit association protecting consumers)
2. Equiterre (environmental group)
3. CRE-Montréal (umbrella group for local environmental organizations)
4. Le petit réseau (a childcare centre)
5. ENvironnement JEUnesse (environmental group dedicated to educating and involving young people in the environmental movement)
6. the Regroupement national des conseils régionaux de l’environnement du Québec (an umbrella group for regional environmental organizations)
7. Le Regroupement des services Eco-Quartier (a resource organization to help neighbourhood environmental groups)
8. the Centre québécois du droit de l’environnment (a non-profit corporation that promotes environmental justice)