NYC sustainability advocate blogs about Alex Wilson

Alex was in New York for meeting of the Municipal Art Society about preparing the city for future emergencies like Hurricane Sandy. Here’s an excellent summary by Dan Miner, who blogs at BeyondOilNYC.

The historical data is showing huge increases in intense storm events, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. With our insufficient progress in reducing carbon emissions, climate related disasters will keep increasing. The green building community will increasingly have to meet the need for resilient design, learn how to build net zero energy homes, and to apply those design principles to entire communities. Environmentally aware folks will get this instantly, but an appealing message for non-environmentalists can simply be that these homes will keep their family safe. “Even Rush Limbaugh could like that.”

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One thought on “NYC sustainability advocate blogs about Alex Wilson”

Steve says:

January 31, 2013 at 11:56 pm

Instead of building ‘New Net Zero homes, the emphasis should be on updating (energy wise) older homes to Net Zero (or better). It can be done – I have done it for a 1970s home at 5900 ft elevation in Northern Colorado with both summer and winter temperature extremes.

New home leave the old problems unadressed. Adopting an older home from the “home orphanage” and properly raising it to be Energy Positive will truly help the climate situation… as well as the resources situation.

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David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.