By During a visit to India in early 2016, I noticed that the way people dealt with interruptions had changed but that they were not any closer to having a continuous 24/7 supply of water and electricity.
An excellent article on the subsidies that support growing cotton in Arizona
To understand how federal policies that support the woefully unsustainable cotton farming in the Arizona desert, take a look at this ProPublica article, Holy Crop: How Federal Dollars are Financing the Water Crisis in the West, by Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam. Four years ago, when I took a sabbatical
Municipal Governments Working to Make Their Cities More Resilient
I came away optimistic that the attendees in the room weren’t going to simply sit by and wait for action; they were going to make it happen.
How California Can Model Dramatic Change
America will watch California respond to the drought, and I’m hoping that that can be a model for response to the even bigger—far bigger—challenge we all face with climate change.
Proposing a Resilient America Service Corps
Along with outdoors-focused initiatives, a Resilient America Service Corps could provide the labor needed for weatherization, installing window treatments, and carrying out deep-energy retrofits.
California’s Continuing Water Woes Call for Creative Solutions
“Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing.” -Jay Famiglietti, Ph.D., NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Engineering Our Way Out of Global Warming: Is Climate Intervention a Global Warming Solution That Republicans Will Get Behind?
I am all for carbon-capture—both the research needed to better understand it and the implementation of strategies that employ it. But albedo modification (enhanced solar reflectivity) is a different story.
Searching for Optimism in an Age of Climate Change
What inspired me to launch an organization to promote these and other aspects of resilient design, was the recognition that the safety aspects of these strategies might be a stronger motivation to get mainstream America on-board in achieving more sustainable, lower-carbon buildings and communities than simply “doing the right thing.”
How Beavers Are Coming to the Rescue in an Age of Climate Change
“In 2002 we had the worst drought on record. The only places where we had water in natural areas was where we had beaver. Beavers were mitigating the effects of drought and keeping water on the landscape.” Biologist Dr. Glynnis Hood near Edmonton, Alberta
A Dramatic Resiliency Plan to Transform New York City: The BIG U Moves Forward
The first portion of the project was approved by HUD in mid-October, 2014 for $335 million.
How the California Drought Will Affect All of Us
The most important thing we can do to strengthen the resilience of our food systems is to diversity agricultural production.
Looking to Resilient Design for a Cyclone-Battered Coastal City in India
The devastating cyclone, Hudhud this month in India provides an opportunity to incorporate strategies of passive survivability and resilience in the rebuilding.
Resilience on the Home Front – Creating a Farm
Indeed, the house planning, design, and reconstruction was a major undertaking. After having written about energy efficiency, renewable energy, and green building for more than 35 years, there were countless ideas, materials, and innovative products I wanted to try out. This would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a model
RDI’s role in two recent reports
There’s a new blog from Urban Green on the reach that the NYC Buildings Resiliency Task Force report has had beyond New York City. RDI was involved with one of these new reports–for the City of Boston. You can access the Urban Green blog here, or download a PDF of
Making Los Angeles Resilient
Lisa Novick has a very good blog on what Los Angeles should do to boost it’s resilience on the Huff Post Los Angeles. The blog includes a nice definition of resilience: “Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to absorb shock and still maintain its identity and function.
