Sustainable design is booming, but the men and women dedicated to reducing their carbon impact have lost sight of what they are trying to save: the natural world. Author Neil Chambers has been at the forefront of cutting-edge, sustainable architecture for years, and Urban Green is his revolutionary vision for bringing the power of the conservation and design movements together. He advocates looking to nature for the missing components of the green revolution: oysters that can clean water at up to 5 liters an hour; beavers that reshape their environments while simultaneously enriching ecosystems; and mountains that offer a new way of imagining how a city could be built. By designing our homes and cities in harmony with the natural world, we can take the next step in the sustainable revolution.
Sustainable design is booming, but the men and women dedicated to reducing their carbon impact have lost sight of what they are trying to save: the natural world. Author Neil Chambers has been at the forefront of cutting-edge, sustainable architecture for years, and Urban Green is his revolutionary vision for bringing the power of the conservation and design movements together. He advocates looking to nature for the missing components of the green revolution: oysters that can clean water at up to 5 liters an hour; beavers that reshape their environments while simultaneously enriching ecosystems; and mountains that offer a new way of imagining how a city could be built. By designing our homes and cities in harmony with the natural world, we can take the next step in the sustainable revolution.
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Overview
Sustainable design is booming, but the men and women dedicated to reducing their carbon impact have lost sight of what they are trying to save: the natural world. Author Neil Chambers has been at the forefront of cutting-edge, sustainable architecture for years, and Urban Green is his revolutionary vision for bringing the power of the conservation and design movements together. He advocates looking to nature for the missing components of the green revolution: oysters that can clean water at up to 5 liters an hour; beavers that reshape their environments while simultaneously enriching ecosystems; and mountains that offer a new way of imagining how a city could be built. By designing our homes and cities in harmony with the natural world, we can take the next step in the sustainable revolution.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780230337411 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/05/2011 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Neil B. Chambers is an award-winning green designer and founder of Chambers Design, Inc. and Green Ground Zero. He serves as an adjunct professor at NYU, teaching green design and environmental policy, and is a national fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program. Chambers has a growing media presence, both in traditional media and the blogosphere, where his blog on Treehugger.com, which is owned by Discovery, has an active following of 90,000 readers. He has also been featured in The Village Voice, Architectural Record, The Sun News and Timeout, and has been interviewed by BBC News, NY1, and Guernica magazine, which called him a "green guru."
Neil B. Chambers is an award-winning green designer and founder of Chambers Design, Inc. and Green Ground Zero. He is the author of Urban Green. He serves as an adjunct professor at NYU, teaching green design and environmental policy, and is a national fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program. Chambers has a growing media presence, both in traditional media and the blogosphere, where his blog on Treehugger.com, which is owned by Discovery, has an active following of 90,000 readers. He has also been featured in The Village Voice, Architectural Record, The Sun News and Timeout, and has been interviewed by BBC News, NY1, and Guernica magazine, which called him a “green guru.”
Read an Excerpt
Urban Green
Architecture for the Future
By Neil B. Chambers
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2011 Neil B. ChambersAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-230-33741-1
CHAPTER 1
WHEN BUILDINGS WENT BAD
Buildings were never meant to make you sick. Shelter is an essential element for survival. You can live a couple of days without water, and even longer without food, but one night exposed to rain or cold could spell your demise. Building a primitive hut such as a lean-to increases your chance of survival by almost 100 percent. The fact that buildings are no longer safe for people is at odds with our very survival.
So when did buildings become so deadly? Archaeological studies found that tribal people in Mesoamerica deforested vast areas of woodlands to build dwellings in the southwest of the United States. The logging of these forests caused topsoil to erode, and the forests never came back even hundreds of years after the natives had left. For example, the ancient Pueblo peoples known as the Anasazi built extensive complex structures in the remote deserts of northwestern New Mexico. These settlements required cutting down most of the trees within the area, which damaged the Anasazi's ability to produce food from agriculture because of the loss of topsoil. The drought-stricken area has never rebounded from the deforestation and environmental degradation caused by the Anasazi, though their developments were abandoned more than 800 years ago.
The castles, churches, and cathedrals of Europe are seen as monuments of a golden age, but extravagant numbers of trees and stones were needed to complete each one. Once these edifices were built, it took mountains of logs to heat them during the winter. Burning wood in structures with bad ventilation such as those built in Europe can cause respiratory problems that lead to worse diseases like cancer and chronic bronchitis. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers inhalation of beyond a certain level of wood smoke to be unhealthy because it contains nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, organic gases, and fine particles. Until the twentieth century, ventilation was not a priority for architecture, nor were other means of heating available besides wood and other organic materials such as coal. So it is difficult to say when buildings went bad.
Even more modern structures like the Empire State Building were poorly built. At the time of its completion in 1931, it was considered a marvel of innovation. In 2009, plans were unveiled to update the skyscraper to be green at a cost 22 times the original price tag. The decision for such a radical renovation was seen by green building professionals and advocates as a true victory for their industry. But it also shows just how badly the building was originally constructed not even a century ago. Before modern chemicals were available for preserving wood, people used kerosene, which is highly flammable and very toxic. Lead-based paint was used until the 1970s in the United States and still coats the interiors of many older buildings. Asbestos, which had been used since 100 B.C. by the Greeks as a fire retardant, is known to cause cancer. All of these chemicals can still be found in the Empire State Building—where thousands of people go to work each day, and more than 2 million people visit each year.
Both lead paint and asbestos are now outlawed in the United States. But today many other materials and chemicals that are standard in the building industry should give us pause.
HOW THE BUILDING INDUSTRY LEARNED TO POISON US
The building industry is not always easy to understand. One way to look at it is that it is like the Wild West, where two factors reign supreme: money and speed. Everyone in the building profession, from real estate developers to architects and designers, wants to keep construction costs as low as possible, and thus they always pick the cheapest materials for a job. The problem with the cheapest building materials is they are often the most toxic and lowest quality. They result in the biggest profits for the developer, but they also hold the highest potential for making anyone using a building sick.
Companies manufacturing the materials used in buildings understand that they can stay competitive only if they can offer their products at, or below, the current price of common products. They also know that they must mass-produce their materials to keep down production costs. The end result is that cheap, low-quality materials with unacceptable toxicity levels are the standard, even in so-called luxury items.
Those of us who don't work in the building industry have become so accustomed to the toxicity levels of common household materials that we overlook obvious signs that something is wrong. The woozy feeling you get from being inside a newly painted room is because a category of toxins called volatile organic compounds (also known as VOCs) are off-gassing. Paints containing VOCs are the standard for 99.9 percent of all paint jobs throughout the world. Anyone who has ever spent time in a newly painted room or hallway has inhaled VOCs. These toxins can cause eye, nose, and throat irritation along with headaches, loss of coordination, and nausea. Long-term exposure can lead to damage to your liver, kidneys, and central nervous system. Some VOCs can cause cancer. Symptoms of exposure include nose and throat discomfort, skin irritation, fatigue, and dizziness. Only in the last three to four years have paint industry giants such as Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore begun to offer low- VOC (the still toxic but not as toxic option) and zero-VOC alternatives to consumers.
But simply picking a different paint will not let you avoid the toxicity conventional buildings contain. Carpets, hardwood floors, molding, wallpaper, floor tiles, floor sealants, and adhesives are packed full of hazardous chemicals. Urea-formaldehyde is a toxin commonly used in fiberboards, particleboard, and plywood—all of which are always used in building projects. Urea-formaldehyde is one of the most cost-effective ways to give wood products their flat form and makes the wood scratch resistant. But it can also trigger asthma attacks as well as cause eye, nose, and throat irritation, wheezing and coughing, skin rashes, and severe allergic reactions, and it has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory testing. Nearly every wood product in the world uses it. You can find it in the furniture you buy and the clothes you wear. The wood used within a couch is full of urea-formaldehyde while the cushions are full of other VOCs. Bed mattresses and frames are full of these things too. Most bed linen is laden with toxins left over from the processing of the fabric. According to the EPA, studies have found that levels of several VOCs are on average two to five times higher indoors than outdoors, and after such activities as new construction, painting, or paint stripping indoor levels may be a thousand times those of the normal levels found outside. These have the same health effects as the VOCs mentioned above.
Urea-formaldehyde and VOCs are child's play compared to the stuff found in everyday carpeting. The fibers of carpeting are made from petroleum products, and they include as many as 120 known poisonous materials. These toxins can be found in the bonding agencies, dyes, and stain-resistant treatments of the carpets. The simple act of walking across a carpet sends fibers airborne, making it extremely easy for people to inhale them. In essence, you are inhaling oil along with a long list of chemicals. Many of the chemicals are neurotoxins, which can affect the normal activities of your nervous system. Once they are inside you, it is difficult to get them out. Carpets contain a staggering amount of other chemicals such as ethyl benzene, styrene, and acetone, some of which are listed by the EPA as extremely hazardous substances. These chemicals cause hallucinations and respiratory illness in humans.
Taken together, the combination of carpeting, paints, wood, furniture, sealants, glues, and linens in our homes and workplaces reveals just how bad these places can be for our health. Sometimes when I point this out to people, their response is that no one is dropping dead from the carpet at the office. This is because the cancer-causing agents within building materials are accumulative, and most build up over time. It can take years for these poisons to work their way into the sensitive parts of your body like the lymphatic system, where they can irritate cellular structure enough to bring about tumors.
It is nearly impossible to know just how many people have been made sick from simple household products like carpet, paint, and mattresses, but it is safe to say there have been many. These toxic choices have been the materials of choice of architects and developers for decades. And yet, for all the problems the presence of carcinogens, VOCs, and other noxious substances in common building products can cause, their potential harm pales in comparison to the damage done before they ever make it to the store to be bought.
WHERE THE DAMAGE TO HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT STARTS
The investigation of how materials affect the environment from when their raw components are harvested until they are finally delivered and installed is called a life- cycle analysis. The life-cycle analysis can be broken into four major phases: harvesting, processing, manufacturing, and installation. For example, in the harvesting phase of steel, you first have to pull iron ore out of the ground. Very often, ore is found in remote locations, requiring wide roads to be built deep into the wilderness. Iron is the most commonly used metal in the world, mainly due to its being a key ingredient for steel. Because of this, iron represents almost 95 percent of all metal used per year worldwide. To get iron, you must first mine iron ore, or the rocks and minerals that yield metallic iron during extraction. Because iron and steel are the structural materials of choice for bridges, towers, naval ships, automobiles, and just about every building in the United States more than a story high—with Japan, European countries, the United States, China, and South Korea increasing consumption by about 10 percent yearly—we are increasingly complicit in the environmental degradation caused by iron extraction, delivery, processing, and manufacturing.
To get to high-quality, large deposits of iron ore, you have to remove tons of soil and rock with explosives before electric shovels can load blasted ore into trucks. By the time all the available ore has been removed from the mine, it looks more like a moonscape than someplace on Earth. Take for example, the Mount Whaleback iron ore mine, Newman, Western Australia. Mount Whaleback is the biggest open-cut iron ore mine on the continent. Iron in its raw form is the color of rust, and the Mount Whaleback is covered in a thick layer of red iron ore dust.
The geological history of Western Australia is ancient, with most of the landscape flat and never exceeding an elevation of 4,300 feet. The Mount Whaleback mine opens the land like a mini–Grand Canyon. Mining of iron, like that of most other open-mine resources, is done in a series of steps. A layer is cut into the ground, and then another and another until, like Whaleback, it resembles a huge red rock ziggurat made of terraces 50 feet deep. From tip to tail, the mine is three miles long, more than a mile wide, and several hundred feet deep. The gigantic pieces of machinery necessary to move the ore are dwarfed against the human-made canyon. This is how most iron ore mines look. In the United States, Michigan has three of the six iron-rich areas.
The blasting needed to carve into the earth means removing anything living on the site along with precious topsoil. Erosion poses a significant problem as miners begin to blast and remove the iron. Environmental impacts and risks start at the very beginning of the process. For example, many valuable metals are present within iron ore that are soluble in acid. The ore will go through several stages of processing. It is typically processed close to the mining site the first time, and leaching of acidic solutions is common. The proper disposal of wastewater presents problems because of the typical remoteness of mines. The grinding of nonmetals like quarried stone and limestone pose air-pollution problems as airborne particulates are released. Solid waste like soil, waste rock, and vegetation overburden the general area. Toxic fumes from solvents and vapors from heavy equipment make the areas unsuitable for life. Water used for processing is contaminated with cyanide, solvents, sulfur dioxide, sulfuric acid, cyanide compounds, cresols, hydrocarbons, copper compounds and zinc dust, aluminum sulfate, lime, iron, calcium salts, and starches. Artificial ponds are constructed to retain the water from flowing away from mining sites, but often regulatory rules can't be enforced, so it escapes into the environment. Once the mine is completely depleted, the walls of the mine are unstable, topsoil is absent, and pollution is high, making recovery to a more natural condition impossible.
Hauling loads of iron from work site to factory causes large quantities of dirt to become loosened along the road. The loose dirt gets swept away during rainstorms into streams and rivers. As rainfall sweeps the earth away as runoff, it takes along with it any toxins or chemicals such as grease, gasoline, motor oil, and antifreeze that may have splashed from the trucks. These impurities enter streams and water tables and are absorbed by the soil. Roads on hillsides or mountains create erosion, sometimes destroying entire hillsides over time. Unstable shoulders and roadways will supply hefty amounts of dirt into waterways like rivers and creeks in the form of erosion. This dirt becomes a primary agent that chokes riverine habitats by coating the bottom of rivers. Grasses, shrubs, and brush that stabilize riverbanks disappear due to the root systems being covered with sediment. The sedimentation that occurs clogs the foundation of essential habitat for insects that are the basis of these ecosystems' food chain. For example, the rocky bottoms of a river act as nurseries for insects like dragonflies and damselflies. Birds, fish, water beetles, frogs, spiders, lizards, and even larger species of other insects feed on dragonflies from the moment they are larvae until they are adults. Without them the web of life is off balance, soon affecting other species. A river in a forested area impacted by sedimentation from mining can become defunct, losing the natural method by which the water flowing within it is cleaned.
The unforeseen side effect of rivers becoming defunct is that flooding increases. When the natural habitat is fully intact, the velocity and volume of water are modulated by variations in depth as well as width. Also, vegetation and the way rivers wind create ecological checks and balances to control any sudden surges of water from rainfall or snowmelt. However, as riverbanks lose the grasses and brush that hold them together, the banks erode and widen. This, along with additional sedimentation, makes them shallower. Where the ecological conditions could at one time withstand a rush of excess water, now the system has been robbed of that ability. The only place for the flow to go is over the banks and into whatever is built on the other side.
Worse still is that more water is pouring into the river than before. With all of the vegetation removed from the hillsides or watershed, there is nothing to capture and hold it throughout the landscape. Storm water flows directly into the waterbody at a faster rate and in a higher quantity. If the natural conditions were still intact, less runoff would make it to the stream or river because layers of leaves, root systems, depressions, holes, and other characteristics of the ground would soak it up as it moved across the landscape. Without these things, the water is unimpeded, resulting in worse and worse flooding—which, as many disasters have shown, means more damage to property, loss of jobs, and, in more and more cases, loss of lives.
Roads cut for hauling iron ore and other goods to a factory can also create massive floods in low-lying areas where towns, farms, and roads are typically located. Many people think that the raw materials we must extract from the earth are a prerequisite for society, that we have to have the resources at whatever cost, monetary or environmental. The toll on humans is greatest with regard to the side effects of problems caused. You may have on occasion seen stories in the media about record-breaking rainfall followed by extensive damage to property. Homes, businesses, cars, and bridges are washed away during storms. Flooding costs companies and individuals billions of dollars every year. Most pundits do not look beyond the notion that such issues are caused by lack of tax dollars being spent to update civil underpinning like levees and dams. But the truth is that it is the damage inflected onto ecosystems across the country in the name of progress that is the deeper root of the problem.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Urban Green by Neil B. Chambers. Copyright © 2011 Neil B. Chambers. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
List of Figures,Introduction: Why the Current Green Movement Is Getting It Wrong,
1 When Buildings Went Bad,
2 The History of Green Building,
3 How Infrastructure Makes Water Work for Us,
4 The Electrical Grid,
5 The Sustainability of Nature,
6 The Cities of Tomorrow,
7 Working with Nature to Find Clean Water,
8 Energy Better Sized,
9 Bridging the Divide between Buildings and Wilderness,
10 The Invisible City,
11 The Greatest Vision,
12 Our Role as a Keystone Species,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Index,