 |
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
THE ARCHITECTURE ISSUE
The Chronicle Review's yearly look at architecture examines buildings on and off campuses. Above, Caltech's new Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, designed by Morphosis. (Chronicle photograph by Lawrence Biemiller)
Other News
U. of Tennessee Landmark to Move to Nearby Location
New campus buildings
Multimedia
Pomona's Skyspace
The artist James Turrell turned a Pomona College courtyard into a work of art worth waking up at dawn for.
Subscribe
Subscribe to Buildings & Grounds in a feed reader.
Get the Buildings & Grounds widget for Facebook, Myspace, or your own blog.
About Buildings & Grounds
Buildings & Grounds is written by Scott Carlson (left) and Lawrence Biemiller (right). Scott Carlson writes about architecture, facilties, energy, and sustainability, among other topics. Lawrence Biemiller writes about architecture and facilities and contributes to Notes from Academe. What's happening on your campus? Let us know.
Doing the Sustainable Thing at Cascadia Community College
An article in a business publication in Washington State details some of the sustainable programs going on at Cascadia Community College. This is notable because it shows, once again, that community colleges are becoming intensely interested in sustainability — despite having a transient student population, tight budgets, and (as someone put it to me recently) a physical plant built for disposability.
The article was written by a sustainability adviser in the architecture firm working with the college, so assess the article for what it is — a publicity piece. However, it does provide a guide to a number of innovative programs that might prove useful at other colleges.
The college used goats, instead of chemical weed killers, to clear its landscape of brush, and it has set up worm composters to eat its garbage. (Worm composters, you might already know, produce very potent fertilizer. Two Princeton students started a fertilizer company in which worms are the primary employees.) The campus has also stopped using pesticides in favor of integrated pest management, which uses a number of natural methods to control insects and other pests.
The college is planting trees and restoring a wetland, which will serve as a reservoir for storm-water runoff.
And the college is also putting up a building that is shooting for a platinum rating in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. College officials hope that the building will be a zero-energy building.
Scott Carlson | Friday September 21, 2007 | Permalink | Contact usComments
Previous: A Green Ballpark at Penn State
Next: Shop Talk: Short Items on Science, Plants, and Power
How to kill pests without killing yourself or the earth…...
There are about 50 to 60 million insect species on earth – we have named only about 1 million and there are only about 1 thousand pest species – already over 50% of these thousand pests are already resistant to our volatile, dangerous, synthetic pesticide POISONS. We accidentally lose about 25,000 to 100,000 species of insects, plants and animals every year due to “man’s footprint”. But, after poisoning the entire world and contaminating every living thing for over 60 years with these dangerous and ineffective pesticide POISONS we have not even controlled much less eliminated even one pest species and every year we use/misuse more and more pesticide POISONS to try to “keep up”! Even with all of this expensive pollution – we lose more and more crops and lives to these thousand pests every year.
We are losing the war against these thousand pests mainly because we insist on using only synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers There has been a severe “knowledge drought” – a worldwide decline in agricultural R&D, especially in production research and safe, more effective pest control since the advent of synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers. Today we are like lemmings running to the sea insisting that is the “right way”. The greatest challenge facing humanity this century is the necessity for us to double our global food production with less land, less water, less nutrients, less science, frequent droughts, more and more contamination and ever-increasing pest damage.
National Poison Prevention Week, March 18-24,2007 was created to highlight the dangers of poisoning and how to prevent it. One study shows that about 70,000 children in the USA were involved in common household pesticide-related (acute) poisonings or exposures in 2004. It is estimated that 300,000 farm workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning each year in the United States – No one is checking chronic contamination.
In order to try to help “stem the tide”, I have just finished re-writing my IPM encyclopedia entitled: THE BEST CONTROL II, that contains over 2,800 safe and far more effective alternatives to pesticide POISONS. This latest copyrighted work is about 1,800 pages in length and is now being updated at my new website at http://www.stephentvedten.com/ .
This new website at http://www.stephentvedten.com/ has been basically updated; all we have left to update is Chapter 39 and to renumber the pages. All of these copyrighted items are free for you to read and/or download. There is simply no need to POISON yourself or your family or to have any pest problems.
Stephen L. Tvedten
2530 Hayes Street
Marne, Michigan 49435
1-616-677-1261
“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.” —Victor Hugo
— Stephen L. Tvedten Sep 22, 08:45 AM #