Category Archives: Class

Updates from Campus

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Hello, all! I was thinking of sending out an update on what I’ve been doing, and was pleasantly surprised to see Nick and Irys’s posts on the blog! Green Dorm lives on! It would be great to get this going again and keep an active dialogue going on here. A great way to stay in touch with this blog is to click on the “WordPress Entries (RSS)” link at the bottom of this page, or by going here: feed://www.lotuslive.org/blog/?feed=rss2 and clicking either the “Subscribe in Mail,” “Add Bookmark,” or other pertinent links which will create a feed to your browser or email client that will let you know when new content is posted by green dormers!

While I’ve been at Stanford, I’ve been working on creating the new Student Sustainability Research Consortium, which some of you heard the beginnings of at the end of last year. I’m working with the Woods Institute, Students for a Sustainable Stanford, the OSA, and some others to create an organization that will be responsible for bringing together, organizing, and publishing all the student sustainability research on campus. (Shameless plug: If you have any research/papers/etc that we could start the site off with, we’d love to have it!)  We’re also going to be hosting events to bring people together in interdisciplinary groups & get people excited in sustainability research. Hopefully, by providing a place for people to go to look for direction, funding, advice, and experience, we’ll be able to increase the quantity and improve the quality of student research on campus! It’s been a fun process so far, and we’re heading into a lot of work as the summer rolls on with excitement. (shameless plug #2, if any of you know of any good web programmers with lots of time and no need for money, let me know!)

As for the Green Dorm, I’m meeting with Professor Fischer some time later this week (pending contact ;) ). He was very interested in me helping to raise the money to get the dorm built, and I’ll be talking with him about the future of the class, TAs, etc as well. Let me know if you want me to say anything to him!

-Mike

Breaking News – Carnegie Mellon is Still Cool

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A class at Carnegie Mellon University has students taking green back to the drawing board – Literally.

Students created posters designed to influence sustainability

Students created posters designed to influence sustainability

“One of several assignments given by Melissa Cicozi in her Design and Social Change class, the project asks students to design a poster showing how an individual can reduce carbon emissions by changing a single behavior.

While some of the students try to get you to make the switch to fluorescent bulbs, others suggest you turn the lights off altogether. A few encourage you to plant a tree and even consider getting on your bike instead of into your car — all in the name of saving our planet.

Global warming is so overwhelming,” said Cicozi, winner of this year’s Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Advising and Mentoring.  “I wanted the students to not only grab people’s attention, but to make viewers feel like one person really can make a difference.”

In a second component of the course, the students get together in groups and study the recycling habits of the Carnegie Mellon community. After careful consideration, they design an improved recycling plan – complete with container and label design, a strategic plan for placement of the containers, a plan for “communicating the plan,” and a proposed ad campaign for the nationwide college and university competition known as Recyclemania.

Encouraging a return to nature can be very productive

Encouraging a return to nature can be very productive

The course’s final component encourages the students to literally dig deep and reach for any remaining scraps of inventiveness: they have to make something out of trash.  Their work will be exhibited and sold at Construction Junction, an organization that supports and promotes conservation in Pittsburgh through the reuse of building materials, starting April 28.

“The students are in the middle of the final project right now,” said Cicozi. “I know they are considering everything from tools and accessories to furniture and housewares.  Any profits will go to Construction Junction, to help them continue their promotion of reusing construction waste and architectural artifacts.”

Cicozi’s Design and Social Change class is just one of more than 100 Carnegie Mellon courses exploring environmental issues through a variety of disciplines. It’s also one of more than 30 courses that integrates environmental awareness as part of the three-year “Greening of Early Undergraduate Education” project, funded by The Henry Luce Foundation.”

Source: CMU Green Practices

 

I think these advertising campaigns are a great and creative way to get students involved and passionate about the Green Dorm and sustainability in general. Can we host events to promote sustainability like we were beginning to plan last quarter?

January 22, 2009: Magic

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David Schrom from Magic joined us today to talk about Magic, an intentional community in Palo Alto. They are building a second residence on their campus, and would love to collaborate with us, sharing ideas and experiences.

Magic is overwhelmed with the hundreds of questions that come with designing a green building, and as luck would have it, our time has just opened up. This could be a great opportunity to apply our research conclusions, and find new research questions to explore. They could use our time and knowledge, and we could use their knowledge and connections. They’re dealing with exactly the same issues and questions that we are, and they’re doing it right now, making the decisions in the near future, and they’re open to all of our ideas. Essentially, the Magic residence could serve as a small scale test run for green dorm ideas, giving us the experience we need to make the Green Dorm that much better.

David has invited us to join them for supper at Magic, and we’re definitely going to take him up on it – I’m coordinating with him about specifics and will let you know.

 

Sam Says:

The Magic talk was very cool.  There are many opportunities to develop least cost life services solutions in a real building.  The house is designed within a tight budget framework which means that there is a rich opportunity for innovation.   Public transit is near the site.  The house currently has almost no insulation.  We could figure out an inexpensive way to install high R-value “Passivhaus” quality insulation.  

Solar energy for the site is difficult because solar panels are expensive.  We could get a hodge-podge of discount solar panels panels for the site and use micro-inverters to integrate all of the panels for optimum power production.

The Economic Impetus for an Ecologically Friendly Green Dorm

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Different types of ecosystem services

Different types of ecosystem services

A fundamental property of any building is that it takes up space, space that at one point was host to a variety of life. From grasses, trees, or running water on the surface, to fauna of all sorts that inhabit the area, to even soil down below, the ecology of any area is a fascinating and complex function of the species that surround it.  Within these ecosystems, interactions between species provide the world with certain ecosystem services. These services are invaluable to our way of life. Below are two descriptions of commonly known ecosystem services from the Natural Capital Project:

“Carbon Sequestration is the work forests do naturally, taking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and holding it captive in all the cells that make up the trunk, branches, leaves, roots, and bark (biomass). Commonly measured in tonnes, the World Bank reported in May 2007 that the value of the global carbon market tripled in size to US $30 billion in 2006.

Clean drinking and irrigation water is a vital benefit granted by healthy streams, watersheds and river basins. The hard work of water filtration is performed by roots, soil and bacteria which pull out nasty toxins, pollutants, and dangerous microbes.”

The economic problem behind the loss of habitat and thus these environmental services is that companies don’t incur charges from nature for the natural capital they consume. Whereas most companies have to invest in capital, there’s clearly a negative externality here for nature as business profits directly from the external benefits.

While our chosen site right now may be a parking lot, a movement to incorporate Green Dorm into its surrounding ecosystem (and possibly help to create one through the landscape of a Green Dorm complex?), could help the building to make a positive impact both ecologically and economically. Green Dorm features like green roofs (or even the placement of large trees) help instill life to the area, rejuvenating valuable environmental services (such as improving air quality) and providing substantial energy gains.

ecosystem_services111

Though designing Green Dorm to be ecologically sustainable may take extra considerations and costs, it is truly necessary we incur them if our intention is to call this a “Green” Dorm.  Otherwise, it will just be an energy efficient one, and we can only call it EconoDorm.

See also:  Natural Capital Project

If you really want to learn more, Two Books:
Natural Capitalism, call number: HC106.82 .H39 1999 , Green Library Stacks
The Ecology of Commerce, call number: HD60 .H393 1993, B-School Library

“Fab Tree Hab Living Tree House”

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there are some concepts about this small home we can definitely apply to GIL

There are some concepts about this small home we can definitely apply to GIL

Fab Tree Hab Video Tour

Hey everyone,

This is a really interesting concept from MIT that correlates with one of our goals of utilizing the infrastructure of Green Dorm to have a net positive ecological impact. More to come, but here is the link with a little more detail and documentation on the project. If you go to slide 02, you can see a vertical lattice structure that I am interested in testing (if available) to use for exterior walls. 

Click Here For More
 

 

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