GreenHomeNYC’s Green Careers Transition team is putting together a reading list - check out their previous selections. Continuing the series, GreenHomeNYC volunteer Mary Tchamkina takes a look at six books on designing in harmony with nature.
Yikes! You are probably wondering what any of these have to do with green buildings! Not to worry!
One Straw Revolution by Masonobu Fukuoka, Gaia’s Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway and Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell each explore in various contexts, the notion of leveraging existing system elements and assets in order to minimize necessary inputs, maximize desired outputs and control or reduce adverse impacts or, in simple English. . .strategies for creating systems that achieve potentially conflicting goals and are also self-maintaining. I would say that accomplishing this is certainly an aspiration of the “high performance” or “green” building.
As part of the GreenHomeNYC Career Transitions group, I have been asked to share my thoughts and recommendations for 5 books on sustainability. I’m also supposed to come up with a theme, like 5 books about suburban homes and how they achieve or fail sustainability, or 5 books on air sealing and high performance structures. But as I was putting together my list, I kept veering away from my self-picked themes. Then I realized that my 5 books might topically be different but they all gave me a simple ah-ha moment. Sometimes it’s not about technical knowledge or high level theorizing but about imagination and curiosity. Before I get all Oprah on you, let’s get to my list.
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