September 22, 2020
By Tamanna Mohapatra and Pamela Berns
After a long spring and summer of streaming and one too many Zooms, many city dwellers started craving something three-dimensional, organic and more nurturing to the body and soul. One therapy that emerged was growing our own herbs and vegetables at home—or at least trying to. We’ve used whatever spaces we’ve had—unused corners in small apartments, windowsills, kitchen counters, balconies (for those lucky enough to have one), and whatever little patches of lawn we could possibly cultivate. One Upper West Sider even appropriated a former city street tree planter to sprout corn stalks.
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March 3, 2010
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.
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By Tamanna Mohapatra and Pamela Berns
After a long spring and summer of streaming and one too many Zooms, many city dwellers started craving something three-dimensional, organic and more nurturing to the body and soul. One therapy that emerged was growing our own herbs and vegetables at home—or at least trying to. We’ve used whatever spaces we’ve had—unused corners in small apartments, windowsills, kitchen counters, balconies (for those lucky enough to have one), and whatever little patches of lawn we could possibly cultivate. One Upper West Sider even appropriated a former city street tree planter to sprout corn stalks. (more…)