Sustain this!

I recently attended a meeting between the faculty and the student body of my architecture program. The students wanted to show the faculty just how interested they were in “sustainable” building. This is a hot topic, as far as I can tell, in every industry right now, but no one seems to know how to measure this.

To the hippies who started this (I think it really does come straight from the original environmental movements of the 60’s and 70’s) it meant re-using anything they could, not demanding new products and keeping things away from landfills. This is vital, but hard to measure, I think. Now the National Forest Service has wood that is graded on whether it was sustainabley harvested or not. We re-use steel, aluminum, wood, aggregate for concrete (in Boulder, an 30 year old mall was torn down, and the concrete was ground up and used as aggregate for the new mall. That is ironic, but resourceful, I think.) I helped work a day on a Net-Zero house project in Boulder last fall. They measured the amount of carbon that was released by the production of all the building materials and the transport involved, and bought land through the Nature Conservancy to balance it.

I think that the “sustainable revolution” will help to balance the self-destructive way humans (especially the West; but China and India are rapidly depleting and polluting their resources) have used this planet. I have to hope so…but I think that there is a different measure that I will try to apply. I think the measure of sustainability should be in how it affects people. An example: I know that we recycle lots of computers, and China buys these by the boatful, and dumps them where woman and children pour chemicals over piles of motherboards (where are the fatherboards?) to leach out the precious metals. This is “sustainable.”

I don’t know exactly what my point is here; maybe just to fan the flame in my heart to love God’s people and serve them, to care for the orphans and widows and aliens.

self-portrait

I’ve been taking a lot more photos lately, and I’ve even done a few self-portraits. This is one of my favs: