A recent New York Times article on a wastewater treatment plant in San Diego, California led to this week’s Five Friday Facts. Singapore, a sovereign island nation of just over 5 million people has used effluent, a polite way of saying wastewater, to supplement drinking water for years. Elizabeth Royte mentions it in her book [...]
Archive for the ‘Eric Wilson’ Category
Five Friday Facts: NEWater
February 17th, 2012 
Eric Wilson 
Posted in Eric Wilson, Five Friday Facts 
Tags: California, Elizabeth Royte, Wastewater, Water 
No Comments »Book Review: Michael Pollan’s Food Rules
February 16th, 2012 Eric Wilson Compared to The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food (reviewed here), Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual is less revolutionary. Instead, his latest book, published in 2009, is more of a reflection on what he’s learned through writing about food in his previous efforts. Comprised of 64 rules in three parts (What should [...]
Posted in Agriculture, Behavior, Eric Wilson, Sustainability Tags: Book Review, Food, Michael Pollan No Comments »SunShot Initiative Aims to Make Solar Affordable
February 15th, 2012 Eric Wilson The United States’ Department of Energy (DOE) is working to bring down solar energy costs. The program, known as the SunShot Initiative, “is a collaborative national initiative to make solar energy cost competitive with other forms of energy by the end of the decade.” The goal is to drive down the costs of solar energy [...]
Posted in Economics, Eric Wilson, News, Renewable Energy Tags: Department of Energy, Solar Energy, Stephen Chu No Comments »Building Energy Efficient Homes on the Crow Reservation
February 14th, 2012 Eric Wilson As a follow up to last month’s post about BOULD, a Colorado-based social venture that is working to “end substandard housing through green building education,” comes another story from Boulder, Colorado about green homes for under-served populations. In this case, it is the University’s Sustainable Housing Project, which is part of the Mortenson Center in [...]
New Exhibit at MoMA Highlights Reimagined Suburbs
February 13th, 2012 Eric Wilson On Wednesday February 15th, a new exhibit will open at the Modern Museum of Art (MoMA) in Manhattan. Running through the end of July, this installation looks at how to reconstitute the suburbs in a more integrated fashion. In other words, scrap the current plan. Titled “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream” the project “is an [...]
Posted in Eric Wilson, Real Estate, Sustainable Development Tags: Calendar, New Urbanism, New York City, Urban Planning No Comments »The Legacy of Cheap Natural Gas
February 12th, 2012 Eric Wilson What will be the legacy of cheap natural gas? Until recently, natural gas in the United States was 3-4 times as expensive as it is today. With advances in technology, costs have dropped precipitously. Natural gas prices ended the other day at $2.32 per MMBtu. 18 months ago a MMBtu sold for $5.50 on the [...]
Posted in Business, Eric Wilson, Featured Posts, Op-Ed, Policy, President Obama, Renewable Energy, Sustainability Tags: Carbon Dioxide, Economy, Fracking, Natural Gas, Shale Gas No Comments »Five Friday Facts: Affordable Green Housing
February 10th, 2012 Eric Wilson The following statistics come from EverBuildPro, a subsidiary of BOULD, a social enterprise that seeks “to end substandard housing through green building education.” 46.9% of all CO2 emissions in the US came from the building industry in 2009 compared to 33.5% from transportation 1.6 billion people live in substandard housing worldwide 40% of raw materials [...]
Posted in Education, Eric Wilson, Five Friday Facts, Green Building, Transportation Tags: Carbon Dioxide, Energy No Comments »Department of Energy Announces 2013 Solar Decathlon Details
February 9th, 2012 Eric Wilson Last month the US Department of Energy (DOE) selected teams from 20 colleges and universities to take part in the 2013 Solar Decathlon at Orange County Great Park in Irvine, California. (A full list of schools can be seen below). The location for next year’s Decathlon marks a departure from previous ones which were held [...]
Welcome to the Uniiverse
February 8th, 2012 Eric Wilson Evoking the memory of E.F. Schumacher, the German born economist who wrote Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, a new service by the name of Uniiverse has launched with the goal of serving as a platform for collaborative living. Schumacher’s vision of local economies moves one step further with Uniiverse, which “is an [...]
Posted in Behavior, Business, Economics, Eric Wilson, Green Economy Tags: Bike Sharing, Collaborative Consumption, Triple Bottom Line, Video No Comments »Are Cities Really More Sustainable?
February 5th, 2012 Eric Wilson In the most recent Five Friday Facts, Justin provided information on the growth in cities outside the developed world. He points out that increasing populations pose challenges for sustainability. How can we support a global population in denser cities? The argument tends to go that cities are more sustainable since they use less land to [...]
Posted in Behavior, Eric Wilson, Featured Posts, Op-Ed, Sustainability Tags: Cars, Collaborative Consumption, Energy, Food, Population Growth, Urban Planning No Comments »
