Lately I have been fascinated by the subject of green roofs. I wrote an article for greenlandlady.com which I could have tripled in length. It still would not have included all the things green roofs do to improve the urban environment like capture rainwater, insulate rooftops and eliminate heat islands to name a few.
Portlanders understand me. The airport has vines crawling up the parking structure for no other reason than they are beautiful, which warms my heart. Under my daughter's direction, Multnomah's County Crops farm produced 12,000 pounds of fresh vegetables for the food banks this past summer. People ride bikes to work (like demons, so watch those intersections), walk and use public transit as reflex behavior. With our general drizzle, nobody cares what you hair looks like either. It's a cool place.
Our young people here are just brimming with great ideas. Another local gal, Laura Kutner, is currently serving with the Peace Corps in Guatemala. She got some well-deserved press when she helped insulate a school there with discarded plastic bottles. She noticed there was a lot of trash around where she was living and convinced her students and the community to collect them. The article is pretty interesting - it has pictures too - and shows the construction with the bottles, stuffed and filled, being stuccoed inside the walls.
The latest? The Federal building at Jefferson and Third in downtown Portland will be using $133 million dollars to revamp the energy waster high rise and turn it into an environmental showpiece. The money came from the stimulus/recovery act and will help fulfill President Obama's desire to upgrade all federal buildings and structures to energy efficiency and environmentally sound operations.
A wonderful feature that the architects, SERA, will provide to satisfy the Portland community's soul is a green wall on the building. The West side of this 18-story tower will have plants growing all the way up that side of the building. The story even made the New York Times' on-line edition this morning, as it is such a cool idea. They haven't completely worked out the kinks yet - like how to prune the plants, etc. - but the remodel includes a rain harvesting system that will probably direct the rainwater from the roof down onto the planters.
Of course, they may need to refer to a few mountain people to figure out what will be able to grow well 200 feet in the air with wind factors and other such things. It is all just so... innovative and so cool. Well, I have nothing else to say. What about you? Anything fun happening with your town?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment