Turns out that not all ski runs are created equal.  A UC Davis study documents the deleterious effects of bulldozing slopes to create ski runs (as opposed to clearing by cutting back shrubs and trees) and notes the rather minuscule benefits accorded the resort in question.

Neil Takemoto at Planetizen surveys the structural tendencies in our financial system that favor massive-scale projects (think whole-neighborhood-from-clean-slate projects) rather than organic, human scaled, infill development.

Smart Growth America have released a report indicating that federal stimulus funds spent on public transportation projects create far more jobs than dollars directed to highway infrastructure programs.  According to the summary the numbers aren’t even close; roughly 16,000 job-months per billion spent on public transportation vs. about 8,000 job-months for highway projects.  That’s a staggering difference, as if we needed another reason to think we should be spending more money on trains and less on highways.

The National Wildlife Federation has a great report on the many ways in which the current generation of university students are shaping their education, and therefore their ultimate careers, around the concept of sustainability. We can’t wait for them, certainly, but it is heartening to know they will be ready to carry whatever momentum we leave them with. Fascinating stuff.

It’s a simple concept: If you want people to use streets for walking and biking you have to make them safe and comfortable for both activities. The problem of course is that street design in the United States is totally dominated by car-centric thinking. Anything that makes cars go faster is considered good. Everything else is considered after high speed traffic has been optimized- if it is considered at all. It is such a pervasive mindset that most Americans literally have no concept of what a pedestrian and bike friendly streetscape might look like, with the result that they never ask for better, or even know that “better” is an option. A new report, Dangerous by Design, analyzes the impact of these design decisions: soaring numbers of pedestrian deaths.

The ASLA has a great rundown of the report, here.

One of the major issues surrounding any discussion of carbon neutrality, at any scale, is the varied methods of calculating the carbon emissions of a given act.  The leading organizations of the worldwide green building community have stepped up to rectify this issue with regard to buildings by announcing the adoption of a common carbon metric to measure the footprint of buildings.

The metric is being developed by the Sustainable Building Alliance and will be publicly presented at Copenhagen. The devil is in the details, of course, but almost anything will hugely benefit the global conversation on this issue. Even if the tool is not robust, or too narrow in it’s scope (will, for instance, the tool account for the transportation intensity of a building’s location?) it will provide a benchmark for us all to argue about.

Organizations that have agreed to pilot the common carbon metric include: UNEP, World Green building Council, US Green Building Council, BREEAM and others.

Our report on the cost of building green in NYC is now available to the general public, here. (Registration required.)

I encourage you to take a look. You cannot typically describe statistical analysis as dramatic, but this is. After years of hearing about how expensive green building is, how unreachable it is in projects where it isn’t mandated or subsidized, we have data that simply flips this notion on it’s head. There is no cost difference between LEED and non-LEED High-Rise Residential or Commercial Interiors projects.  None.  It’s a game changer in terms of the cultural conversation around green buildings.

Sweet- does this mean, you ask, that photovoltaic panels are free?  No.  The lesson of this report is not that green features are always cost neutral, many of the systems we typically find in a green building are more expensive.  The lesson is that buildings are (surprise!) expensive, complicated and often unique- and most importantly that projects of similar type can choose to achieve LEED or not within the same budget.  In other words, the determining factor of whether you bring your project in on budget is not whether you pursue LEED or not.  It is simply a matter of priority.

Don’t believe me? Argue with the data.

National USGBC commissioned Booz Allen Hamilton to study the prospects for green building from 2009-2013 and the numbers are very, very big.

7.9 million jobs and $554 billion of the U.S. gross domestic product.

Read the study. A nice, quick rundown of the numbers over at DIRT.

A Netherlands study provides further statistical evidence of the positive health impacts of living near green space. Bloomberg reports here.

A welcome addition to the growing library of work detailing the direct, inherent reliance of our species on natural systems. It seems every time we study some aspect of our our health, from sleeping with the lights on to the view from your hospital bed, we discover another obvious connection between us and living systems.

The unfortunate aspect of these studies is our inability as a society to extract a big lesson from the myriad small examples.  For each study we add another technical component to the matrix of decisions we make on a building or planning project.  We add a window on a garden to a hospital room, or a park to an under-served neighborhood.  Each of these are important.  But the system by which we build a whole from increasing numbers of small components has the effect of further complicating an already complex process, and increasing the chances that something important will be left out.  Hopefully as the evidence of our biophilic dependence becomes overwhelming we will consider increasing our connection to natural systems as a guiding principle, and the vast majority of those technical components will fall into place as a result.

Treating water as a precious resource is every bit as important as conserving energy. In the same manner that we have begun to explore the possibility of net zero energy, we need to move towards buildings that are net zero water users. Like energy, water use is terrifically complicated and concepts like Net Zero Water can help us get our heads around the subject and move the conversation forward.

A researcher in Philadelphia has launched a blog on the Net Zero Water concept.  Worth a visit.