From the monthly archives: April 2008
Treasure Island is a 400 acre island built from fill dredged from the bay for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. It is connected to land by the Bay Bridge on both sides leading from San Francisco to Oakland. Loosing money due to the depression and WWII, it was converted into a naval base in 1940. In 1996 it was decommissioned and opened to public control. Today San Francisco’s Department of the Environment is transforming it into the most sustainable community in the US by 2020.
The streets are going to be reoriented at an angle to maximize solar and minimize wind. It will include 6,000 units of high-density housing, without any single detached residences. Thirty percent of the housing will be affordable.
Last night at the Nob Hill Masonic Center Auditorium in San Francisco, the Ecocity World Summit hosted San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and former Mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, now Governor of Paraná Jaime Lerner.
Mayor Newsom started off proudly declaring San Francisco has the highest recycling rate in the country at 70 percent, with a goal of zero waste. The city accepts all types of plastics and even provides a bin to compost all food, including meat! One of the few items not accepted are plastic bags, but last year San Francisco banned plastic bags from all major grocery stores.
The city has one of the most aggressive green building programs in the US. This is important because construction and operation of buildings are responsible for 40 percent of total energy use, 65 percent of total electricity use, 40 percent of air pollution and 38 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. The building below is the California Academy of Sciences which is planned to be LEED Platinum,
This Earth Day Week, San Francisco is hosting the 7th Annual Ecocity World Summit. This conference brings together an “international community of courageous individuals who are addressing problems of the world’s environment with thoughtful long-range solutions that are truly sustainable, ecologically healthy and socially just.”
I am attending the conference and I will post interesting information throughout the week about the sessions I attend. Last night (April 21st), Gary Braasch, photographer and author of Earth Under Fire, How Global Warming is Changing the World, presented “his past and present record of climate change around the world with emphasis on
