Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Horticulturalists Seek to Go Native on Interstates

By FELICITY BARRINGER Published: August 29, 2007

NEWARK, Del. — For Americans on the move, a rest stop on the East Coast’s main drag, Interstate 95, seems an unlikely setting for a revolution. But to a growing number of horticulturalists the vegetation stretching beyond the gas pumps toward the highway median might as well be marching behind a fife and drum.

Dark green switchgrass stands four feet tall. Asters, amonsia with tiny blue flowers, and flowering white thoroughwort nestle there, in place of a simple lawn. Down the road, the cloverleaf for I-95 and Route 896 is filled with golden Indiangrass, its gossamer flowers riffling as trucks whiz by.

This is the meadow vista when Delaware was a colony, and before. Now these regional plantings are increasingly deployed by highway gardeners around the country who see themselves as heirs of an environmental Enlightenment. Their credo: get the mowers out of the 12 million acres of roadsides and median strips around the United States, and let the wildflowers and grasses grow.

 

In part as a frugal move — not mowing can save states tens of thousands of dollars each year — at least a dozen states including Colorado, Nebraska, Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Vermont and Washington State , have increased their inventory of native plantings. Roadsides, they say, are the national front porch. Why, then, should they look like an English formal garden or a Scottish golf course? Why shouldn’t they mimic the land as it was before highways?

In the words of the University of Delaware horticulturist, Susan S. Barton, an adviser to the state’s Department of Transportation: “We’re doing it so when you’re driving around Delaware you know you’re in Delaware, not in the tropics.”

But the movement, which dates back well before Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification project, beginning before World War II in Midwestern states, has more heart than muscle. Roadsides fulfill a variety of engineering functions. They must provide clear lines of sight and easy drainage. As for aesthetics, a Delaware poll showed the public prizes neatness more than nativeness.

And so the native plant pushers must fight endless battles with their economic and aesthetic opponents — turf-grass vendors, lawnmower jockeys who make a living cutting 20-foot median swaths in the summer sun, or garden clubs that favor manicured beds of tulips, poppies and lilies over meadow grasses that can look downright blowsy.

Jeanette Carey, who with her husband, George, operates a farm in southern Delaware, said the native grasses “just look awful.”

Her husband, a state representative, said many neighbors complained after the median grasses grew tall. “There was nothing but weeds in the middle of the road. It should look like a lawn, mowed,” Ms. Carey said.

She added, “Everybody who called us said they travel, and all the other states look neat.”

Thomas Yoakum, an environmental manager with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, wants to give native grasses a chance. But some experiments, like the switchgrass planted near Bedford, Pa., on U.S. 30, left the general impression of a botched hair transplant.Jon Johnson, a research support associate with the Roadside Vegetation Management Project of the Pennsylvania State University, worries that during droughts, switchgrass is highly flammable, and a tossed cigarette butt could cause a road closure.

Other states have joined the native plant revolution, at least in theory. Over 5,000 species of wildflowers and grasses flourish along Texas roadsides. Nebraska has limited mowing on its right-of-ways, a practice that provided some wildlife habitat; in years of drought native grasses can be harvested to provide hay for the cattle industry.

As Jane Lareau of the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League put it, “I would love people to see things that are native, not a stupid poppy or canna lily.” But some states take more traditional tacks. North Carolina, for instance, plants acres of ox-eye daisies every year, though they are considered a noxious weed in other states. Tennessee, a western neighbor, has ox-eye daisies on its list of invasive plants and wants to be rid of it.

“Ox-eye daisies are the bane of my existence,” said Bonnie L. Harper-Lore, a Minnesota-based restoration ecologist for the Federal Highway Administration.

Derek C. Smith, a roadside environmental engineer in North Carolina, happily pleads guilty to daisy-pushing. His state’s highway vegetation program, paid for in part by fees from vanity license plates, is a source of great pride..

While native plants make up about one-third of the state’s inventory, compared with as little as 10 percent in the 1980s, Mr. Smith said, “our citizens like a lot of the nonnative plants, bright red poppies and the like.”

If the native plant advocates gain more traction, they can thank champions like Calvin Ernst, 66, a highly successful seed seller from Meadville, Pa. His shyness belies a canny eye for what will grow and what will sell, and a passion for taking the landscapes of his region near Lake Erie back to their roots, literally.

Years ago, Mr. Ernst was a proponent of a creeping, bushy plant with small leaves called crownvetch, which is now a staple of Pennsylvania highways, particularly in the Alleghenies. Highway engineers prize its ability to grow fast and to thrive in poor soils and on steep hillsides. When the Interstate System was being built in the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Ernst found himself selling crownvetch around the country and making a tidy profit doing so.

That was then. Now crownvetch is a villain of native plant proponents, seen as an invasive bully whose presence discourages the growth of native flowers and shrubs. (Nonnative, or exotic plants, often have a biological edge over natives, since they often have fewer natural enemies.)

Ernst Conservation Seeds, where Mr. Ernst is the general partner, still sells crownvetch seeds to the state, but about three-quarters of its wares are now seeds for native plants, collected by hand from Appalachian forests or Carolina marshlands. On the Delaware stretch of Interstate 95, the seeds have blossomed into broom sedge, switchgrass and little bluestem grass.Ms. Barton, the horticulturist in Delaware, said that of the 13,414 acres that the Department of Transportation has planted, about 3 percent or about 425 acres are with native plants.

The biggest benefit for the state is potential savings on mowing. Native plants need to be left alone to grow to their full height.

On the nonnative areas, routine mowing eight times annually costs $162.72 an acre using state workers or $800 an acre using contractors. On the native plots, mowing once yearly costs $20.34 per acre with state personnel or $100 per acre with contractors, Ms. Barton said.

Joseph Wright, who runs the mowing program in southern Delaware, said his mowers have trouble digesting tall stands of native plants and often break down.

Where Mr. Wright does not mow, local farmers, like Fred Bennett, 82, in southern Delawaresometimes move in. “In front of my house I mow it every week,” Mr. Bennett said. “I like long hair on a woman but not on a man and not growing around my house.”

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Thursday, May 24, 2007

It Won’t Be Easy Being Green

Berkeley sets tough course for its residents to follow to help reduce emissions of greenhouse gases in city

Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer; Thursday, May 24, 2007

It Won't Be Easy Being Green. Chronicle graphic by Lance ... Activist Redwood Mary takes on the role of a polar bear a... Berkeley's greenhouse gas emissions. Chronicle Graphic

In Berkeley’s green future, there will be no incandescent lightbulbs, Wedgewood stoves or gas-powered water heaters. The only sounds will be the whir of bicycles and the purr of hybrid cars — and possibly curses from residents being forced to upgrade all their kitchen appliances.

Six months after Berkeley voters overwhelmingly pass

ed Measure G, a mandate to reduce the city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, the city is laying out a long-term road map for residents, business and industry. It includes everything from solar panels at the Pacific Steel foundry to composted table scraps.

While San Francisco, Oakland and other local governments in the Bay Area have approved policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Berkeley is the first to begin spelling out how people would be expected to reduce their carbon footprints.

Some measures will be popular and easy, like a car-share vehicle on every block and free bus passes. But others will be bitter pills, such as strict and costly requirements that homes have new high-efficiency appliances, solar-powered water heaters, insulation in the walls and other energy savers.

“It will challenge people, and it will be difficult,” said Cisco DeVries, chief of staff to Mayor Tom Bates and one of those coordinating the city’s greenhouse gas reduction efforts. “But if Berkeley’s niche isn’t leadership on this issue, then what is it? This is what we should be doing.”

It won’t be quick, and it won’t be easy, especially in a city where even the most mundane zoning minutia can become mired in months of debate. Few of the proposals have been approved yet, and some might not be ready for decades.

Berkeley started with an estimate of all the emissions attributable to residents and businesses in the city. These include sources within the city limits, such as cars and trucks and natural gas consumption, and Berkeley’s estimated share of those outside the city, such as electricity generation and solid waste sites.

The city generated, directly or indirectly, 696,498 tons of greenhouse gases in 2000, the benchmark the city will use to measure its 80 percent reduction. That figure has already dropped almost 9 percent, but that’s due largely to greener energy practices by Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

To reach an 80 percent reduction, sacrifices would have to be made in all quarters of the city.

Under the emissions crash diet, builders will use only recycled and green materials. Residents will be told exactly how many carbon units they’re generating based on the cars they own, the distances they drive, the waste they generate and the energy they consume. Landlords will be required to provide free bus passes to tenants.

To help out, the city plans to create an assessment district to help residents buy solar panels for their homes — an idea Berkeley officials think other cities will copy. The costs would be tacked on to property tax bills over the course of 30 years so homeowners won’t be stung by the steep up-front price, which can reach thousands of dollars.

Berkeley’s green blueprint calls on people to take small steps on a daily basis as well. Incentives and legislation will make common many activities only a few practice now — walking to work, using cloth shopping bags, buying locally grown produce, shutting off appliances and reducing their use of nonrecyclable packaging.

Bates thinks it all will be an easy sell.

“I think people are looking for ways to lighten their footprint,” he said. “People are willing to make these lifestyle changes, and the cumulative effort will add up. It’s not rocket science. We can do this.”

While virtually everyone in Berkeley agrees that reducing greenhouse gases is a worthy goal, not everyone agrees on the process. Former Mayor Shirley Dean questioned whether the city’s enthusiasm has eclipsed its common sense.

“There’s a funny quote about a man who jumped on his horse and rode off madly in all directions. That reminds me of the Berkeley city government,” Dean said. “I think they need to prioritize and come up with some more immediate, practical measures.”

Dean supports many of the ideas Bates has put forth, such as solar water heaters, but wonders how many of the ideas would be funded, especially when Berkeley residents already pay some of the highest taxes in the state. She also notes that the city’s method of tabulating emissions seems “fuzzy.”

The city is omitting Interstate 80, UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from its calculations because those are controlled by state agencies that have their own, and in some cases tougher, greenhouse gas reduction plans, DeVries said.

The city also is counting emissions reductions that occur far outside city limits, such as reductions from PG&E plants and garbage dumps.

But the accounting details are irrelevant, said Dan Kammen, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resource Group.

“Berkeley is one of the first cities to do this, and I think they’re entitled to some creative bookkeeping,” he said.

He also doesn’t think the city will suffer economically from these measures. Developers still will build in Berkeley, housing prices will remain among the highest in the Bay Area, and business will continue to operate. It is Berkeley, after all.

“There’s still a huge cachet to be in Berkeley. I think we’ll see that these plans will actually improve Berkeley’s economy,” he said. “And let’s face it, a lot of cities will be doing the same thing in the future. If we don’t, we’re cooked.”

LET THE SUNSHINE IN

To meet the voter mandate of reducing greenhouse gases by 80 percent by 2050, Berkeley officials propose:

 

Bus passes for apartment dwellers and eventually for everyone. Landlords would be allowed a small rent increase (equal to $7 per month in today’s costs) to pay for tenants’ passes; funding of passes for all residents has not been identified.

Increased incentives to install solar panels, especially for water heaters.

Mandatory green building requirements, such as using recycled materials, even for small residential projects.

Strict energy efficiency requirements for all new buildings, resold homes and renovations requiring permits. Older appliances would be have to be replaced, insulation upgraded and added to walls, windows upgraded and garages equipped with outlets for electric cars.

Berkeley’s greenhouse gas emissions

In 2005, residents, businesses and industry in Berkeley emitted 634,798 tons of greenhouse gases, an almost 9 percent drop from 2000. Where the gases came from:

– By sector

Transportation: 47%

Commercial/industrial: 27%

Residential: 26%

– By energy type

Natural gas: 36%

Vehicle gasoline: 29%

 

Electricity: 18%

Vehicle diesel: 17%

Source: City of Berkeley

E-mail Carolyn Jones at carolynjones@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/24/MNGJSQ0N671.DTL

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Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Executive on a Mission: Saving the Planet

Jessica McGowan for The New York Times
Gone Green Ray Anderson at his plant in West Point, Ga.
By CORNELIA DEAN; Published: May 22, 2007

VININGS, Ga. — What Ray Anderson calls his “conversion experience” occurred in the summer of 1994, when he was asked to give the sales force at Interface, the carpet tile company he founded, some talking points about the company’s approach to the environment.

Jessica McGowan for The New York Times
At a plant in LaGrange, carpet scraps are collected for reuse.

“That’s simple,” Mr. Anderson recalls thinking. “We comply with the law.”

 

But as a sales tool, “compliance” lacked inspirational verve. So he started reading about environmental issues, and thinking about them, until pretty soon it hit him: “I was running a company that was plundering the earth,” he realized. “I thought, ‘Damn, some day people like me will be put in jail!’ “

“It was a spear in the chest.”

So instead of environmental regulation, he devoted his speech to his newfound vision of polluted air, overflowing landfills, depleted aquifers and used-up resources. Only one institution was powerful enough and pervasive enough to turn these problems around, he told his colleagues, and it was the institution that was causing them in the first place: “Business. Industry. People like us. Us!”

He challenged his colleagues to set a deadline for Interface to become a “restorative enterprise,” a sustainable operation that takes nothing out of the earth that cannot be recycled or quickly regenerated, and that does no harm to the biosphere.

The deadline they ultimately set is 2020, and the idea has taken hold throughout the company. In a recent interview in his office here overlooking downtown Atlanta, Mr. Anderson said that through waste reduction, recycling, energy efficiency and other steps, Interface was “about 45 percent from where we were to where we want to be.”

Use of fossil fuels is down 45 percent (and net greenhouse gas production, by weight, is down 60 percent), he said, while sales are up 49 percent. Globally, the company’s carpet-making uses one-third the water it used to. The company’s worldwide contribution to landfills has been cut by 80 percent.

“He bet his entire company,” said Bob Fox, an architect who specializes in “green” buildings and who, like Mr. Anderson, is a member of the advisory board of the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment. “It worked out probably better even than he hoped. He has set the mark for every other corporation in this country.”

And in the process, Mr. Anderson has turned into perhaps the leading corporate evangelist for sustainability. He had a head start, he acknowledges, because he ran his company and controlled its voting stock. But he can make the case effectively, he said, because his Interface experience teaches that sustainability “doesn’t cost, it pays” — in customer loyalty, employee spirit and hard cash. He says Interface sustainability efforts have saved the company more than $336 million since 1995.

In fact, sustainability has been such a successful strategy that Interface established a consulting arm last year, to market its methods to other companies.

As befits an evangelist, Mr. Anderson, a trim 72-year-old, has taken his message on the road, preaching the sermon of sustainability in at least 115 speeches around the world last year alone.

Since last year, when he turned operating responsibilities over to Dan Hendrix, his successor as chief executive, selling sustainability has been “pretty much my full-time job,” Mr. Anderson said, and several people on the company payroll work more or less full time on it too, handling his schedule and fielding inquiries. “I think he was a typical corporate executive: the bottom line was everything,” said Eric Chivian, director of the Harvard Center. “He really did not think about the impact of his work.”

But today, Dr. Chivian said, Mr. Anderson is “a model of creative thinking about sustainable business practices.”

When Mr. Anderson began his crusade, there were those who thought it was quixotic, and some in the company worried that he was a bit too intense about it. Others thought carpet tiles — squares of nylon pile glued ubiquitously underfoot in offices, classrooms, hospitals, airports and elsewhere — were an unlikely focus for an effort to change the way business does business.

“Well, he won us all over,” said Jo Ann Bachman, one of Mr. Anderson’s assistants.

And for him, carpet tiles were an inspired choice.

For one thing, he is a carpet tile enthusiast. After a short stint at Procter & Gamble, Mr. Anderson, a Georgia native and 1956 graduate of Georgia Tech, was working in the carpet division of Callaway Mills when he discovered carpet tiles on a trip to England that he also describes in his book “Mid-Course Correction” (Chelsea Green, 1998).

It was the early 1970s, he said, and “the office of the future was just then emerging,” with more and more electronic equipment fed by more and more wires running under the floors, as walls gave way to cubicles. Carpet tile allowed businesses to move equipment at will, and the tiles could be replaced individually as they wore out. “It just made so much sense,” he said.

So he put together the necessary financing and started Interface in 1973. Today, the company says it has about $1.1 billion in annual sales and 38 percent of the global market for carpet tiles.

But when it comes to the environment, he eventually realized, carpet “is a pretty abusive industry.”

Carpet makers use lots of petroleum and petroleum derivatives, both as components of synthetic carpet and to power its production. Dyeing carpet is water- and energy-intensive. And when people are finished with the carpet, “it goes into landfills where it lasts probably 20,000 years,” Mr. Anderson said. “Abusive.”

So he challenged his employees to find ways to turn all of that around. And he forestalled objections from his own stockholders, he said, by making the elimination of waste the first target. “We saved money from Day 1,” he said.

He acknowledges that some of the advances the company has made so far are relatively obvious and easy, and that some of its claimed progress relies on steps, like carbon credits, that are far from ideal. For example, the company pays to plant trees that, in theory, take up enough carbon to compensate for the greenhouse gas generated by airplane flights on company business.

“All you are really doing is inventorying the carbon for 200 years,” Mr. Anderson said of the company’s tree-planting efforts, which it subcontracts to a company in the carbon credit business. “It’s better than nothing, but it’s temporary.”

In the future, he said, progress will come “in a lot of little steps and a few very big ones.”

Developing recyclable nylon — “that’s a big step,” he said. (Whoever does it will get all his company’s business, he has said.) Substituting “carbohydrates” — using corn dextrose instead of petroleum — would be even bigger. Renewable energy at a reasonable price would be another big step. Transportation remains “a huge issue,” in spite of the carbon credits.

Even so, customers responded to the campaign, he said, noting that it was questions from customers that prompted the sales force to ask for his environmental views in the first place. “In the aggregate, our products are not costing any more,” he said, and customers do not seem to resist those that are more expensive. “Our profit margins are up, not down,” he said.

One key to the effort’s success, he said, was its comprehensive, across-the-board approach to the entire company. “If you begin with a company and say, ‘We are going to green this company by bolting on these green programs,’ you are going to end up with costs up, not down,” Mr. Anderson said. “We stepped back and said, Let’s look at the whole system.’ “

The audiences for his speeches are changing, too, he said. In the beginning, he often found himself preaching to the choir, he said, but in the last five years, his audiences have more often been business groups.

“I always make the business case for sustainability,” he said. “It’s so compelling. Our costs are down, not up. Our products are the best they have ever been. Our people are motivated by a shared higher purpose — esprit de corps to die for. And the goodwill in the marketplace — it’s just been astonishing.”

Mr. Anderson, who has two grown daughters from a first marriage, commutes to his office in a Toyota Prius. He and his second wife, Pat, also have a home on 86 acres in the mountains near Highlands, N.C. It is off the grid, its landscaping designed to minimize environmental disruption.

And after an argument with the landlord, Interface’s office space here is now illuminated with low-energy, long-life light bulbs.

Mr. Anderson is also proud to say that as a member of an advisory council at Georgia Tech, he persuaded the institution to modify its mission statement to proclaim the goal of “working for a sustainable society.”

But there is a lot that even business cannot accomplish on its own, he said.

For example, he said, the tax code is “perverse,” in that it puts heavy taxes on good things, like income and capital, and leaves a lot of bad things, like energy use, relatively unscathed. And economists typically underestimate the true cost of doing business because they exclude “externalities,” like environmental damage from pollution.

If it were up to him, he said, he would reduce income taxes and raise the gasoline tax (with subsidies for the poor). But he conceded that the Clinton administration, which he served as co-chairman of the Council on Sustainable Development, could not get an energy tax through Congress.

“The country wasn’t ready for it,” Mr. Anderson said, adding that when the sustainability council had a cocktail party for members of Congress, only a handful of members showed up, some of them possibly drawn more by drinks than doctrine.

But since then, he said, environmental groups have been spreading the message. He gives them credit for the success of Al Gore’s global warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

“Their work created a supersaturated solution,” he said in the language of chemistry. “Gore drops his crystal in it, and the whole thing precipitates.”

The movie was “fabulous,” he added. And would he support Mr. Gore for president? “Oh, in a heartbeat!”

Mr. Anderson’s schedule is only getting more hectic. He is on track to easily surpass last year’s speech-giving pace, he said, “and I don’t have to send an invitation, they just keep finding me.”

But the effort is worth it, he said, not just for the opportunities he has to spread his message, but for its business-building effect. His favorite audiences are “rich in potential customers,” he said, and among them the sustainability effort “has done more to lift the company’s image than all the advertising we have ever done.”

All of which makes him smile when he looks back on that sales meeting of 1994.

After the speech, he said, “I heard the whispers, ‘Has he gone round the bend?’ ” Mr. Anderson recalls proudly how he confessed at once that he had. “That’s my job,” he said. “To see what’s around the bend.”

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Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Clean Power That Reaps a Whirlwind

Ariana Lindquist for The New York Times

Li Guohai, a peasant near Houxinqiu, has had free electricity since the wind turbines were erected and has freed up money for a steel plow.

By KEITH BRADSHER; Published: May 9, 2007

Ariana Lindquist for The New York Times
A farm family prepared its fields near a wind farm on the fringes of Inner Mongolia. Chinese financial skill has helped make the project profitable.

HOUXINQIU, China — The wind turbines rising 180 feet above this dusty village at the hilly edge of Inner Mongolia could be an environmentalist’s dream: their electricity is clean, sparing the horizon sooty clouds or global warming gases.

But the wind-power generators are also part of a growing dispute over a United Nations program that is the centerpiece of international efforts to help developing countries combat global warming.

That program, the Clean Development Mechanism, has become a kind of Robin Hood, raising billions of dollars from rich countries and transferring them to poor countries to curb the emission of global warming gases. The biggest beneficiary is no longer so poor: China, with $1.2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, received three-fifths of the money last year.

Scientists increasingly worry about the emissions from developing countries, which may contribute to global environmental problems even sooner than previously expected. China is expected to pass the United States this year or next to become the world’s largest emitter of global warming gases. And as a result, some of the poorest countries are being left out.

That draws attention to the Clean Development Mechanism, which has grown at an extraordinary pace, to $4.8 billion in transfer payments to developing countries last year from less than $100 million in 2002.

The Clean Development Mechanism raises its money through a complex market in trading pollution credits: businesses and governments in affluent regions like Europe and Japan help pay to reduce pollution in poorer countries, offsetting their own emissions. This helps advanced industrial nations stay within their Kyoto Protocol limits for emitting climate-changing gases like carbon dioxide.

For each ton of global warming gases that a developing country can prove it has eliminated, the secretariat of the Clean Development Mechanism, in Bonn, Germany, awards it a credit. Developing countries sold credits last year to richer nations for an average price of $10.70 each.

Its growth has come almost entirely by focusing on efficient projects in China and other fast-growing countries that spread the administrative costs over many large efforts, while poorer lands have received almost nothing. And that is why the program is becoming a battleground, pitting an unlikely coalition of bankers, traders, industrialists and environmentalists, who defend it, against economic development advocates, who warn of distortions.

According to the World Bank, China captured $3 billion of the $4.8 billion in subsidies last year for dozens of projects. Yet it accounted for less than two-fifths of the developing world’s fossil fuel consumption, the main source of warming gases.

One of the projects is the wind farm here, nestled on a pine-forested hill beside a blue lake fringed by broad fields tilled into long furrows of freshly planted wheat. It is profitable even without the subsidies, and is owned by a group of Chinese companies traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

But it is China’s financial sophistication that has helped it soak up so much in subsidies. A vigorous cottage industry of project designers and brokers has sprung up in Shanghai — with workers translating forms into Chinese, promoting the program and taking steps to make it easy and inexpensive for Chinese companies to participate.

“There are a lot of people who know how to do it,” said Tao Fuchang, the general manager and chief engineer of the Liaoning Zhangwu Jinshan Wind Power Electricity Company, which built and operates the turbines here.

Next in line are India, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, which get most of the rest of the subsidies, along with South Korea — incongruously classified as a developing nation by the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 pact to limit emissions that also led to the creation of the Clean Development Mechanism.

Trailing far behind are African countries. Payments totaled less than $150 million last year for all of Africa, where government officials say they have been largely left out of one of the biggest bonanzas for the developing world in many years.

“We see this problem everywhere in Africa,” said Sateeaved Seebaluck, a high-ranking environment official in Mauritius, an island nation east of Africa.

Even when very poor countries are able to organize development projects, they may lack expertise and must sometimes pay out as much as half the credits in the form of fees for international consultants and credit brokers.

United Nations executives respond, with considerable support from environmentalists, bankers and corporations, that the program’s primary task is to reduce the tonnage of carbon dioxide and other warming gases entering the atmosphere — regardless of where it comes from. By that measure, they say, the program is a success.

Kai-Uwe Schmidt, the Clean Development Mechanism’s executive board secretary, said the organization was acutely aware of regional imbalances in global warming projects and hoped to address them. But setting up an emissions reduction project usually requires considerable investment.

“We do not see many investments flowing into Africa in the first place,” he said.

Subsidies are readily available for a wide range of projects — straw-fired power plants, wind turbines, even the capture and burning of methane leaking from landfills. Though detailed procedures have been developed for projects in China and other fast-growing countries, they can easily be copied for use in other places.

But before manufacturers can obtain the subsidies, their national governments need to set up a legal framework for handling the money, which some of the poorest countries have not yet been able to do.

The projects that have produced the greatest number of credits so far involve attaching waste-gas incinerators to chemical factories that manufacture an ozone-destroying air-conditioner refrigerant, HCFC-22; these factories are found almost exclusively in the more prosperous developing countries.

Kristalina Georgieva, director of sustainable development strategy and operations at the World Bank, said the Clean Development Mechanism’s secretariat could simplify its rules to help poorer nations.

Ms. Georgieva said the secretariat should also pay more attention to fostering renewable energy in very poor lands, because 1.6 billion people lack any electricity and it is crucial to choose power-generating technologies for them that will contribute as little as possible to global warming.

“How the developing countries choose to electrify will determine the fate of the earth,” she said in a recent speech.

Some say the verification process is too burdensome for the poorest countries. But too much streamlining of the process could undermine the confidence of investors in rich countries that the pollution credits are genuine, Ms. Georgieva acknowledged in an interview. “What you may get is eroding trust in the system,” she said.

David Doniger, an environmental official in the Clinton administration who took part in many Kyoto Protocol drafting meetings in 1997 that led to the creation of the Clean Development Mechanism, said questions had been raised then about whether very poor countries would be able to obtain credits.

But the negotiators decided against any system for guaranteeing a division of credits by region, preferring one focused on reducing emissions wherever they occurred.

“Those were rejected on the grounds that you wanted to get more bang for the buck and they didn’t want this to turn into another U.N. institution with a lot of emphasis on regional balance,” said Mr. Doniger, who is now climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The wind turbine project here in Houxinqiu, an impoverished area of China, shows the pluses and minuses of the current system. It generates nearly 24 megawatts of electricity that would otherwise come from coal. China is already building enough coal-fired power plants each year to light all of Britain.

Farmers here still use mules to pull their steel-tip wooden plows and draw their aging wooden carts, the rough-hewn slats bleached white by years of sun and rain. The setting sun vanishes into a dark murk over the plains to the west, where China has been rapidly building coal-fired power plants.

Li Guohai, a local peasant riding his mule cart home with his wife on a recent evening, explained how he had received free electricity since the wind turbines were erected four years ago. He has saved enough money that he bought an all-steel plow for his mules to pull; the new plow now frees his son to finish junior high school and perhaps go to high school, Mr. Li said.

The project is narrowly profitable even without Clean Development Mechanism payments, Mr. Tao, the general manager, said. But the payments made the project more attractive and made it easier to raise money for it.

While Mr. Tao was reluctant to discuss the company’s finances, Clean Development Mechanism records show that the wind farm saves the equivalent of 35,119 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year. At $8 a credit, that is worth $281,000. Mr. Tao does not rely on that money to make the project viable, as the C.D.M. subsidies aim to do, but it helps him pay for more turbines.

“Without the Clean Development Mechanism, we’d still be profitable,” Mr. Tao said. But “you need the C.D.M. for further expansion.”

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Thursday, May 3, 2007

All His Rooms Are Living Rooms

Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Off the Wall Patrick Blanc, a French botanist who made his name with the plant wall, is an unusual mix of scientist and artist.

By KRISTIN HOHENADEL; Published: May 3, 2007 Créteil, France

ONE April afternoon in a rented bungalow in this small city on the outskirts of Paris, a Kelly green Madagascar lizard slithered across a plant-covered wall. In the next room, a blue-green Malaysian frog balanced on a Thai pandanus branch, still as a stone. Birds careered from room to room — in this house, the doors to the outside are closed to keep them in — dodging human heads as they went, and pausing only briefly to perch in the rhododendron leaves growing up the wall above the aquarium.

The house, and the elaborate ecosystem inside it, are home and laboratory for Patrick Blanc, a 53-year-old French botanist and the inventor of the plant wall, a kind of vertical garden, as he puts it, that grows without soil on a durable frame of metal, PVC and nonbiodegradable felt.

 

Ed Alcock for The New York Times

Lush Life A tangle of plants covers the living area at Patrick Blanc’s house near Paris, which serves as a kind of laboratory for his work.

Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Front yard at Mr. Blanc’s house.
Fred Dufour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A wall he designed for the Quai Branly Museum, covered in 200 plant species.

Since 1988, Mr. Blanc has created dozens of these botanical tapestries in public and private spaces around the world, including the Marithé & François Girbaud boutique in Manhattan, the Siam Paragon shopping center in Bangkok and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. It is only fairly recently, though, that his work has begun attracting serious international attention, thanks to high-profile projects like the Jean Nouvel-designed Quai Branly Museum in Paris, which opened in 2006 and has an administrative center covered in 200 species of plants — a city building seemingly made of leaves.

“I like to reintegrate nature where one least expects it,” Mr. Blanc said as he sat at a table in his overgrown back garden, smoking a Vogue Menthol and drinking chilled white Jurançon. (“I leave the water for the plants,” he said.) He wore green shoes and shocking green highlights in his hair, and brandished a two-inch thumbnail painted a glittery shade of forest green.

“We live in an era where human activity is overwhelming,” he continued. “I think we can reconcile nature and man to a much greater degree. People become much more sensitive to nature when they suddenly see a plant wall in the Métro” — where he has not yet built a plant wall, but hopes to. “It calls out to them much more than plants in a garden.”

But while most of his plant walls present nature through formally elegant design, the plants in his home, and his home itself, are another matter. The house is a tangle of leaves with a mold-smudged ceiling and a sitting area formed from mattresses covered in the bright orange robes of Thai monks. Fraying photographs of Mr. Blanc in faraway jungles are taped to the walls, which are covered in many places with bamboo shades. Out in the front yard, a jumble of iris japonica, Chinese epimedium and carex leaves covers one wall, a plant wall experiment begun five years ago.

“We call it our little jungle bungalow,” said Mr. Blanc’s longtime partner, Pascal Héni, a singer who is well known in India by the stage name Pascal of Bollywood. Mr. Héni’s tidy office is the only room in the house with a door, aside from the toilet room. (Plastic beaded curtains do the trick elsewhere.)

Andrée Putman, the French interior architect and designer, first saw Mr. Blanc’s work at the house several years ago, and hired him to create a much-publicized vertical garden in the courtyard of the Pershing Hall hotel in Paris in 2001. Although the wild look of the interiors at Créteil seems to have little in common with her own highly refined work — “Don’t you find it touching that someone who has had such great success would keep his little cardboard house?” she said — she clearly values it as an expression of Mr. Blanc’s personal style. “He is very surprising,” she said. “Very fresh and sincere. And there’s a very strong sense of his character in that singular house.”

Ms. Putman called his plant walls revolutionary. “It’s like a magic trick,” she said. “There is no soil in this operation, and yet the plants seem to grow faster. It creates a rather miraculous atmosphere.”

Mr. Blanc has long practiced his botanical experiments at home, beginning with a crude version of the plant wall that he created at 12, when he planted flowers on a mesh frame along the walls of his parents’ garden in the Paris suburbs. After reading about how rooting plants in water can purify them of nitrates, he grew rhododendrons in his aquarium, training them to climb the wall as they do here in Créteil.

Fascinated by plants that flourish without soil and in low light, he went on to study this phenomenon at Pierre & Marie Curie University in Paris and traveled to Malaysia and Thailand for the first time in 1972 to observe how plants managed to grow on rocks or in forest underbrush. This research has been the foundation of his botany career — he has been a researcher with the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris for 25 years — and central to his work with plant walls, which thrive indoors using artificial lighting. A fixture in the French media, he has also published a handful of books for a general audience about his work.

“He’s a curious character because he is the symbiosis of a scientist, an artist and a communicator,” said Stéphane Martin, the director of the Quai Branly Museum. “He has created a personality with his green hair, a look and an image.”

In addition to exterior walls, Mr. Blanc installed vertical gardens in the museum’s administration offices. “It puts me in a good mood when I come into the office,” Mr. Martin said. “His walls are at once beautiful, friendly and funny. They look from certain angles like a forest that is standing up on its own.”

Mr. Blanc approaches his projects the way a landscape architect would. “If a wall is going to be seen from up close,” he said, “I pay attention to the texture and form of the leaves; from a distance, the colors must be considered.” He prefers leaves to flowers and avoids plants with trailing vines. “I’m sensitive to the architecture of leaves,” he said. “I use plants with curves.”

A plant wall begins as “a two-dimensional surface, like a painting,” he said, “and as the plants grow it develops volume.” It does not, however, need to be trimmed, he added, and the density of the planting prevents weeds from sprouting. He pointed out that a wall he designed at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris nearly a decade ago has never been pruned. “It’s superb,” he said. “Very natural and very beautiful.”

One wall in the living room of his home is 25 years old. He pointed out that it is the use of artificial materials that allows for this endurance. “People often have a hard time understanding that by using materials which are not biodegradable, it allows biology to install itself, and to last,” he said.

Construction costs for the walls vary, but in general, Mr. Blanc said, the materials cost about $680 per 10 square feet, plus labor. He takes a percentage of the overall cost of a project, and leaves the installation to gardeners, though he does visit the site during installation to make corrections.

Thanks to projects like the Quai Branly Museum and the outdoor wall for the BHV, a popular Paris department store, which Mr. Blanc completed this spring, plant walls have become increasingly fashionable in France, and various imitators have stepped in to offer alternatives, including less expensive do-it-yourself systems with hanging clay pockets or iron grid systems. “In human society, as soon as there’s something new that seems to work, it’s normal that everyone wants to do it,” Mr. Blanc said. “It’s like what people said about Édith Piaf — around her, even the hobos wanted to be singers. If I’m imitated, it’s good.”

But he has been careful to copyright his walls, like works of art. “When I am invited into museums to create permanent works, I am treated like an artist,” he said, “meaning someone capable of choosing the plants and the plant sequences that will function together in the long run. If someone wants to copy one for himself, it’s no problem. But they’re protected from being reproduced for financial gain or public recognition.” (He added that he never copies himself: “Out of the question.”)

A recent exhibition in Paris of Mr. Blanc’s work, which included experiments in growing plant ceilings, was so popular it was extended twice. “In the tropics I always noticed how hanging plants grow from the top down at cave entrances,” he said. “It’s interesting to show that plants don’t always have to grow upward.” But his main focus remains the plant walls. He said he is planning to concentrate increasingly on improving public spaces with them in years to come.

“Humanity is living more and more in cities, and at odds with nature,” he said. “The plant wall has a real future for the well-being of people living in cities. The horizontal is finished — it’s for us. But the vertical is still free.”

Posted by M at 21:05:13 | Permalink | No Comments »

Sunday, April 29, 2007

A Starring Role for ‘Green’ Construction

ProLogis
A ProLogis distribution center in Japan has wind turbines.

By VIVIAN MARINO; Published: April 29, 2007

NOT too long ago, the concept of “green” building was discounted as impractical, something that might be good for the environment but not necessarily for the business climate. But that mind-set is changing rapidly.

Paul S. Bartholomew Photography;
The Plaza at PPL Center in Allentown, Pa., developed by Liberty Property, has a vegetative roof.
James Burtnett/Burtnett Studios
The Inn & Conference Center by Marriott at the University of Maryland is a “green” hotel.

As concerns mount about global warming and oil prices, so, too, has interest in more sustainable, or green, construction — that is, developments that balance style and function with protection of the environment and conservation of natural resources.

 

“You can’t open a newspaper or a real estate publication these days without seeing the word ‘green,’ ” said John Fleming, the director of commercial real estate for Johnson Controls, whose sales of products that monitor energy output have been strong.

An estimated 6 percent of commercial developments are certified as “sustainable” or have applied for certification through the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program of the United States Green Building Council. Industry experts say they expect that the percentage could rise to as high as 10 percent by 2010. And many more buildings are being retrofitted with devices that curtail energy consumption and carbon gas emissions.

What does it all mean for real estate investors?

“Green for the environment and for your bottom line,” said George Caraghiaur, a vice president for energy services at the Simon Property Group, one of the largest owners of shopping malls. “Energy expenses make up 25 to 35 percent of our controllable operating costs.”

Many big institutions are investing billions into projects with sustainable building practices, aiming for both environmental and financial benefits. Among the leaders so far have been big pension funds like the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, known as Calpers, which has a goal of reducing energy use in its real estate holdings by 20 percent over the next five years.

At the same time, private equity funds and partnerships focused on green developments are being formed, like the Hines Calpers Green Development fund and the Rose Smart Growth Investment Equity fund. These funds are marketed to institutions and high-net-worth individuals.

“The institutional players are getting to the market first,” said Leanne Tobias, the founder and principal of Malachite, an advisory company specializing in green real estate investments. “You’re seeing more sophisticated investors who want to take the development risk.”

But Ms. Tobias, who is herself exploring the creation of a green real estate fund, and other industry experts say they believe that investment products will eventually filter down to average investors.

Gary Pivo, a professor of urban planning and natural resources at the University of Arizona, who tracks the green building market, said, “The No. 1 issue for the general public today seems to be global warming, and buildings are a huge part of the problem and part of the solution.”

One of the first green-focused public mutual funds was the Forward Uniplan Real Estate Investment fund, created in 1999. It takes into account environmental factors when choosing companies for its portfolio, though it also looks at broader criteria of social responsibility, like management policies. The Spectra Green fund, established this year, uses similar standards and adds to the mix manufacturers of equipment used by green builders. Such manufacturers include Suntech Power Holdings of China, which produces solar panels.

Ecologically minded investors might also consider individual stocks of real estate companies that have been recognized as having a strong focus on energy efficiency, including the Thomas Properties Group; hotel companies like Marriott International and Hilton Hotels; and real estate investment trusts like ProLogis, Liberty Property Trust and Simon. Liberty’s Plaza at PPL Center in Allentown, Pa., includes a vegetative roof of 6,000 or so plants that helps cool the building, among other things.

These companies and a few others “are listed as part of various socially responsible investment indexes,” like the Domini 400 Social Index and Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Dr. Pivo noted, and they may also have partnership programs with groups like the Environmental Protection Agency.

Dr. Pivo says he thinks investors will be able to choose among more green companies over the next few years. A study he completed this year found that 41.3 percent of REITs, real estate operating companies, developers and pension funds had invested to some degree in green buildings, and another 26.8 percent had plans to do so.

Many real estate companies have already been making steady forays in sustainable developments overseas, where the green movement has clearly gained traction.

“We’ve been very focused on sustainability for a long period of time in the U.K. and Japan; it’s what the customers want,” said Jeffrey H. Schwartz, the chief executive of ProLogis, the world’s largest warehouse developer. “In Japan, it’s expected that you have grass on your roof and computerized light systems and H.V.A.C. system to minimize electrical use.”

ProLogis also uses, among other devices, photovoltaic solar panels and wind turbines; low-energy heating and cooling systems; and landscaping irrigation that incorporates recycled rainwater. But it has found, too, that simply replacing incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent lights can significantly cut electrical use.

THE company is making inroads in the United States as well, starting with its new 89,000-square-foot headquarters in Denver. The building, LEED-certified, has a light-harvesting system that adjusts electrical lights based on the level of incoming sunlight and an evaporative-cooling mechanism that uses less energy than conventional air-conditioning.

In its first sustainability report, which the company plans to release formally this week, ProLogis is laying out plans to create minimum design standards for new developments that will meet or exceed the requirements for environmental certification from global rating systems like LEED. “Being a good corporate citizen,” Mr. Schwartz said, “is also positive for shareholders.”

Mr. Caraghiaur of Simon agreed, saying energy conservation measures can be “seen as a proxy for management strength.”

“The smart investors of the world have come to conclude that energy is a tough thing to manage and that those companies that do manage energy well are seen as those that manage well — period,” he said.

Since 2004, Simon has trimmed about $18 million a year in operating costs through its green retrofitting and other projects, representing a reduction of 110,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, Mr. Caraghiaur said.

Some of the same conservation measures employed by big companies like Simon can also be used on a smaller scale by individual landlords. To promote green building practices, the E.P.A. offers a free software tool called Portfolio Manager as part of its Energy Star program. The software helps owners track and improve energy efficiency.

“The opportunity to improve is often available through operations and management practices that don’t require much capital expenditure,” said Stuart Brodsky, the agency’s national program manager for commercial real estate. One step, he said, would be to inspect equipment regularly: “Are your fans running when they’re supposed to be? Are the electrical relays working efficiently? Are the thermostats calibrated to where you think they should be?”

The benefits are the same for all investors, large or small, Mr. Brodsky added. Besides lowering consumption, and therefore, costs, greener buildings typically attract and retain more tenants, thereby ensuring a more continuous revenue stream. They may also help landlords qualify for certain tax credits and insurance discounts, in addition to enhancing the value of a building. E.P.A. research shows, for example, that each dollar per square foot invested in a building’s energy efficiency has the potential to raise its market value by $2 to $3 a square foot.

Of course, advances in energy-saving technology have helped make sustainable buildings more cost-effective, not to mention more comfortable for occupants.

“In life,” said Ms. Tobias of Malachite, “it’s very rare when you find an opportunity to do well by doing good.”

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Monday, April 9, 2007

California ‘Green’ project makes critics see red

The DWP’s proposed energy corridor, to bring nonpolluting power to L.A., would traverse a national forest and wildlife preserves.
By Janet Wilson, Times Staff Writer
April 9, 2007

Highlighting the environmental pitfalls of harnessing “green” energy, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s push to import nonpolluting power to Los Angeles could require building power lines and transmission towers through a national forest, two desert wildlife preserves and a rustic hamlet used in countless westerns.


According to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the 85-mile-long “Green Path” energy corridor designed to bring solar, geothermal and nuclear power from southeastern California and Arizona would slice across the Big Morongo Wildlife Preserve north of Palm Springs, Pioneertown near Yucca Valley, Pipes Canyon Wilderness Preserve and a corner of the San Bernardino National Forest before crossing over the Cajon Pass and connecting with existing power lines in Hesperia.

More than a dozen preservation and community groups have condemned the mayor and DWP for a plan that they say would destroy priceless vistas, natural areas and wildlife corridors.

“Not only is such energy consumption not ‘green,’ it is unacceptable under any name…. The ends cannot justify the means,” Justin Augustine of the Center for Biological Diversity said in a letter to Villaraigosa last week.

City officials are up against tough new state laws and self-imposed deadlines to replace highly polluting coal-fired power with renewable energy produced by geothermal, wind and solar generators in the Imperial Valley, the Tehachapi Mountains in Kern County and elsewhere.

Villaraigosa did not return calls for comment. DWP commission President David Nahai insisted that no final decisions on a route had been made.

“This project is very much environmentally at its beginning stages,” Nahai said.

The anger over the proposed route underscores challenges nationwide over how to ship wind, sun and steam power from remote rural reaches to booming urban centers.

“People do not like the way power lines look,” said George Douglas, spokesman for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Energy.

He said vast amounts of renewable resources exist across the country. Enough wind turbines could be built in North Dakota to power Chicago. One hundred square miles of desert solar panels in California, Nevada or New Mexico could power most of the United States.

But, Douglas said, “the chances it’s going to happen are zero, because nobody’s going to build the transmission lines. They’re great big things that cost a lot of money, and people don’t like them. They are unsightly — there’s no two ways about it — and when you build them, they definitely disturb the land.”

In Los Angeles, Villaraigosa said last year that he wanted to make the sprawling metropolis “the greenest city and cleanest city in America” and was pushing aggressively for 20% of the city’s power to be renewable by 2010. Officials also chose not to renew a contract with a Utah coal plant that provides more than 40% of the city’s power. That pact will expire in 2023.

The proposed Green Path is a key piece of the mayor’s strategy. High-voltage lines in the transmission corridor would ship 800 megawatts of geothermal and solar power from near the Salton Sea and 400 megawatts of nuclear power from Arizona — enough to meet 10% of the city’s current energy needs.

DWP officials said they decided on a “preferred alternative” in December after studying possible routes for more than a year. They said the route they chose would be the least intrusive to existing homes, tribal lands, national parks and wilderness areas.

Environmentalists scoffed at that claim. “We were just shocked,” preservationist David Myers said of his reaction after looking at a map of the route.

Myers is head of The Wildlands Conservancy, a nonprofit group that has spent $50 million assembling private wildlife corridors and preserves close to Joshua Tree National Park, the San Bernardino National Forest and elsewhere, including Pipes Canyon.

Myers accused city officials of secretly planning the route, saying that conservationists learned about it two weeks ago from a staff member of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Nahai said there was no attempt at secrecy but acknowledged that Myers had a point. “I think we need to do a better job of outreach and a better job of communication,” he said. “This is a new, environmentally committed administration. What we’re trying to do is to diversify away from filthy coal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and do it in a way that is environmentally protective.”

The DWP staff members said that there would be extensive public hearings before a final decision was made, and that they might “tweak” the map to try to move it away from the Pipes Canyon preserve, Pioneertown and the surrounding Sawtooth Mountains, which provided the backdrop for “The Cisco Kid” and many other western television shows and movies.

But Nahai added that no matter what route was chosen, there would be some environmental damage caused by the project. He said the priority was obtaining clean, renewable energy on a citywide basis to reduce greenhouse gases and other air pollution, as well as meeting power needs.

“Failure is not an option,” he said. “What I can commit is that the department will do its utmost to minimize adverse environmental effects.”

janet.wilson@latimes.com
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Thursday, April 5, 2007

Looking beyond green

Eco-friendly houses used to be clumsy, idiosyncratic and all about the message, but architects are discovering stylish approaches to sustainable designs. For one Santa Monica couple, home is more than a soapbox.
By Morris Newman, Special to The Times; April 5, 2007

The Green House

BOB BEITCHER says he and his wife, Carol, want their newly built home in Santa Monica to be a showcase of sustainable practices “without being granola-y, if you know what I mean.”

Their house off San Vicente Boulevard has been carefully designed by architect Warren Wagner to optimize solar energy and the use of recycled and renewable materials. Yet the modernist dwelling seems more about the panache of architectural possibilities than the virtuousness of green design.


Seen from the busy boulevard, the facade is energetic yet understated, as if it had power in reserve. The hip-looking exterior is covered in Western red cedar, stucco-covered block and unfinished sheet metal. The upward-tilting roof seems to float above ribbon-like windows at the ceiling line, without external supports.

A closer look, however, reveals that the house is sustainable down to its foundation. A two-story opening in the center acts as a thermal chimney, pulling the hot air out of the house while drawing in cool air, all through an automated skylight. The walls are insulated with recycled denim, made from the remnants from a blue-jeans factory. Twelve photovoltaic panels supply 85% of the home’s power needs, while 10 solar thermal panels supply the house with hot water and radiant heat for the floors and heat the swimming pool.

“The primary thing is that the house has an architecturally interesting design, and the punch line is that it’s got all these sustainable design features,” Bob Beitcher says.

His interest in green design was sparked a decade ago when a house designed by Wagner arose in his neighborhood. “I was dragging everyone over there to see it,” he recalls.

When the family decided to build a new house, sustainability seemed preordained. “It never occurred to us to do it any other way,” says Carol, whose four children include a vegan chef. Their children also “had plenty of input” on the design of the house, she adds.

The Beitcher house is the latest in a series of recent Westside houses — Pugh + Scarpa’s Solar Umbrella house, also in Venice; Ray Kappe’s prefab house in Ocean Park; and the Ehrlich house in Santa Monica by John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects — that have excited interest for their design and sustainable features.

THE combination of architecture and environmentalism is the credo of Wagner, who founded W3 Architects in Venice in 1993 to “demonstrate the integration of solar and sustainable technologies into the highest level of architecture.” He earlier earned his graduate architecture degree at UCLA and worked for several years with passivesolar-design pioneer Edward Mazria in Santa Fe, N.M.

Wagner also is a modernist who counts R.M. Schindler, the Viennese-born architect who created many boldly geometric homes in the hillsides and canyons of Los Angeles, among his artistic heroes. He calls his own style “warm Modernism.”

“Architecture is about one form doing several things,” he says.

The shape and siting of the Beitchers’ house on a corner lot is a case in point.

Rather than position the house in the center of the lot, as most architects do, Wagner pushed the house north, almost to the sidewalk on San Vicente, to maximize the size of a south-facing courtyard and to capture as much sunlight as possible.

This long-and-narrow configuration also fits the Beitchers. An open plan makes the living room, kitchen and dining room — all furnished in comfortable contemporary furniture by interior architect Tracey Loeb — into a single, continuous space.

The sliding-glass doors open onto a courtyard that unifies the garden and pool with the living areas. The result is a communal setting for the close family. The Beitchers have two teenagers living at home and two adult children.

As if to make a witty commentary on the close connection between the living room and the courtyard, Wagner located the fireplace outdoors, where it takes the form of a decorative fire pit, with a bed of black sand. The surrounding xeriscape was designed by Sasha Tarnopolsky of Dry Design.

The shape of the house also provides privacy: The rear of the house has a separate entrance that leads to a second-floor breezeway that opens into a guest room, which the Beitchers call “the crash pad,” available to their adult kids on visits. The rear entrance allows visitors to enter the house at all hours of the night without disturbing the rest of the family.

The 4,000-square-foot, four-bedroom house is large enough for Carol to have a separate room for quilting. Located on the shorter side of the L-shaped floor plan, this rooms allows Carol, a confessed “clutterbug,” to work in her own space. The west-facing wall gives her a full view of the courtyard and the living room. “You can be aware of all the activity that is going on in the house,” she says.

Bob and Carol’s bedroom is upstairs, above the quilting and media rooms. The master bath features rough-hewn carved limestone on one wall, a slatted floor of sustainably farmed Paulope wood and a shower lined in honed limestone.

Also upstairs on the landing is a sunny room with windows in three directions plus a skylight that offers an unobstructed view of San Vicente and the joggers on the central median. The landing is furnished with a daybed and a low table, where the Beitchers plan to plop down and read together.

ALTHOUGH Bob Beitcher, who is president and chief executive of Panavision, could afford a showier home, his aim is to make the house into a demonstration of green living.

The house is scheduled to be featured on three tours (see accompanying story) even before the owners have fully moved in. Despite all the green materials and special techniques, the house cost $310 per square foot to build, not including the cost of land or landscaping, according to the architect.

The interior finishes are part of that demonstration: Amber bamboo flooring has been used to clad the ceiling (it was difficult to apply, because workers had to make the ceiling perfectly flat before installing the flooring upside down) but the material wins compliments from visitors. The interior stairs are made of wood harvested from palms that are too old to bear fruit and would otherwise go to waste.

Even more radical, for this high-end house, was the choice of comparatively humble strawboard — a composition material made of compressed straw — for their kitchen cabinets and shelves in the TV room. The kitchen cabinets have a clear finish that highlights the material’s natural light brown, gold-flecked color, while the TV room shelves are stained a bluish gray. “We were blown away by how quiet and dignified it looks,” Carol says.

The choice of unusual materials is one of the issues that Wagner says most excites him about sustainable architecture. “Sustainability brings in a whole array of new materials to use,” he says. “Some are cruddy looking, some are OK, and some, like the straw board, are very good looking.”

The architectural sophistication of the house contrasts strikingly with the first passive solar houses built in the 1970s. Although idealistic, these houses were often clumsy and idiosyncratic-looking, and gave environmental architecture a bad name for decades.

“The first houses tended to be too diagrammatic,” says Deva Berg, a design architect at W3 Architects, referring to the steep roofs and awkwardly mounted solar panels in some early passive solar house that attempted to align themselves precisely to sun angles for 100% efficiency.

“The fact that the early homes were made of high-mass adobe set them apart as alternative architecture,” says Richard Schoen, professor emeritus at UCLA and one of Wagner’s former instructors. Passive solar technology, he adds, became associated with the counterculture and its anti-modern, utopian ideas.

By the 1980s, passive solar housing “ceased to be an issue, period,” Schoen says. “There were two or three generations of architects who had no idea as to what constitutes passive solar design.”

The growing awareness of global warming has helped architects embrace energy-saving design and construction. The construction of homes and buildings, coupled with heating and cooling of these structures, contributes to about 50% annually of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., according to the American Institute of Architects.

The new standard is the zero-energy house, a dwelling that consumes no more energy than it produces.

Solar pioneer architect Mazria, Wagner’s former employer, has started an organization known as Architecture 2030, to promote the zero-energy goal, while the American Institute of Architects and other professional organizations have started their own emission-reduction programs.

“Now, we are coming full circle,” says Schoen. “Zero-energy housing is becoming mainstream and architects will have to catch up.”

Wagner says that the didacticism of the 1970s has been replaced by a more inclusive, artistic approach. At the Beitcher house, the architect laid the photovoltaic panels flat on the roof rather than at an upward angle facing the sun because he did not want the panels to be visible and disturb the design of his facade. By lying flat, the panels lose 5% of their efficiency. Wagner shrugs.

“As an aesthetic decision, it was more important to lay the PVs flat than maximize their overall efficiency. They work well enough to accomplish all they need to do.”

Although Bob expects to entertain many of his friends and contacts in the entertainment industry at the house, he does not see Carol and himself as standing on a soap box for green design. He thinks the house will speak for itself.

“”We prefer to be quiet evangelists.”

home@latimes.com

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Look inside the `green’ home

“Greenies,” architectural and design buffs and the newly environmentally conscious can get a firsthand look at the Beitcher house inside and out during three tours over the next two months:

Friday: CA Boom 4 architect-led tour of Santa Monica homes. $75 for the shuttle tour, includes admission to the design show at Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport, 3021 Airport Ave. The first shuttle leaves Banker Hangar at 11:12 a.m., the last one at 2:36 p.m. The buses run continually in between. Reservations strongly suggested. For information, call (310) 394-8600, http://www.caboomshow.com .

April 28: Third Annual Santa Monica Green Gardens Tour, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Advance tickets $30, tour day $40 ($25 for seniors), van tour $60. Proceeds benefit the Virginia Avenue Project. Tickets and information are available at (310) 264-4224, or at http://www.virginiaavenueproject.org .

May 19: Venice Art Walk Architectural Tour. Self-driven, docent-led tours of green homes in Santa Monica and Venice, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., featuring works by John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects, Warren Wagner, Ray Kappe, David Hertz and Victoria Yust. Tickets are $50. Proceeds benefit the Venice Family Clinic. http://www.venicefamilyclinic.org/index.php?view=art_architecture .

Posted by M at 18:22:25 | Permalink | No Comments »

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Looking beyond green

Eco-friendly houses used to be clumsy, idiosyncratic and all about the message, but architects are discovering stylish approaches to sustainable designs. For one Santa Monica couple, home is more than a soapbox.
By Morris Newman, Special to The Times; March 29, 2007

The Green HouseBOB BEITCHER says he and his wife, Carol, want their newly built home in Santa Monica to be a showcase of sustainable practices “without being granola-y, if you know what I mean.”

Their house off San Vicente Boulevard has been carefully designed by architect Warren Wagner to optimize solar energy and the use of recycled and renewable materials. Yet the modernist dwelling seems more about the panache of architectural possibilities than the virtuousness of green design.


Seen from the busy boulevard, the facade is energetic yet understated, as if it had power in reserve. The hip-looking exterior is covered in Western red cedar, stucco-covered block and unfinished sheet metal. The upward-tilting roof seems to float above ribbon-like windows at the ceiling line, without external supports.

A closer look, however, reveals that the house is sustainable down to its foundation. A two-story opening in the center acts as a thermal chimney, pulling the hot air out of the house while drawing in cool air, all through an automated skylight. The walls are insulated with recycled denim, made from the remnants from a blue-jeans factory. Twelve photovoltaic panels supply 85% of the home’s power needs, while 10 solar thermal panels supply the house with hot water and radiant heat for the floors and heat the swimming pool.

“The primary thing is that the house has an architecturally interesting design, and the punch line is that it’s got all these sustainable design features,” Bob Beitcher says.

His interest in green design was sparked a decade ago when a house designed by Wagner arose in his neighborhood. “I was dragging everyone over there to see it,” he recalls.

When the family decided to build a new house, sustainability seemed preordained. “It never occurred to us to do it any other way,” says Carol, whose four children include a vegan chef. Their children also “had plenty of input” on the design of the house, she adds.

The Beitcher house is the latest in a series of recent Westside houses — Pugh + Scarpa’s Solar Umbrella house, also in Venice; Ray Kappe’s prefab house in Ocean Park; and the Ehrlich house in Santa Monica by John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects — that have excited interest for their design and sustainable features.

THE combination of architecture and environmentalism is the credo of Wagner, who founded W3 Architects in Venice in 1993 to “demonstrate the integration of solar and sustainable technologies into the highest level of architecture.” He earlier earned his graduate architecture degree at UCLA and worked for several years with passivesolar-design pioneer Edward Mazria in Santa Fe, N.M.

Wagner also is a modernist who counts R.M. Schindler, the Viennese-born architect who created many boldly geometric homes in the hillsides and canyons of Los Angeles, among his artistic heroes. He calls his own style “warm Modernism.”

“Architecture is about one form doing several things,” he says.

The shape and siting of the Beitchers’ house on a corner lot is a case in point.

Rather than position the house in the center of the lot, as most architects do, Wagner pushed the house north, almost to the sidewalk on San Vicente, to maximize the size of a south-facing courtyard and to capture as much sunlight as possible.

This long-and-narrow configuration also fits the Beitchers. An open plan makes the living room, kitchen and dining room — all furnished in comfortable contemporary furniture by interior architect Tracey Loeb — into a single, continuous space.

The sliding-glass doors open onto a courtyard that unifies the garden and pool with the living areas. The result is a communal setting for the close family. The Beitchers have two teenagers living at home and two adult children.

As if to make a witty commentary on the close connection between the living room and the courtyard, Wagner located the fireplace outdoors, where it takes the form of a decorative fire pit, with a bed of black sand. The surrounding xeriscape was designed by Sasha Tarnopolsky of Dry Design.

The shape of the house also provides privacy: The rear of the house has a separate entrance that leads to a second-floor breezeway that opens into a guest room, which the Beitchers call “the crash pad,” available to their adult kids on visits. The rear entrance allows visitors to enter the house at all hours of the night without disturbing the rest of the family.

The 4,000-square-foot, four-bedroom house is large enough for Carol to have a separate room for quilting. Located on the shorter side of the L-shaped floor plan, this rooms allows Carol, a confessed “clutterbug,” to work in her own space. The west-facing wall gives her a full view of the courtyard and the living room. “You can be aware of all the activity that is going on in the house,” she says.

Bob and Carol’s bedroom is upstairs, above the quilting and media rooms. The master bath features rough-hewn carved limestone on one wall, a slatted floor of sustainably farmed Paulope wood and a shower lined in honed limestone.

Also upstairs on the landing is a sunny room with windows in three directions plus a skylight that offers an unobstructed view of San Vicente and the joggers on the central median. The landing is furnished with a daybed and a low table, where the Beitchers plan to plop down and read together.

ALTHOUGH Bob Beitcher, who is president and chief executive of Panavision, could afford a showier home, his aim is to make the house into a demonstration of green living.

The house is scheduled to be featured on three tours (see accompanying story) even before the owners have fully moved in. Despite all the green materials and special techniques, the house cost $310 per square foot to build, not including the cost of land or landscaping, according to the architect.

The interior finishes are part of that demonstration: Amber bamboo flooring has been used to clad the ceiling (it was difficult to apply, because workers had to make the ceiling perfectly flat before installing the flooring upside down) but the material wins compliments from visitors. The interior stairs are made of wood harvested from palms that are too old to bear fruit and would otherwise go to waste.

Even more radical, for this high-end house, was the choice of comparatively humble strawboard — a composition material made of compressed straw — for their kitchen cabinets and shelves in the TV room. The kitchen cabinets have a clear finish that highlights the material’s natural light brown, gold-flecked color, while the TV room shelves are stained a bluish gray. “We were blown away by how quiet and dignified it looks,” Carol says.

The choice of unusual materials is one of the issues that Wagner says most excites him about sustainable architecture. “Sustainability brings in a whole array of new materials to use,” he says. “Some are cruddy looking, some are OK, and some, like the straw board, are very good looking.”

The architectural sophistication of the house contrasts strikingly with the first passive solar houses built in the 1970s. Although idealistic, these houses were often clumsy and idiosyncratic-looking, and gave environmental architecture a bad name for decades.

“The first houses tended to be too diagrammatic,” says Deva Berg, a design architect at W3 Architects, referring to the steep roofs and awkwardly mounted solar panels in some early passive solar house that attempted to align themselves precisely to sun angles for 100% efficiency.

“The fact that the early homes were made of high-mass adobe set them apart as alternative architecture,” says Richard Schoen, professor emeritus at UCLA and one of Wagner’s former instructors. Passive solar technology, he adds, became associated with the counterculture and its anti-modern, utopian ideas.

By the 1980s, passive solar housing “ceased to be an issue, period,” Schoen says. “There were two or three generations of architects who had no idea as to what constitutes passive solar design.”

The growing awareness of global warming has helped architects embrace energy-saving design and construction. The construction of homes and buildings, coupled with heating and cooling of these structures, contributes to about 50% annually of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., according to the American Institute of Architects.

The new standard is the zero-energy house, a dwelling that consumes no more energy than it produces.

Solar pioneer architect Mazria, Wagner’s former employer, has started an organization known as Architecture 2030, to promote the zero-energy goal, while the American Institute of Architects and other professional organizations have started their own emission-reduction programs.

“Now, we are coming full circle,” says Schoen. “Zero-energy housing is becoming mainstream and architects will have to catch up.”

Wagner says that the didacticism of the 1970s has been replaced by a more inclusive, artistic approach. At the Beitcher house, the architect laid the photovoltaic panels flat on the roof rather than at an upward angle facing the sun because he did not want the panels to be visible and disturb the design of his facade. By lying flat, the panels lose 5% of their efficiency. Wagner shrugs.

“As an aesthetic decision, it was more important to lay the PVs flat than maximize their overall efficiency. They work well enough to accomplish all they need to do.”

Although Bob expects to entertain many of his friends and contacts in the entertainment industry at the house, he does not see Carol and himself as standing on a soap box for green design. He thinks the house will speak for itself.

“”We prefer to be quiet evangelists.”

home@latimes.com

*

(INFOBOX BELOW)

Look inside the `green’ home

“Greenies,” architectural and design buffs and the newly environmentally conscious can get a firsthand look at the Beitcher house inside and out during three tours over the next two months:

Friday: CA Boom 4 architect-led tour of Santa Monica homes. $75 for the shuttle tour, includes admission to the design show at Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport, 3021 Airport Ave. The first shuttle leaves Banker Hangar at 11:12 a.m., the last one at 2:36 p.m. The buses run continually in between. Reservations strongly suggested. For information, call (310) 394-8600, http://www.caboomshow.com .

April 28: Third Annual Santa Monica Green Gardens Tour, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Advance tickets $30, tour day $40 ($25 for seniors), van tour $60. Proceeds benefit the Virginia Avenue Project. Tickets and information are available at (310) 264-4224, or at http://www.virginiaavenueproject.org .

May 19: Venice Art Walk Architectural Tour. Self-driven, docent-led tours of green homes in Santa Monica and Venice, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., featuring works by John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects, Warren Wagner, Ray Kappe, David Hertz and Victoria Yust. Tickets are $50. Proceeds benefit the Venice Family Clinic. http://www.venicefamilyclinic.org/index.php?view=art_architecture .

–Morris Newman

Posted by M at 18:12:49 | Permalink | No Comments »

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

SF supes vote to ban plastic bags in stores

Charlie Goodyear, Chronicle Staff Writer; Tuesday, March 27, 2007

(03-27) 14:45 PDT SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted 10-1 this afternoon to make the city the first in the nation to prohibit petroleum-based plastic checkout bags in large markets and pharmacies.

On the first of two votes needed for final passage, supervisors approved legislation sponsored by Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi that would mandate the use of biodegradable plastic bags or recyclable paper bags. The legislation would take effect in about six months for some 50 large markets in San Francisco and would apply in about 12 months to large drugstore chains such as Walgreen’s and Rite-Aid.

“Hopefully, other cities and states will follow suit,” said Mirkarimi.

Mirkarimi introduced his legislation earlier this year after the collapse of an agreement between the California Grocers Association and the city. That agreement was supposed to reduce by 10 million the estimated 180 million plastic bags distributed to shoppers in 2006. The grocers association said it cut use of the bags by 7.6 million but the city said those figures were unreliable.

Aside from the petroleum required to manufacture them, plastic bags are blamed for gumming up recycling machines, taking up space in landfills and killing or sickening marine mammals.

The grocers association argues that it already has plastic bag recycling centers operating in many large markets and that new compostable bags could confuse recycling efforts.

Supervisor Ed Jew, who said he has heard from constituents wondering why supervisors have spent so much time on the issue of plastic bags, was the only member to vote against the legislation.

E-mail Charlie Goodyear at cgoodyear@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/27/BAG1ROSLSG4.DTL

Posted by M at 22:45:22 | Permalink | No Comments »