Tom Hartman, Chris Benedict, Andy Shapiro, and I are in the midst of a 2-week tour of high performance buildings in Saxony and Upper Austria. We’ll be presenting our findings during three sessions at Building Energy. Here’s a very quick taste of some of the things we’ve seen.
The Crash Course is soon to be published, but in advance of that event the author is presenting much of this material in a full day workshop at the upcoming NESEA Building Energy conference in Boston on March 8 (www.nesea.org/be11). The next day, he and the conference keynote speaker David Orr have agreed to engage in a discussion in the opening of the Whole Systems in Action “track” of sessions, immediately following Orr’s speech to the conference on Wednesday morning March 9.
Let me say up front that I recommend you read this book as soon as you can get your hands on it. The book’s subtitle The Unsustainable Future of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment seems to signal that this might be yet another “gloom and doom” book intended to scare and intimidate. But this time it’s different: Chris Martenson is clearly a whole systems thinker. He gets at the root causes of the predicaments we face with our energy, environmental and economic endeavors, and offers a positive vision for how we might become more balanced and resilient as the future emerges.
Things have that crazy, breathless feeling as we close in on BuildingEnergy, with only 4 weeks to go until showtime. But I wanted to share with you a spontaneous outpouring of generosity that occurred within the NESEA community within the past week.
A group of NESEA emerging professionals, led by Ryan Lacey, LEED AP, of Petersen Engineering, and Bernice Radle, of Buffalo Energy, were working hard to make the NESEA student design competition, which culminates at BE11, a success. Part of their work entailed securing sponsorships and/or donations for prizes for the winners – something they had hoped to be able to offer, but that wasn’t in the budget. The put out a call for help on Basecamp, NESEA’s project planning forum.
Today we’re talking to Kate Goldstein, a young NESEA member from Providence, RI, and a PhD candidate at MIT, about how she came to be involved with the organization and what NESEA has meant to her professionally and personally. This is part one of a two part conversation with Kate (pictured, right). In part two, she’ll talk about her efforts on behalf of Emerging Professionals at the BuildingEnergy Conference.
As always, we hope these Q & As will provide you with some insights about what you can expect from this year’s conference and the people who are making it happen.
Like the main protagonist in the movie “Six Degrees of Separation” – where making connections is key in order to advance oneself – many product manufacturers today are making claims of greater connectedness to being green than is warranted. The definition of ‘green’ is constantly changing, and when worded in just the right way, can translate into greater profits for business and big problems for consumers. Are we to settle for a confusing variety of certifications that subtly offer false shades of green at the expense of our environment?
