As I pulled up to our friend’s birthday party in North Natomas last week it was pouring down rain. But what baffled me was that 2 of their neighbors houses had their sprinklers going full blast at 3 in the afternoon on a rainy Sunday in February. Something is seriously wrong when farmers aren’t going to plant as many crops because of water shortages this year but these homeowners have their timers that messed up. They are paying for it too since they are on water meters. I told my friend (who is looking for work and has a lot of landscape experience) there is a great business opportunity there. Get those peoples timers programmed (and turned off all winter) so they aren’t wasting our precious resources. While he is at it maybe he can talk them into a drought tolerant landscape too!

Steve Schweigerdt

Take a step outside the world you know with me for a second and try to dream of a place where things are better. What kind of better comes to mind? Here is what my better place looks like.

I see progress but not the kind that we have seen before, instead this progress raises the poor and the rich at the same time. It’s a place where everything for sale is like the shoes that Tom sells where every pair you buy also means that someone who is in need is given a pair. A place where opportunity to help others becomes as abundant as opportunity for greed is today. A place deciding to rise from the pit of extortion and take on the challenge of the worlds poor becoming a people who are not any longer just absorbed with our self interest but also that of others.

What I see is a people who decide that no longer can we move through life building our own separate lives full of third world produced trinkets and our oh-so-important personal freedoms because there is a better way.
[Read more →]

I am very excited about this solution for vacant urban land.  We have often talked about what to do with land that both we and others in our area own and have turned down the idea of a community garden because there are so many stories of gardens that once put in are “permanent”.  And I understand fully why that is.  But this idea takes out the permanence of that concept and allows a space to be used while it awaits future development without having to worry about what is in the dirt that could possibly contaminate the soil.

I can not tell you how inspired I am to make this happen all over the place!  I am going to be in touch with the people who did this in London and get more information on how it all went together.  I really hope that somehow Sacramento can adopt this as a interim solution and these can pop up all over the place.  The lots that now take away from the area would instead contribute to the community.   And all for a very minimal investment.   There is no doubt that gardens help build community and more than ever the cost of transportation mandates that we grow more of our own food as close to home as possible.

Who is with me?

Go here for more about the people who started it, and here for an article about its first trial run.

Jessie (My awesome wife) has been really digging this blog lately. We now have homemade hand soap, deodorant and laundry soap is on the way, all because EnviroMom is helping us think about our waste and consumption in a new way with her writing. Makes me think about what else we can produce at home…  Because its clear that a good portion of each of our carbon footprint sizes comes from the packaging wasted by the stuff we buy.

Here is the recipe if you want to get your hands dirty (or clean, either way).

1 cup water
1/4 cup liquid castille soap (like Dr. Bronners)
1 tsp vegetable glycerine

Levi

I run it. I actually don’t know anyone in Sacramento who does not use one. Although I am sure there are people who don’t.

And after seeing this fact…

18% of all the electricity consumed in America is used to power air conditioners.

I think we need to figure out a better way.

If you go out to Point Reyes on the coast, you just might spot the herds of Elk that apparently migrated down from up North and then got trapped there by rapid development (at least that’s the story I always heard). I’ve always wondered if Elk Grove was named for elk that used to herd there when the land was less tamed.

More Elk Grove land is currently at risk of being tamed and primed for Sprawlification. We got an e-mail from ECOS calling for action against lobbying efforts to extend the Urban Boundary around Elk Grove.

Decisions will happen today at City Hall (2:15 at 700 H. Street). We got wind of it a little late, so we won’t be there but Steve sent the letter below, expressing our concerns.

In March, ECOS launched a similar campaign which resulted in a victory. Its clear that vigilance is required to send a strong, ongoing message that Sacramento doesn’t have to grow out in order to grow.

For those of you who are speaking out, we thank you!

June 12, 2007

Dear Supervisors,

We are writing to urge you not to remove any land from the South Sacramento Habitat Conservation Plan at the meeting this afternoon.

We understand that Elk Grove has requested that portions of the study area be removed so that they can annex and develop these areas in the future. We oppose Elk Grove’s consumptive land use and attempts to grow outside of the established Urban Service Boundary. Elk Grove has had plenty of reserve land to grow into and they have consumed it at an astonishing rate with low density development. Even now the roads are choked with traffic and some of the best habitat in the county has been lost due to their poor development patterns.

We hope that you will not give in to Elk Grove’s request. Further we ask that you oppose any expansion of Elk Grove city boundaries if and when they come with that request to LAFCO.

Allowing Elk Grove to grow outside its current boundaries will cause increased competition with new areas that should be developed in Sacramento unincorporated areas, which include large infill locations and the revitalization of commercial corridors such as Florin Road and the Florin Mall.
It is in your best interests to contain the growth of Elk Grove.

As a development company focused on urban growth, we plan to invest approximately $300 million over the next five years in projects near the core of downtown Sacramento. If you choose a compact growth model consistent with the Blueprint and good planning principles, we will be encouraged continue our investments in Sacramento County neighborhoods and corridors that can benefit from an urban and transit focused growth model. However, if you allow Elk Grove to open vast new tracts of land to development at the fringes it will erode the market for redevelopment of existing corridors and we will look elsewhere to invest our resources.

Again, we urge you to move forward with the existing HCP and focus your investment to improve existing communities in Sacramento County.

Jason

Daniel Pink is a keynote at the ULI Multifamily Trends Conference that Micah and Steve are at today.

Here’s something I pulled from an article he wrote for Wired, “The Rise of the Neo Greens”.

Hybrids as Symbols of Identity
Reporting on a UC Davis study on consumer motivations for buying a Hybrid, lead by Ken Kurani he writes…

They discovered that the cars were “symbols of identity.” Buying a Prius or Honda Civic hybrid was less about careful economic reasoning than about self-expression and self-understanding. “People construct their identities as a narrative. The project of our lives is to tell a more interesting story about ourselves,” says Kurani. “In large part that’s what we see happening with hybrids.”

For most buyers, the goal wasn’t fuel economy. It was to produce fewer emissions, to minimize external harm – and to let everyone else know that they’ve made a deliberate choice to do so. “Lower resource consumption is part of an identity people are constructing. They want to be seen as someone who’s concerned about the world around them,” Kurani says. At the same time, “they want others to see that they’ve done this, so that others might see themselves doing this.”

Researchers have found similar motivations for the early adopters of that other staple of the neo-green movement, solar power.

Apple Application?
While there’s nothing really strange about a car as a symbol of identity, the integration of the eco-sensibility into this mix really strikes a chord with me.

Another company I admire, Apple, has long aligned itself as a symbol of identity”: look no further than its “I’m A Mac” campaign for telling evidence. Perhaps this neo-green identity is the social pulse Apple was tuning into when it recently announced its “Greener Apple” policy. The graph at the top is theirs and represents their past, present and forecasted percentage of weight recycled as a percentage of past sales.

What About Houses?
Makes me wonder how this plays out with home buyers? Thus far, research about green building has indicated that home buyers respond first and foremost to the bottom line question of energy-efficiency and value/cost benefits, followed by “health” benefits and lastly “preservation” issues. However, I’ve always wondered if these variables adequately describe why people make eco-related decisions. Perhaps there’s more going on than current research about home buying indicates…

Jason

This came out a few weeks ago but its still buzzing around in my head.

What would it take to organize enough Sacramentan’s to shut off as much power as possible on a particular night. I think it could happen if we pick a date and time and convince enough building owners and city officials this would be fun. It would certainly be a powerful statement about our region’s growing commitment to sustainability. Shoot, we could do it once a month. Maybe we could even convince all those people to put timers on their buildings to shut them down every night at AM or something.

This is such a simple idea that would reduce Sacramento’s carbon footprint, reduce local people’s power consumption, and move us progressively further along the road to true sustainability.

Here’s a telling statistic from the Sydney people…

If businesses turned off lights, computers, photocopiers and unused appliances, Sydney could cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 5% over the next 12 months – the equivalent of pulling about 75,000 medium-sized cars off the road – said WWF’s communications director in Australia, Andy Ridley.

What do you think?

Micah