By In this final installment of my ten-part series on the fundamentals of resilient design, I’m taking a look at where our food comes from and how we can achieve more resilient food systems. The average salad in the U.S. is transported roughly 1,400 miles from farm to table, and here
By Changing the Climate Change Conversation
If I go to one more meeting about climate change where the audience is lectured about how urgent, enormous and unprecedented the challenge before us is, I am going to scream. That’s because these meetings are largely attended by people who already understand that the climate is changing, are
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #9: Building Strong Communities
In this ninth installment of my ten-part series on resilient design fundamentals, I’m focusing beyond individual buildings to the community scale. Following a natural disaster or other problem that results in widespread power outages or interruptions in vehicle access or fuel supplies, people need to work together. We saw that
Resilience and Sustainability in the Food System
For example, resilience is the ability to bounce back quickly from an extreme weather event by re-establishing food production and distribution, hopefully with improvements so that such events will do less harm in the future, while sustainability is the long term challenge to slow the rate of climate change so
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #8: Water in a Drought-Prone Era
Periodic drought is something that a significant portion of the U.S. will have to get used to in the coming decades. Climate scientists tell us that while precipitation will increase overall with climate change, certain regions, including the American West, will see increased frequency of drought. I certainly saw that
New York City’s (Lack of) Resilience
There’s a great article in today’s New York Times, “New York is Lagging as Seas and Risks Rise.” In a nutshell, with 520 miles of shoreline, New York City is highly vulnerable to rising sea level and storm surges, and the City isn’t doing enough to address its vulnerabilities. The
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #7: Renewable Energy Systems for Emergency Use
House location and design are the starting points in achieving resilience—with such considerations as where the house located, how well it can weather storms and flooding, and how effectively it retains heat and utilizes passive solar for heating and daylighting. Beyond that, we should look to renewable energy systems for
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #6: Natural Cooling
A blog on cooling? In September? What gives? In my recent series of blogs, I’ve been laying out some of the basics of resilient design—which will become all the more important in this age of climate change. Achieving resilience in homes not only involves keeping them comfortable in the winter
