By the time I complete my ten-week internship Asia will have nearly one million new urban residents. Many of these urbanites will move into freshly constructed, high-energy consuming buildings that help make up a building sector accountable for one-third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Over the next 20 years, China alone will add […]
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Going With the Flow: The next life of Waller Creek
To explore Waller Creek and environs is to live intensively in the modern world and at the same time to be aware of how brief an instant modernity has been with us; how brief an instant, indeed, the human presence has been here in any guise to contemplate a very old set of surroundings. […]
L.A. needs desert solar farms — but not everyone’s happy about it
Currently the city of Los Angeles gets about one-fifth of its electricity from renewable resources. By the end of the decade this will increase to one-third. As the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the largest municipal utility in the United States with over 4 million customers, slowly phases out coal and some […]
Reinventing The Biosphere: The Future of The Research Jewel of the Arizona Desert
I approach Biosphere 2, couched in the cacti-ornamented hills of the Sonoran Desert and surrounded by mountain peaks. I’m enamored with the unusual tale of this larger-than-life science project, but have come to terms with the fact that for the generation that came of age in the 1990s, the memory of Biosphere 2 will likely forever […]
A Development Dispute in the Grand Canyon
Imagine riding a tramway from the rim of the Grand Canyon all the way down to the canyon floor at the confluence of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers along the East Rim. Once your gondola docked, a 1,400-foot “riverwalk” would guide you to the Confluence Restaurant or to an amphitheater in the other direction. […]
