Sustainable Oregon and Iraq

AIR DATE: Friday, November 5th 2010
POSTED BY: ALLISON FROST

Oregon's green reputation got a big boost this week, with the news that the state, along with  Oregon State University, has signed a five-year agreement with Iraq to help its universities develop sustainable engineering and design programs. Oregon officials say the agreement won't just benefit Iraq — OSU faculty and students will have exchange opportunities that will enrich their educational experience as well.

Meanwhile, sustainability gurus in Portland are busy developing five "EcoDistricts" in the city. Leaders like Rob Bennett say the idea is less about creating one particular green policy and more about coordinating various existing environmental strategies in a particular neighborhood.

Did you attend the recent EcoDistricts Summit in Portland? Do you work in a sustainable industry? What does that mean to you? What value do you see in an Oregon-Iraq partnership? What questions do you have about it?

GUESTS:

Tagged as: ecodistricts · green · iraq · jobs · sustainability

Photo credit: Southernpixel / Creative Commons

I know nothing of this fascinating idea so I'll be happy to kick back and listen.

trurl9 —

A lot of building light and heat is related to building siting.  The south side is warmer than the north side related to sun exposure.  The morning sun on the east is of different hue and warmth than a setting sun.

All our buildings are oriented to compass directions as our streets  are planned with compass bearing--very scientific and progressive.  

All buildings have an axis.  But they are not necessarily oriented to an ideal passive solar axis.  Some buildings front facade face the north, some south,  east, west etc   as determined by land developers.  But with some effort, we can make buildings better conform to passive heating principles-- by tweaking the foundations a few degrees, putting more windows on the north side, or  using shade trees.

An optimal home would have windows that let in winter sun, and long eaves that exclude summer sun.  Lots of natural indirect light from a northern or eastern exposure.   And ways to exclude summer  heat with deciduous trees or screens on the west.

Interesingly in  muslim countries, there is an axis as well--not to compass directions but to Mecca.  The axis of the building is oriented to the correct prayer direction which would occur 5 times a day.  Doors and windows orientation play to these rules.  Certain household items like toilets are excluded  from the Mecca side.  Preferentially you place your face towards mecca whenever possible, and your posterior  away.  So even your TV has to be place in a certain way.    Dirty items are placed on the anti Mecca side.   Some of the more devout even fart in a particular direction.  Woman have a certain degree of access and restriction and above all, privacy.

Religious restrictions would make a passive sustainable home different than your typical NW  dreamhome.  Eco-siting adjustments may be as little as 5% of a project and bring substantial savings with ideal passive solar  heat  cutting winter fuel costs by up to 40%. 

But  having to move a bathroom, an entrance, a kitchen,  a  worship parlor, all custom to a certain Mecca location, would add boatloads of cost escalations.  And it would also sacrifice ideal principles to allow a somewhat arbitrary axis.

Sometimes religous and cultural  belief will trump science and good judgement.  It happens in our society.  But some cultures are even more affected.   But then again, God gave them all the oil.

jacob —

I think it is good that Oregon is doing more to save our cities from destroying our environments. Unfortunately where we try to conserve and recycle our landlord fails when it comes to recycling. We have dumpsters that are often over flowing and no recycle bins. All but one bulb in my apartment are flurescent. That one bulb is incandescent 3-way. I am hoping to get LED light to replace all the bulbs I use.  I am hoping that we can get a better grid to give us all cleaner energy.

Chrissy4605 —

Our cities are not destroying our environments.  Most Oregon cities bend over backwards t improve their environmental conditions.

 If your landlord and their waste disposal company provides inadequate recycling and waste disposal then you should contact the waste disposal comany and the local municipality.  If you live within the Metro controlled region, contact Metro.  They will come down on your landlord like a ton of bricks.

 Do not purchase LED lamps.  They are a waste of money.  They are very expensive new technology.  I have yet to see an LED lamp capable of producing adequate light.

cfbednarek —

I have come to believe that sustainability is an issue that will ONLY be solved from the bottom up. There are too many counter-influences at the top, with too much money and too much at stake to let effective top down solutions happen.

Like civil rights 40 years ago, the green/sustainability movement is largely bottom up. Government and business are busy scrambling to ride (or stem) the tide, but the real action is happening on the ground and is pushing rather than following our political and business leaders.

Collaboration builds communities and empowers people. Which is why so many work so hard to stop it (divide and conquer is not just a slogan, it is a very effective technique)

Innovative education like this is an excellent bottom-up activity. If you teach people how to do more, and better, with less, or less harmfully, then they can do it themselves, with or without other top down assistance.

So, yeah for OSU! yeah for Iraq! and yeah for the planet!

katied —

This initiative is strong on the physical elements of sustainability, and it is right in focusing on scale - the neighborhood will be the boundary for most people's lives in future as energy prices rise and environmental limitations increase.

A problem - actually twin problems - exist, however.

First, the governance of a neighborhood is an entirely new kind of project. And unless it is to be a sort of hidden dictatorship that obeys the experts and the government agencies in its environment, it must be envisioned and formed by its own citizens according to their own vision. As Bruno Bettleheim once observed, you don't give people freedom; they take it. As a founding member of Transition PDX, a local manifestation of a worldwide movement to build local town organizations based on shared visions of a rich future and ways people ourselves can create resilience, I have discovered that this is a long, demanding process, and we don't know much about how to do it. Work is going on in over 70 towns and cities in the US alone and more around the world. But what we have found is that it is crucial to start with people; the material, water, energy and information flows will follow.

Second, the city government - all city governments - will need to create a new kind of organization. The bureaucratic models that have served us so well for the last 500 years or so are reaching the end of their usefulness. While we need the ongoing reliability of government agencies and regulations such as building codes, sanitary laws, etc., we also now need to allow those rules to change as people perceive new needs. And many of those perceptions will come from the bottom up; it no longer serves us to have government agencies that, like most citizens themselves, divide the world into officials and clients. The authority of the agencies has to begin bending - including the empires that bureaucrats often end up building.

The real work of sustainability, as it turns out, is the social restructuring, rather than the physical.

Jim Newcomer, Ph.D.

Transition PDX Hub Member

Social Sustainability Colloquium, PSU

jimnewcomer —

That social restructuring can be based on new studies of how babies think and behave that completely reverse the traditional views of babies that have been handed down through religions. Alison Gopnik has helped write two books about those studies; "The Scientist in the Crib" and "The Philosophical Baby". I highly recommend them.

Here is a URL with reviews and information:

http://productsearch.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?store=book&ATH=Alison+Gopnik

Our governments, politics, economics, and pretty much everything are leftovers from the times of Kings, of top down governments which taught wrongheaded beliefs about babies and people in general.

Now with this new research we ought to start revising our social structures to line up with our new learning.

Tom D Ford —

It is not just that people don’t know how to be sustainable, it is more likely that they don’t care. It is an uphill battle getting anyone to plan for the future, and thinking about climate change is the ultimate sort of 'planning for the future.' It is incredibly difficult to get us to save money, let alone thinking about preserving the planet ‘as is’ for future generations. Even accepting climate change, which I do, I see little evidence that suggests we won’t survive it. Yes, areas may flood and be uninhabitable, certain species may become extinct, but that is no reason to suspect that humans can’t survive it. I think we need to go back and develop a better argument for sustainability that actually and accurately presents the risk, and perhaps sells sustainability as a good idea in itself, that is based on and promotes the simple concepts of resourcefulness and efficiency as a philosophy, rather then basing everything on saving the human species from climate change.

This Oregon-Iraq partnership is one big, well-intentioned, sensational gimmick. It ends up making people look like radical nutters. Don’t get me wrong, it is fine to be a radical, but your motivation needs to be substantive rather than cheap.

scottmil —

I  think you may be right.  I fear this may be more of a propaganda effort to win the hearts and minds rather than achieve sustainablity. 

 Iraq is a desert kingdom with summer temperatures reaching 125 degrees.  They have no trees, forrests, or water.  How can OSU forrestry really help in technology? 

They need to have desert specialists.  They need desert hydrologists.  They do not need to travel 8,ooo miles when there are probably experts in  solar  and desert planning in universities in Italy, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and India.  It's like seeking an expert in  jungle ecology  in  Canada.  Can they even justify the carbon footprint of the jet flight?

jacob —

Jacob, I recommend that you do at least a tiny bit of research on Iraq before you make such assertions about the lack of water, and what native and domesticated plant life is there. And OSU is not just a Forrestry school, it has the Agriculture School that has studied what and how to grow over on the Oregon High Desert, so they are very appropriate for Iraq.

You might start with the CIA Factbook on Iraq, the CIA Factbook has publicly available information online for pretty much all nations and areas of the world. And I'd bet that Wiki has Iraq info. And check into history, because as the Cradle of Civilization alongside the Euphrates River, I'd bet that there was and is "water" in Iraq.

For my part, I'd bet that Catherine Mater is surrounded by and has access to an incredible amount of resources at OSU that will help in the efforts for sustainable engineering and design in Iraq.

Tom D Ford —

kOMRADE Tom,

Maybe you should visit a desert and a forest.  There are striking differences that will surprise you. 

And water though present, is much, much more scarcer than let's say in PDX.

jacob —

Well, Jacob, I can lead you to information but obviously I can't make you think.

I've lived in the Mojave Desert and  the Great Basin High Desert, and I'ved lived in many different forested areas.

I've installed deep well water pump and irrigation systems in the Central and Eastern Oregon High Desert and watched dry lands turned green through my efforts. That was long before the idea of sustainability, and I know that those systems could be reengineered and redesigned now to be more sustainable.

And I have combine harvested dryland wheat that only grew to about 5" or 6" high on the very sparse water that falls on the high desert out between Crane and Princeton, but made a very good crop.

Oh well, you know what you know and you're unwilling or unable to learn what you don't know, but spout off anyway, from you it's just what psychologists call "word salad".

Tom D Ford —

Germany is doing a very good job and here is an interview with one of the leaders on energy, talking about the strategy they used to get around and ahead of the entrenched energy owners and foot-draggers.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/15/hermann_scheer_1944_2010_german_lawmaker

Tom D Ford —

Portland is   exceptionally well organized in terms of Neighborhood Associations.  In the suburbs this is definitely not so.  I live in Hillsboro, a city that doesn't even keep track of the HOAs  and is VERY resistant to neighborhood organizing.  How does a citizen bring their city council and mayor to the consciousness necessary?

dailydaly —

Welcome back, Dave, good job and whatever you do with your mike, please show Emily, because it works better.

Tom D Ford —
To help the Iraqis, experts need to know about their culture, language, religion and their ecology. Not understanding the desert can condemn a construction projecting in the cradle and become deadly. Knowing about high effiency lightbulbs can only get you so far. And there is the safety issue of targeting Westerners for kidnapping or death. That kind publicity can really damper a liberal populace. Pie in the sky engineering and magical thinking will only waste valuable resources. Better to just ship them the lightbulbs, thermostat timers and insulation. And train Iraqi petroleum engineers who will be more needed than LED lighting engineers. OSU does not do petroleum.
jacob —

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joyy —

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joyy —

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joyy —

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