I just wanted to share this site with everybody.  Inhabitat.com is a blog that provides a ton of fascinating content about sustainable design, architecture, and technology.  The homes and commercial structures featured are brilliant in design and function.  I originally discovered the site while browsing for articles passive solar housing.  However, far beyond building, Inhabitat showcases a whole array of design, including fashion, gadgets, transportation, household products, and lighting.

I read the feeds every day and am always amazed and heartened by the innovation happening out there these days to protect our planet for future generations.  Yet, when you look around, environmental sensibility still seems to be a fringe element.  I hope that sites like Inhabitat.com help spread the beauty and common sense of sustainable design.

Some recent favorites: 

• Electric cars can be fast
• A bizarre concept for a 2-MILE-HIGH  vertical eco city
• Beautiful prefab homes like this one
• Wind-powered swirly lights for your back yard
• The rise of solar power

Unfortunately, a lot of the innovations featured are rather expensive or targeted as high-end luxuries.  A lot of the technology is emerging and will become more affordable as it becomes more mainstream.  However, I’d like to see more cool designs and sustainable products available at prices that everybody can afford.  After all, protecting the environment only works if we can all participate, not just the few top percentiles of consumers.

To that end, I believe Inhabitat.com helps by generating interest in sustainable design.  The more people who catch on, the more demand and innovation.  Hopefully, this technology becomes ubiquitous.  It has to.

Here’s a little something awesome I found featured on Inhabitat.com, a blog that focuses on sustainable design and architecture.  You can order a plush mollusk called a Socktopus that is made from recycled sweaters and is "lovingly filled with hypoallergenic polyester".  I think it’s brilliant because the recycled result is convincingly a new product, whereas some recycled products fall short and just seem like stuff with garbage stuck to it.  And wisely, despite the catchy name, these are made of sweaters not socks!  Aren’t they cute?

Which got me to wondering…what would it look like if Bill Cosby recycled his sweaters?

This weekend, I learned that the tallest tree in the world is a coast redwood named Hyperion. He stands a towering 379.1 feet (115.55 meters) tall! The location in a remote region of Redwood National Park is kept secret out of fear tourists would damage the forest’s ecosystem. And what kind of forest is an old-growth redwood forest? Remember the Ewoks? The forested planet of Endor was certainly my favorite setting in the Star Wars trilogy, with it’s huge and majestic trees. You don’t need a spaceship to get there, though. It’s all right here on Earth…for now.

In the 1970’s, only 15% of the Californian redwood forest’s original range remained in it’s pristine old growth state, thanks to logging and development. Today, a shocking 4%* of old growth forest all that remains! And the logging continues!

Sometimes it’s hard to visualize a figure like 4%. Here are some examples that illustrate the magnitude of what has happened to our redwood forest:

• The estimated 2007 US population is 303,111,027. If there were 4% remaining, that would be only 12,124,441. That would be like only the populations of New York City and Los Angeles remaining!
• There are 30 Major League Baseball teams, each with a 25-man active roster. That’s 750 players. If only 4% remained, the league would consist of: The Boston Red Sox, and the 5-man starting rotation of the Colorado Rockies.
• That Grande (16 oz.) cup of Starbucks coffee you rely on every morning? Well, sorry, but you’re getting just 2 teaspoons now! Drink up.
• During the daytime, you can expect to catch a subway in New York City approximately once every 5 minutes. Uh oh…if there’s only 4% of trains remaining, you’re going to have to wait 2 hours for the next train!
• Eggs now come in cartons of 1/2 egg.
• The phrase 24/7/365 now only applies from January 1st through 14th. Sorry, you’re going to have to call Dell next year to get your laptop fixed.
• Good golly, the average adult penis size is less than a quarter of an inch!

Well, that was shocking, wasn’t it? Then it should be equally shocking that so much old-growth redwood forest has disappeared! And what about that drop from 15% remaining to 4% remaining since the 70’s? That happened during my lifetime! Some of these trees are over 2,000 years old!

That’s right, any portion of redwood forest replanted today would take another 2,000 years to return to the pristine state we see in the present remaining forest!

I want to go to the redwood forest myself to experience it in person. I want our ancestors 57 generations from now to be able to experience the same thing, to see grand redwood forests planted today, and hopefully somehow still have rich biological diversity in their world, though it slips away from us each passing day.

* - I found these figures online, but I’m not sure how recent they are. They refer to old growth redwood forests (you know, with thousands-year-old trees and their original ecosystem intact), but an even smaller portion is protected park land. According to Jeff of Humboldt Forest Defense, California environmentalists are reporting less than 2% remain! Anyhow, this is far too small a number. It wouldn’t take more than a very localized disaster to wipe out what remains!

I’ve been giving Compact Fluorescent Lamps a try since early this year. They use far less wattage than incandescent bulbs, prompting Australia and Canada to begin phasing out incandescent bulbs to reduce energy consumption. A 14 Watt CFL outputs the same light as a 60 Watt incandescent bulb, and lasts up to 10 times longer. According to the math on the packaging, the electrical costs you save on one bulb over its lifetime pays for the bulb fivefold. Just reducing the environmental load of power generation is enough for me to get the warm fuzzies, so the cost saving is icing on the cake.

There is some controversy, though, about the “greenness” of these bulbs. As with any fluorescent bulbs, CFL’s contain mercury, about 4mg per bulb. So in order for this mercury to not pollute the environment, every you must recycle every bulb (See recycling information links below).

Consider the fact that coal-burning power plants release mercury into the atmosphere. Over the five-year lifetime of a CFL, the mercury emissions via coal-generated power are 2.4mg, plus 4mg in the bulb, for a total of 6.4mg. Equivalent five-year usage of incandescent bulbs causes 10mg of emissions. (US EPA, 2002) Of course, 4mg of that mercury is trapped in the bulb and can be recycled and needn’t ever be released to the environment! Conversely, you can’t recycle what goes up the smokestack once it’s release to the atmosphere.

I believe there needs to be more incentive for people to recycle their CFL’s. People get lazy, you know. It would be great if there was a deposit on each CFL, like with bottles and cans, maybe 50 cents or so? And how about more green energy?

Well, anyway, I’ve tried several brands of bulbs with mixed results. The earlier bulbs had a barely perceptible flicker to the light that I found a bit jarring. One bulb even had an annoying hum, but others of the same brand were fine.

I recently purchased several varieties of BlueMax CFL’s that I am quite pleased with! There is no detectable flicker or hum. Good fluorescent lights use three or four colored phosphors to blend into white light. Sunlight consists a full spectrum of colors. BlueMax bulbs use six phosphors in order to more closely simulate natural sunlight. After, comparing these CFL’s side by side with two other brands, I agree that the light is more natural.

I purchased two varieties, Daylight Spiral and Sunset Spiral. The Daylight bulbs have a color temperature of 5900° Kelvin, which approaches daylight. The Sunset bulbs are closer to the warm glow of standard incandescents at 3000° Kelvin. I much prefer the Daylight bulbs for my office.

Recycling information links:
http://www.epa.gov/bulbrecycling/
http://www.lamprecycle.org/

Here’s a fascinating site about urban planning for cities without cars:

Carfree Cities

These designs rely on circular districts interconnected by metro rail. Each district is walkable within five minutes and is totally free of cars. The resulting layout alleviates the congestion, pollution, and danger of modern urban environments that have become overrun by private automobile use.

It’s a book, too, apparently.