Once teeming with bountiful salmon and fertile plains, Seattle’s Duwamish River drew both Native peoples and settlers to its shores over centuries for trading, transport, and sustenance. Unfortunately, the very utility of the river was its undoing, as decades of dumping led to the river being declared a Superfund cleanup site. Much of Washington’s history…
We have dual climate and affordable housing emergencies bearing down on us as a community and a world. In order to be truly sustainable, our communities must make note of the equitable access to clean, green, affordable housing. Our communities in Redmond and Kirkland are 100% LEED Platinum certified, and yet close to three quarters…
The top 50 architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) firms, and other key professionals responsible for well over one trillion dollars of global annual construction have rallied around establishing building sector emissions targets to meet the Paris Agreement. The embodied carbon emissions of construction products represent a significant portion of emissions and unlike operational carbon emissions these…
The benefits of electrifying your home are numerous: improved health from reducing air pollution inside your home, increased comfort from using heat pump heating and cooling, and lowering your impact on climate and the environment by reducing emissions. The process of electrifying your home can start with a deep retrofit including insulation and energy efficiency…
The focus of this session is on best practices for developing a strategic energy plan that is centered on equitable outcomes, while promoting community energy resilience. Learn more about recent tribal energy resilience, microgrid, and strategic planning projects, while gaining technical resources for implementing in your community. Navigate existing frameworks, technologies, grant funding resources, and…
Significant amounts of usable wood are going to landfills and being burned in our region. (300,000 tons of clean wood go to waste in King County, alone, each year.) Additionally, there is inconsistent availability of reclaimed and sustainably-harvested (FSC) wood for the construction industry to incorporate into buildings. Meanwhile, due to climate change, lumber prices…
The C Street Co-op packs a punch: Affordable Housing at 60% AMI? Check. Affordable homeownership? Check. Permanently affordable homeownership? Check. Net Zero Energy? Neighborhood walkability? And all this with about 10% of the subsidy required by typical affordable housing apartment buildings? Check, check, and check. Recently completed in Springfield, Oregon, the C Street Co-op has…
This is a story about a family’s determination to effect a cleaner future by building a certified passive house – a giant collection of the very big and very small choices that many owners, architects, and builders made this year, this week, today. From the owners’ perspective, the arrival of their daughter brought them greater…
My Green Roof 16 years later and I am still hanging in there with it I was on a team that proposed a green roof at the Department of Interior headquarters. I read about green roofs and their benefits in slowing down stormwater, extending the life of roofs, and more. I saw the green…