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Sustainable Communities Wheel.

Sustainable Design - Buildipedia.com™ Upgrade your home’s insulation and air-seal gaps and cracks sooner rather than later. This is one home improvement that will pay for itself relatively quickly and then continue to generate savings for as long as you live in your home. Even if a full upgrade is not in your budget this year, you can tackle several low- or no-cost improvements right now. Here are 10 tips to keep your home comfortable this winter. 1. If you have a sunroom or enclosed porch with a southern exposure, it can collect a great deal of heat. 2. In winter, a surprising amount of cold air can leak into your house around window and door openings, due largely to the fact that the framed (or rough) opening of a window or door is bigger than actual size of the window or door. 3. Baseboard and crown moldings that run along exterior walls are also sources of cold air infiltration. 4. 5. The tiny gaps between window sashes, jambs, headers, and sills and between the sash and the rails all add up. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA Ron Finley plants vegetable gardens in South Central LA — in abandoned lots, traffic medians, along the curbs. Why? For fun, for defiance, for beauty and to offer some alternative to fast food in a community where “the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.” Eating HealthyGardeningGIYGrow Food Not Lawns Related Posts « How To Keep Your Home Garden Monsanto-Free Cancer Doctor Explains How Cooking with Turmeric Leads to Amazing Health Benefits »

One The Event - Social Architecture "12 Pillars of Human Endeavor" Origins Originally designed by futurist & social architect, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Founder of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, the 12 Pillars shown here (above) match & advance Barbara's popular12 point Wheel of Co-Creation (right) based on the Model of the Peace Room, which focuses on a world that works for all. many others including officials in Washington DC saw this wheel as an open-source tool that would help us define and bridge us from old hierarchical systems to ones based in co-creation and bridging resources and needs in evolutionary ways. How we use it Each pillar is self explanatory. Embracing Whole-System(s): Beyond the Pillars While the Pillars cover the WHAT (solutions, impact areas, and issues); facilitating meaningful collaboration also requires coherence, trust and synergy. More about the 12 Pillar Model & its Purpose

Service design phases — Government Service Design Manual Accessible Media Player by Nomensa The timeline slider below uses WAI ARIA. Please use the documentation for your screen reader to find out more. Building a digital service is a complex task, with many risks. By breaking development into phases you minimise risk, learning about what works and what doesn't, iterating as you go. As the service progresses through development you'll find out more about users' needs, development requirements and the conditions your service will be operating in. This approach allows the team making and operating the service to start small, learn fast, and provide value to users as soon as possible. Discovery A short phase, in which you start researching the needs of your service’s users, find out what you should be measuring, and explore technological or policy-related constraints.

Institute of Sustainable Building Global Village Construction Set by Marcin Jakubowski Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters building the Global Village Construction Set - a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The aim of the GVCS is to lower the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing. Its a life-size lego set that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, or in the developing world. So Far we’ve prototyped 8 of the 50 Machines and we’ve been expanding rapidly. We are 100% crowd-funded. Please watch these videos if you are new to the project: What Makes the Global Village Construction Set so special? Why should I help fund this project? The library of instructional material that we produce will make replication a straightforward task. What will you do with the $40,000? Absolutely!

Small West Yorkshire town aims to be first town with food self-sufficiency by growing all its own vegetables (NaturalNews) Different local authorities throughout the USA have been harassing homeowners for growing veggies or herbs in their front lawns. But in the small town of Todmorden, England, a grass-roots food movement has been started by one woman who grew veggies in her front yard and let neighbors pick them free. It took six months before neighbors and passers-by got the notion that Mary Clear's lowered fence and signs encouraging people to pick veggies from her lawn was for real. Mary, a 56 year old grandmother, kicked off a scheme thought up with local Bear Cafe owner Pam Warhurst and others to engage in local guerrilla agriculture. Soon, others joined in and they called the movement Incredible Edible. Even the Todmorden police station has a few of those beds on its premises. Mary and Pam realize that Incredible Edible isn't up to feeding all 15,000 residents of Todmorden yet. An updated UN report on agro-ecology and the right to food is available on pdf here (

Sustainable Building Article Directory This directory links to hundreds of free sustainable building articles on the Internet. In many cases these links point directly to the article, saving time and effort searching through entire websites. Websites with lots of articles are listed under Major Sites. Enjoy! Search these articles: Adobe Adobe Adobe Builder.com Newsletter Archives Adobe and Super Block Technology Some Thoughts on Adobe Codes Agricultural Fibers Agricultural Fibers Agricultural Fibers For Use in Building Components Agricultural Residues: A Promising Alternative to Virgin Wood Fiber Arundo Donax Biobased Structural Composite Materials for Housing and Infrastructure Applications Biocomposites from Engineered Natural Fibers for Housing Panel Applications Fiber Futures Leftover Straw Gets New Life Cellulose Insulation Blown-in Cellulose Insulation Cellulose Facts Cellulose Insulation Winning Market Share in Colorado Earthbag Building With Earthbags Earthbag Earthbag Dome Building The Honey House

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