Incorporating Green Design Elements

Sustainable affordable housing is also playing a strong role in breathing new life into economically challenged neighborhoods. William Stein, AIA, LEED, principal of New York-based Dattner Architects, presented an affordable housing development located in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., that his firm designed. The benefits that the Atlantic Avenue Apartments (pictured below) … Read more

Yuppie Chow?

Organic food, taken over by big business, has become an assembly-line product marketed as yuppie chow for the privileged, a Canadian researcher says.Multinational food-processing giants such as ConAgra Foods, Cargill, Kraft Foods, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo now own most organic brands, Irena Knezevic of Toronto’s York University said in advance of a presentation she will make … Read more

A Good Thing?

In developed nations, factory farms have expanded rapidly since their origins in the early 20th Century. So much so that in the U.S. only 3% of farms now generate an astonishing 62% of that nation’s agricultural output! In fact, they have so consolidated the agricultural sector that only five food retailers (Kroger, Albertson’s, Wal-Mart, Safeway … Read more

Starvation In Malawi

The imposed compulsion to spend the attractive food aid packages on American produce is ensuring handsome rewards for farmers in Iowa and Wyoming with an additional boon for American shipping: it has begun to spell doom for indigenous African farmers. In addition there is evidence that some of the ‘in kind’ donation being sent to … Read more

Darfur, Saving Itself

The people of Ain Siro are among the 1 million who are “out of reach” of aid agencies — people who we automatically assume must be facing starvation because we are not feeding them. But in North Darfur, at least, there is no starvation. Much is needed — medicines, schoolbooks, decent wells — but people … Read more

Turning Farming Sideways

The vertical farm’s power would come from solar panels and wind spires on the roof. Its circular (cylindrical) design uses the space most efficiently, allowing maximum light into the center. The city’s wastewater would be filtered and sterilized, then used for irrigation, and rainwater would also be collected and used to clean pollutants off the … Read more