Onward and Upward!
The PATH Concept Home uses innovative building technologies to enhance a home’s flexibility and make it more efficient to build and maintain. Six principles create the foundation for incorporating innovative systems into the Concept Home. PATH has prepared a series of reports which explore technologies and systems that support each principle. Principle #1: Flexible Floor … Read more
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
When Marin Soljacic first presented the principle, it was unproved. All he could show were his calculations. “I expected that some people would think I was a crackpot,” says Soljacic, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “This was pretty far out.”A year and a half later, a bulb lit up in an … Read more
“I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” — Jesus (MT 17:20)
Peter Kahugu of Banana Hill just outside Nairobi makes a living using his bicycle. He has modified his bicycle with a belt, a set of tensioning pulleys and a grinding stone to make it a knife-sharpening machine. By kicking the bike up onto its stand and engaging a gearing system, he is able to use … Read more
The subject of food and nutrition security is a complex one. According to FAO (2000), Food Security is achieved when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. This heavily loaded definition … Read more
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
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
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
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