Green Design » Collaboration

Architecture for Humanity Joins Forces with Yéle Haiti

Christa Morris — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:40:04 +0000

by Christa Morris

Last week, a team from Architecture for Humanity (AFH) spent four days in Haiti with Wyclef Jean’s non-profit organization, Yéle Haiti, hoping to help with new design and building projects. Though Haiti has long been recognized as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, many international aid organizations state that they are tired of sinking resources into a failed state and investors are shying away from the risk and social turmoil. But as Wyclef says, “My response to the critics is, you know, past the danger is opportunity,” and if there is an opportunity to seize, Yéle Haiti and AFH, together, are the ones to do it.

Rooted in the philosophy that innovative architecture does much more than put a roof over your head, nonprofit design and building firm Architecture for Humanity believes that “design is the expression of a community’s vision for change.” In its decade of existence, AFH has created a Youth Sports Facility and HIV/AIDS outreach center in rural South Africa (for which they won the prestigious Index Design Award), a women's center in Tamil Nadu, India, and emergency shelters and clinics in Grenada after the devastation of Hurricane Ivan (in 2004, AFH also teamed up with Worldchanging to raise $500,000 for rebuilding in post-tsunami Sri Lanka); in total, AFH has created spaces that directly improve the livelihoods of an estimated 700,000 people.

Yéle Haiti is no less ambitious or inspired. Wyclef Jean, Haitian native and world-renowned musician, founded the organization in 1995 to improve the lives of Haitians through education, sports, the arts and the environment. As he describes it, “The objective of Yéle Haiti is to restore pride and a reason to hope.” Yéle Haiti has already provided thousands of student scholarships and partnered with the Pan American Development Foundation to run a garbage-clean up campaign, generating 2,500 jobs in Port-Au-Prince. A recent 60 minutes video reveals more about Wyclef's impact:

Watch CBS Videos Online

Though the exact projects haven’t been revealed yet, Yéle Haiti and AFH will be working as what co-founder of AFH and Worldchanging contributor Cameron Sinclair calls tugboat NGOs; they don’t spend the most money, they don’t organize the biggest projects, but through smaller, smarter, and more locally connected investment, they are transforming the most desolate communities into empowered communities.

Photo credit: flickr/vanessabertozzi, Creative Commons license.

See more pictures of the reconnaissance trip on Architecture for Humanity's flickr page

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(Posted by Christa Morris in Collaboration at 3:40 PM)

Architecture for Humanity Joins Forces with Yéle Haiti

Christa Morris — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:40:04 +0000

by Christa Morris

Watch CBS Videos Online

Photo credit: flickr/vanessabertozzi, Creative Commons license.

See more pictures of the reconnaissance trip on Architecture for Humanity's flickr page

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Christa Morris in Collaboration at 3:40 PM)

Plastic Bag Revolt Halves Nationwide Use to 450m

WorldChanging Team — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:46:20 +0000

by John Vidal

Small green revolution reaches milestone as government figures reveal shoppers are rejecting plastic bags

It began in 2007 with a few traders in the small town of Modbury in Devon refusing to give out plastic bags. But yesterday their small green revolution reached a national milestone: British shoppers have nearly halved the number of single-use bags they get through.

Figures from Wrap, the government's waste and resources programme, show that whereas 870m single-use plastic bags were handed out in the UK in May 2006, the figure for May 2009 was down to 450m – a 48% reduction, and 4,740 tonnes to send to landfill against 8,890 tonnes in May 2006.

Nationwide rejection of the bags, which take up to 1,000 years to decompose and clog drains and pollute oceans, followed a government challenge to retailers to voluntarily halve bag use by June 2009.

"Over the past year or so, we've invested £3m to help our customers change the habit of a lifetime. We've cut the number of single-use bags our customers use by 53%," said an Asda spokeswoman.

But Asda still expressed frustration at the scheme. "The populist appeal of plastic bags has obscured more pressing issues, such as packaging reduction, carbon and energy use, and waste."

Further reductions should be implemented through a carrot not a stick approach, and at retailers' own discretion, it said. The €0.15 (12p) tax introduced in the Republic of Ireland in 2002 has cut bag use by more than 90%.

Yesterday the Welsh Assembly government said the dramatic reduction in bag use would not affect its proposal to introduce a 15p charge on single-use carrier bags. "Wales is still using 27m plastic bags a month, or 324m a year, " said the environment minister Joan Davidson.

Rebecca Hosking, the BBC filmmaker who persuaded Modbury and other towns to reject plastic bags after seeing how they killed wildlife around the world, yesterday said the supermarkets had fought hard against the voluntary reduction in bag use. "What has been achieved is fantastic but they have complained non-stop like little children. You'd have thought they were being asked to go on a vegan diet or something. This has not been difficult at all. No-one has lost trade, or gone out of business in Modbury or anywhere else," she said.

The plastic bag issue has divided environmentalists with some arguing the action is inconsequential while others say it is an important symbol of reduced consupmtion and often leads to further environmental action.

This piece originally appeared in The Guardian

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Collaboration at 4:46 PM)

So You Want To Be A Citizen Scientist

Joe Romm — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:26:26 +0000

The National Phenology Network’s Project Budburst Facebook group; an unidentified insect posted by Flickr user urtica as part of a citizen science project Life on the Japanese Knotweed; pasque flowers spotted in Brainerd, MN, by Flickr user esagor.

Are you plugged in to the Internet? Are you an amateur hiker? Photographer? Gardener? Birdwatcher? Frog aficionado? Nature lover? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” then with the click of a button you can also make a serious contribution to the study of climate change.

Online social networking is no longer just about tagging a picture of your dog on Facebook or announcing to the world what you’re having for dinner on Twitter. Scientific institutions worldwide are beginning to harness the power of online social networking for scientific research. Online communities are an ideal vehicle for matching professional scientists with armies of enthusiastic amateurs. This corps of citizen scientists has the capacity to capture far more data over a vastly expanded geographical spectrum than professional scientists can on their own.

The USA National Phenology Network is one organization that is reaching out to citizen scientists via the Internet. People have used phenology, the study of the timing of lifecycle events of plants and animals, to detect the signs of spring since the early 18th century. The rising threat posed by global warming has spurred scientists to put phenology to another use: to detect the signs of climate change.

Plants and animals are very sensitive to even the smallest changes in their climates. Shifts in the timing of their lifecycle events can therefore be an important indicator in the study of climate change and its effects. Slight changes can have huge repercussions; mutual relationships between species and even entire systems can begin to fall apart.

USA-NPN is asking people across the country to record the phenology of their local flora and then report it online. Amateur hikers and photographers can also participate in NPN’s Project Budburst. They are asked to identify the phenological stage of the flowers and plants they see using information provided by the project’s website. The participants record the location, longitude, and latitude of what they observe. Eventually, Project Budburst will use this information to include real-time mapping with Google maps.

Relying on anonymous volunteers to collect data that will be entered into important scientific databases certainly raises questions about the reliability of the information gathered. Yet it turns out that most of the data is remarkably accurate, and researchers do perform checks on anomalous data. What’s more, the large pool of samples collected by a large group of volunteers diminishes the impact of any faulty data.

This creative new use for social networking also answers critics’ accusations about the frivolity of Facebook, Twitter, and other sites with proof that online networking has the potential to mobilize users to actively participate in innovative programs. Jack Weltzin, executive director of NPN, has said that in the future NPN hopes to make it possible for people to submit their findings via Twitter. NPN, a nonprofit organization, also hopes that iPhone and Facebook applications might be created to more easily facilitate volunteer participation.

Climate change scientists are not the only members of the scientific profession to tap into the potential of these online communities. In addition to tracking climate change, the information participants collect can help scientists predict wildfires and pollen production and monitor droughts as well as detect and control invasive species. Other online projects, such as “The Great World Wide Star Count,” rely on volunteer participation to gauge the level of light pollution across the globe. Several websites are also dedicated to tracking the migratory and breeding patterns of animals such as birds, frogs, and butterflies. All of these observations will augment the databases available to scientists attempting to understand annual fluctuations.

Imagine what the near future will bring–a world where you wake up, look out your window, and notice the first lilac blossom of spring. As you drink your coffee, you report your floral spotting on Twitter. Presto! You’ve made a contribution to the study of climate change before you’ve even had your eggs.

So the next time you head outside, grab your camera and snap a picture of the flowers that are starting to bloom in your neighbor’s yard. Then plot your location on your Google maps and give scientists the help they need to understand global warming and its consequences.

This piece originally appeared on Climate Progress.

This article is reprinted from the Center for American Progress’s “It’s Easy Being Green” series.

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(Posted by Joe Romm in Collaboration at 1:26 PM)

Resilient Community

Alex Steffen — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:38:49 +0000

I think pretty highly of John Robb. I don't always agree with him -- and sometimes I think he's way off base -- but I think he's really grappling with the new realities of violence, conflict and system instability in our times.

In particular, I find his on-going series of posts on Resilient Community a source of both worry and insight.

First, the insight. John's posts themselves tend to focus on work-arounds for brittle infrastructure, things like smart local networks (sort of the information equivalent of energy smart grids), community scrip and local fabrication. There are some really thought-provoking ideas here, new thinking applied in new ways, many of which fit well with a strategy of increasing neighborhood survivability. The world is getting bumpier, and preparedness, learning and innovation are called for.

But I worry as well about the role these sorts of ideas seem to often end up playing in the public debate. At the very least, I see these sorts of ideas playing into a misinformed understanding of the possibilities of localism, one which has the potential to seriously drain needed energy from efforts to stave off collapse. At the worst, I see it playing into an insane survivalism, one that's quite oblivious to the real nature of big systems failures.

Because, it bears repeating again and again and again, responses based purely on localism and scaling-back can't save us now. We need to remake our material civilization. If we don't do that, no amount of community preparation or personal bunker-building is going to save our bacon. If we don't avoid the tipping points, we're headed into an atmospheric singularity, which will likely involve cascading systems failures and a total inability to meaningfully plan our own lives.

Resilience is a great strategy for making sure our communities are capable of withstanding the bumps we're facing in order to keep generating solutions which can be used to avoid the crash; but if the crash comes, individuals and local communities are not going to be in any position to weather it through their own actions, no matter what they do.

Prevention is the only cure worth talking about here.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Collaboration at 10:38 AM)