Exclusive coverage of 2006 West Coast Green Residential Building Conference and Expo
Open Access Article Originally Published: October 10, 2006
Cars aren't the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, buildings are. More and more building professionals are recognizing they too have a serious role in reducing global warming through the built environments they design and construct. That's why between September 28th and 30th, at the Bill Graham Auditorium in downtown San Francisco, thousands of green building professionals, businesses, and individuals came together to network, display their resources, and grow strategic alliances.
Here's what EV World learned.
Day One:
The Plenary Address Ed Mazria, Author, The Passive Solar Energy Book & Founder of Architecture 2030 opened the conference as the keynote speaker on the first day.
Ironically, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newson was invited but apparently had a previous engagement opening a shopping center somewhere in the Bay Area that is anchored by a Bloomingdale's department store. While this is probably more important to the city from an immediate economic development point of view, if you believe that we are faced with an urgent need to build green and reverse our destructive ways as expressed by Ed Mazria in his keynote presentation, then maybe the Mayor needed to rethink this priorities.
But that's just our opinion.
Like all conferences of this type, there was a plethora of green building sessions, as many as seven or eight at a time with titles like, "Green Development: The Butterfly Effect and The Spirit of Place", "The Big Picture: Why Green Building is the Key to Solving Our Biggest Problems", "Make Green Sexy: Marketing Yourself as a Green Building Professional", "How To Be 60% More Efficient than your Neighbor" and the appropriately titled session for the many architects present, "Design Like You Give a Damn". Because I could only attend one or two sessions at a time without being an irritating "session hopper", I simply was not able to report on all the sessions. Instead, I suggest if you are interested, to buy access to all the sessions and most of the keynote presentations available from www.westcoastgreen.com
Day Two:
The Plenary Address speaker on day two was Sarah Susanka, Author of the Not So Big House, which has become a trend in the green building world as a result of the MacMansions being built by wealthy homeowners around the country. Ms. Susanka's book argues that you don't necessarily have to build a large house to have an equal or higher quality of life. I would argue that the same applies to the “Not So Big Car”.
Day Three:
Saturday, Homeowners Day: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who needed no introduction to this very green, liberal, mostly Bay Area crowd, gave a fiery and revealing Plenary Address on Saturday morning entitled, A Contract With Our Future.
Kennedy's talk is taken mostly from his new book, "Crimes Against Nature", which details how President Bush has rewritten the nation’s environmental laws in favor of industry and filled his administration with former lobbyists and corporate executives who now oversee the regulation of their former industries. Kennedy was absolutely brilliant. As a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of the grassroots Riverkeepers Alliance, Kennedy argues that the Bush administration consistently favored corporate interests over the environment and public health, assaulting the very idea of a common good and threatening our very democracy.
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