The town of Greensburg, Kansas was destroyed after a tornado ripped through their community in May of 2007, but it is not only coming back stronger than before, but much greener.

One project currently taking place in Greensburg is the Chain of Eco-Homes. When completed, 12 homes will serve as a “living laboratory” for unique environmental building. Two Eco-Homes already exist, Silo Eco-Home, equipped with a vegetable garden green roof, and Solar Eco-Home, the winner of the 2005 Solar Decathlon Competition and donation from the University of Colorado.

Greensburg GreenTown and FreeGreen.com invited designers and architects from all over to submit sustainable designs for the next three homes in the Chain of Eco-Homes Design Competition. There were more than 230 entries submitted.

“This Chain of Eco-Homes contest is a great way to show how the concept of crowd sourcing can help advance green residential design.  With over 439 participants in this contest, Greensburg, Kansas was able to gain access to the world’s best green designers,” said David Wax in a statement, FreeGreen’s CEO and founder.

Steven Learner, Mike Stevens, and their team at New York-based Steven Learner Studio submitted the winning design, Meadowlark House. Their modern style home is 1450 square feet with three bedrooms and two baths. While their design will be featured as one of the houses in the Chain of Eco-Homes, the first place winners also receive the grand prize of $10,000.

There are many environmental components to the Meadowlark House. Perhaps the most unique aspect of the design is the use of an HIB modular wall system. HIB consists of recyclable wood blocks made from sustainable resources that stack together like LEGOs. They provide a high level of insulation, reducing energy costs, and are designed to resist the forces of strong winds, and all without the use of any chemicals.

“The home is planned to be 50% more energy efficient than a typical code built home.  We would like it to be net-zero energy, but are waiting to hear back from a number of renewable energy companies which we have solicited for donations on that,” said David Andrew Goldman, Global Communications Director for Expansion Media.

Other sustainable elements include:

• Building is oriented along an east – west axis, maximizing southern exposure
• Evergreen landscaping along the north side of the site deflects cold winter winds
• Roof drainage ties into an underground cistern for reuse in site irrigation
• Deep roof overhangs to the south and west reduce summertime solar glare, while allowing winter sun to provide light and warmth
• A whole house ducted energy recovery ventilator (ERV) provides fresh air while recycling the home’s temperature
• High thermal mass floor receives and absorbs solar radiation during the day and re-radiates it at night
• Low-E triple glazed, operable windows allow ventilation while minimizing heat loss in winter and heat gain in summer

“Our goal was to design a house to meet the needs of the people of Greensburg.  We wanted to provide a sustainable, comfortable home that can be built quickly and affordably, with flexibility to accommodate many families’ different needs,” said first place winner, Steven Learner.

The winning design is estimated to cost “$154,000 to $200,000 without Renewable Energy Systems (i.e. with the home saving 50% vs. a typical code built home),” said Goldman.

Stuttio Workshop’s Root/Breathe/Endure Design came in second place winning the Enviro-Ment Masonry Unit (EMU) category. Their EMU wall system is a lime-based masonry block that naturally absorbs carbon dioxide from the air.

Daniel Day, an architechture and design studio in Dallas, placed third overall with its design Linear Villa, which won the Insulating Concrete Form (ICF) category. Second and third place winners each receive $1,000.

Construction for all three houses is planned to begin early next month.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Exxon-Mobil Corporation, the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas company, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Denver to violating the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) in five states during the past five years, the Justice Department announced.

The company has agreed to pay fines and community service payments totaling $600,000 and will implement an environmental compliance plan over the next three years aimed at preventing bird deaths on the company’s facilities in the affected states. According to papers filed in court, the company has already spent over $2.5 million to begin implementation of the plan.

The charges stem from the deaths of approximately 85 protected birds, including waterfowl, hawks and owls, at Exxon-Mobil drilling and production facilities in Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas between 2004 and 2009. According to the charges and other information presented in court, most of the birds died after exposure to hydrocarbons in uncovered natural gas well reserve pits and waste water storage facilities at Exxon-Mobil sites in Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

The company has entered into a plea agreement with the government, calling for guilty pleas to the five charges and a sentence of $400,000 in fines and $200,000 in community service payments. The fines will be deposited into the federally administered North American Wetlands Conservation Fund. The community service payments will be made to a non-profit waterfowl rehabilitation foundation in Colorado and the congressionally chartered National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, designated for waterfowl preservation work in each of the affected states. During a three-year probationary period, Exxon-Mobil also must implement an “environmental compliance plan” designed to keep birds from coming into contact with oily waters at its facilities in the five affected states.

“The environmental compliance plan that Exxon-Mobil has agreed to in this multi-district plea agreement is an important step in protecting migratory birds in these five states,” John C. Cruden, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, said in a statement.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, enacted in 1918, implements this country’s commitments under avian protection treaties with Great Britain (for Canada), Mexico, Japan and Russia. The Act creates a misdemeanor criminal sanction for the unpermitted taking of listed species by any means and in any manner regardless of fault. The maximum penalty for a corporate taking under the MBTA is $15,000, or twice the gross gain or loss resulting from the offense, and five years probation. The birds killed in the five cases include ducks, grebes, ibis, passerines, shorebirds, owls, martin and a hawk. None of these species is listed as endangered or threatened under federal law.

Migratory birds often land on open wastewater ponds at oil and gas facilities and become coated with, or ingest, fatal amounts of hydrocarbons discharged into the water during drilling or production operations. Such killings can be prevented by scrubbing the water of contaminants before discharge, removing the ponds, placing an obstruction such as netting or plastic “bird balls” over the water to prevent contact, or installing commercially-manufactured electronic hazing devices which detect incoming flights of migratory birds and deploy noise and lights to scare them away from the area. Exxon-Mobil’s environmental compliance plan will employ these techniques, tailored to each facility, to prevent future mortality.

The cases were investigated by Special Agents of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and are being prosecuted by Senior Trial Attorney Robert S. Anderson of the Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Carey of the District of Colorado.

If global warming wasn’t so devastatingly tangible, it would sound like part of a doomsday cult. Consider these projections of the future for a swath of the U.S.

First up: Kansas, the American heartland, breadbasket to the world, a place of amber waves of grain…a place we might not recognize by century’s end.

Under projected global warming scenarios, Kansas will become hotter and drier, with more insects and more storms during the next several decades. By century’s end, western Kansas will be so arid, it will need 8 more inches of water to sustain crops there. Eastern Kansas will be wetter, but so warm that evaporation will claim the extra rainfall and southwestern Kansas will be a virtual desert. All this according to a report released last week by University of Kansas scientists Nathaniel Brunsell and Johannes Feddema for the Climate Change and Energy Project based in Salina, Kansas.

But wait, Dorothy, there’s more.

Public health experts speaking in Tuscon Arizona over the weekend projected that climate change could bring a rash of asthma, Nile virus, malaria and dengue fever to the desert Southwest.

How does climate change unleash this cloud of locusts? Warmer weather drives disease-bearing mosquitoes north from Mexico; higher temperatures aggravate respiratory ailments and sudden heavy rainstorms (the erratic weather predicted with climate change) nurture a set of waterborne illnesses. So say scientists speaking at a health conference and quoted in the Arizona Daily Star.

To be fair, these climate projections are just projections. The Tuscon speakers acknowledged that trying to pinpoint where the heavy rains and droughts will occur is tricky science. The Kansas scientists say we could turn it all around, by working very hard to reduce carbon emissions.

Discouraging as all this is, the reaction of some people reading the Daily Star story on the conference was nearly as disheartening. Dozens of comments derided the experts for even trying to project the future, accusing them of being alarmists. “The sky is falling!!!” cracked one.  An astroid could hit the earth, noted another.

People do have enough troubles, without adding global warming. As one Arizona reader pointed out, he’s more concerned about his job security and ability to get health insurance than whether the oceans rise in 50 years and California drops into the Pacific.

Speaking of California. We don’t need projections to outline the effects of global warming there. Extreme drought and high winds have led to some of the worst wildfires seen in Southern California. Hundreds have lost their homes and thousands have been displaced over the past several days as rapid walls of flame descended on their neighborhoods. Firefighters have been fighting fires across four counties, Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange and Santa Barbara. (See the Los Angeles Times map of the affected areas.)

Are these fires climate change related? We can’t know for sure. Is this the sort of thing that climate change models predict? Most certainly.

At least Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger isn’t dithering about it.

“I think that everyone has recognized that this is a different situation now than we had in the past. I think the last two years or so we have seen that this is not anymore a fire season in the fall, like we usually have had but there is fire season all year round,” he told news reporters.

“We have seen the fire(s) starting in February. We have fires in March, in April, in June. We have them now. They will continue. I think it is because of the weather change, the climate change.”

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

As communities in Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Arkansas sift through damage from deadly tornadoes that tore through last night, another town is quietly commemorating its reconstruction after a belly-punch from Mother Nature last year.

On May 4, 2007, 95 percent of the homes and businesses in Greenburg, Kan., were virtually wiped away by a massive, slow-moving EF5 tornado that scraped a 2-mile-wide path. The result left the already economically depressed town wondering if it would have a future.

The ultimate answer was, yes, there was a reason to rebuild Greensburg, but only if it truly lived up to its name. The townspeople launched an ambitious green initiative to make the town “a model for rural America.”

As part of its plan, the Greensburg City Council passed a resolution that all city building projects would meet the top LEED rating of Platinum, making Greensburg the first municipality in the United States to aim for that highest standard for all new construction.

The business of greening Greensburg kicked off with a Resource Conference and celebration this week (Feb. 5-6). Discovery Channel, which is filming Greensburg’s rebirth for a series called “Eco-Town” to air next year, will host the big celebration. Among those attending will be Rick Fedrizzi, founder and President of the U.S. Green Building Council, which oversees LEED certification.

Already the town, with a current population of 800 living mostly in FEMA temporary housing, has several important projects underway:

• Feb. 1 saw the groundbreaking for a John Deere dealership that will include wind turbines and other green features.

• In January, Dwane Shank Motors and General Motors broke ground on a new green dealership that will feature energy-efficient skylights, special windows that maximize the use of sunlight, water-saving fixtures in the bathrooms, and cellulose insulation with a high R-value.

• Blueprints are ready and bids will soon be let for a business incubator building that will make use of passive solar heat, natural day lighting, have its own wind generation and use renewable materials throughout. City leaders hope to have a building on the ground by late summer 2008. (See concept drawing above.)

• The nonprofit Greensburg Green Town was created to provide the town’s residents with the resources, information and support they need to rebuild Greensburg as a model green community.

• Construction is underway on 101 new homes, with repairs and construction of another 300+ buildings ongoing.

Ultimately, plans call for the town in southwest Kansas to have a new platinum LEED-rated city hall, school, arts center, library and visitors center – replacing buildings that were total losses in the tornado and helping lure back tourists and more residents, more than a third of whom were forced to leave after the tornado.