Open Architecture Network

Image: Ecotopia Biketour 2007, pid.blog.hr
With all their gear and tents strapped to their bicycles and trailers, a small group of young people from several European countries are slowly but surely making their way from Bulgaria to Turkey on the annual Ecotopia Biketour. Despite their self-described status as a “totally chaotic tour, with constantly changing sleeping places, group composition and food quality,” it’s no ordinary bunch of cyclists and it’s no run-of-the-mill r...

On the inside. Europe Manages Risk: USA Pretends It Doesn't Exist. There's a pattern here. European Union nations phase out the more hazardous of the pthalate plasticizers: USA lobbies against it and resists it in the US. Europe tests animals for Mad Cow disease: USA makes it illegal to test them. Europe takes climate action: USA resists. There are plenty more where these come from. You get the idea: when it comes to protecting children from dye marketed mainly to children, Europe leads....

Image from ScienceNOW Bombed out reefs might not immediately come to mind as areas that could harbor large aggregations of healthy corals. Yet that's exactly what Bernhard Riegl, a scientist at Florida's Nova Southeastern University, found in the waters off Puerto Rico's Vieques island, which has been used as a U.S. Navy training ground for the past 6 decades. As he told ScienceNOW's David Malakoff, the results of his survey weren't "quite what some people expected". Indeed, his study, published in the Journal of Coastal Research, found that the ...

Image from Tjeerd It is difficult to imagine what must have been going through the heads of Rio de Janeiro beachgoers in recent months as they have seen hundreds of baby penguins wash up onshore dead. At last count, more than 400 penguins, swept from the shores of Patagonia and Antarctica, have been found dead on Rio de Janeiro's beaches, reports the AP's Michael Astor....

all image credits: Sergio Carratala It is nice to see that Sinnamon, the organisers behind the yearly music festivals Daydream and Summercase in Barcelona, are keeping up the green efforts even without Radiohead asking them to do so. Like for the Daydream festival, Summercase, in collaboration with Intermon Oxfam, are motivating festival goers to actively participate in their water bottle recyc...

TreeHugger is proud to be contributing original content to the Huffington Post Green section. This week's posts: Do Big Homes Mean Bigger Happiness? Nowadays, you can take a stroll through a suburban street and actually come across the White House. Well, not the actual residence of George W., but a scarily accurate, humongous replica. Yep, despite the woes of the housing market, Americans are still super-sizing their homes. ::Graham Hill Ludicrous Lawns, Wasted Water, and Solid Solutions NASA has studied satellite data and concluded that lawns in t...

Where LEED Once Led: California Has A Conservation Rush. California has proposed a new statewide building code aimed at improving energy efficiency and water consumption.In what was described as the United States' first statewide "green" building rules, the California Building Standards Commission said the code would help reduce the carbon footprint of every new structure in the state. Via::Inquirer.net, Agency France Presse....

This is the first in a series of video blog posts about biking across America to raise awareness about how to stop global warming. Hi there. We're Carson and Eric, friends and transportation consultants in Boston, where we share an office adorned by a large pirate flag. We've taken some shorter trips (Mount Washington, Death Valley, etc.), but when Carson, the endurance athlete, came up with the idea of biking across America, Eric, the planner, figured ...

The Bombardier CSeries: Marketed as a "green jet" (image from Wikipedia). Life hasn't been easy for the airlines lately. As fuel prices wreak havoc with the industry's bottom line, carriers have responded by dumping older, less efficient jets, lowering flying speeds and carrying less weight - not to mention

While the world (understandably) remains focused on the melting Arctic ice caps, those of us living in California have been worrying about a melting of a different sort. And, according to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the problem may be getting worse. Indeed, Noah Diffenbaugh, an associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University, believes the melting of California's snowpack may be accelerating at a higher ra...

Love music? Summer festivals like Fuji Rock are huge events here with hundreds of thousands of participants and bands from all over the world. Organizers are adding lectures about the environment, and inviting NGOs to promote their causes. This weekend you can join the AP Bank Festival - an outdoor music festival in Tsumagoi in Shizuoka Prefecture, south west of Tokyo. All profits from the event are used as seed money for lending to environmental projects and for AP Bank's activity fund. The f...

Unless you’ve been asleep for the last year or two, you’ll know by now that Colony Collapse Disorder is posing a very real and imminent threat to the world’s honeybees, and consequently to global food production (one third of all agricultural crops rely on bees for pollination!). Luckily, many corporations involved in food production are pitching in to support research and action to...

While the numbers are not official, it's estimated that about 20 million people practice yoga - and that adds up to lots of well-loved, grimy and sweaty yoga mats. Luckily, mats can last for years and they can be washed. According to Yoga Journal, just a wipe down with "four drops of dish soap" then clean water and a terry cloth towel-dry are all that's needed, or machine washing in a front-loader. (Tip: Too much soap residue in either case can make a mat slippery, so go easy on the soap.) Greener yoga mats Generally, those ubiquitous purple mats are made out of PVC, but there are other greener material choices, ...

...New moms rejoice! Even the seemingly perfect Angelina needs to work to get her pre-pregnancy shape back. With her twins not even a week old, she's already put herself on an organic diet - one that's high in fresh vegetables and Omega-3. According to her friend, Angelina's menu includes "organic salmon with tomatoes, brown bread and herbs for breakfast, while mackerel or grilled fresh tuna with watercress, spinach tomatoes is typical for lunch or dinner." Via: ecorazzi ...

Image credit: Shall.us
For many people, Paul Hawken is a man who needs no introduction at all. As an author, a speaker, a theorist, and a business person, Paul Hawken has shaped the discussion of what sustainability is, and how it can be achieved. His Ecology of Commerce was an eye opener for many people (including Ray Anderson, last week’s interviewee), and Natural Capitalism, that he wrote with Amory and Hunter Lovins, can often be seen in the...

Green High School The Langston Brown Community Center and High School in Arlington, Virginia, has a LEED Silver rating and has quite a few interesting green features. The enormous water tanks used to store rainwater certainly are the most visible (though the one on the front of the building is hidden by panels that make it blend in the overall design). The two 11,000-gallon tanks store about 280,000 gallons of rainwater per year, and that water is used for "onsite irrigation, sidewalk washing, and other uses." We wish they would consider using it for toilets too, though they already have waterless urinals that contribute to the project's 23% reduct...

Artists’ impression of what the completed tidal fence might look like. Given the height of the ship in the illustration, the fence wouldn’t exactly be unobtrusive. Not that the Severn Barrage would be either. A fairly recent report said that the Severn Barrage should not be built, based on high cost and the possible damage to local ecosystems. However, alternative tidal power plans for the region are now being investigated, according to the BBC. A Tidal ‘Fence’ Rather Than a Dam The main idea,...

photo by Mike Locke Given that manufacturing of wind power components can not only help local economies through job creation, but can save money overall, it certainly makes sense for China to make as many of the parts required to continue building its booming wind industry domestically. Illustrating how this is being done, Renewable Energy World gives us a brief glimpse ...

Forbes Magazine has produced a special report on a subject dear to our hearts, efficiency, the fifth fuel. Amory Lovins kicks it off with The Case for Efficiency: "Using smarter technologies, more brains and less money to wring more work from less delivered energy--what energy experts call "end-use efficiency"--is the largest, cheapest, safest, cleanest, fastest, most diverse, least visible, least understood and most neglected way to provide energy services." ...

A few months ago we wrote about Ben Nelson's DIY electric motorcycle. It's really a cool bike, especially if you consider that it gets equivalent of 321 miles per gallon and only cost about $2k total. Ben has made two videos about it, the first one (above) talks about how he turned the old Kawasaki into an electric motorcycle and what his experience has been. The second vide...