I publish a weekly listing of Energy (and Other) Events at the colleges, universities, and in the community around Cambridge, MA ( http://hubevents.blogspot.com ) and have been doing it consistently since the end of January, 2010 ( http://hubevents.blogspot.com/… ).  This is the second iteration of the idea as I published a similar listings service plus reviews and articles from February, 1995 to February, 1998, “A List of Environmental and Telecommunications Events and Issues” or “AList….” for short ( http://world.std.com/~gmoke/AL… ) {The issues from April 1997 to February 1998 are available at http://world.std.com/~gmoke/AL… but you have to click on the weekly issue heading first before you can read any of the articles.}

My original idea was to have a searchable calendar of all the public lecture information at all the colleges and universities around the Boston area, something like 70 of them, so that anyone could take the opportunity to gather in all the free learning they want.  Imagine the resource for anyone from high school kids to retired people.  I’d been availing myself of the privilege for a number of years already, meeting in small seminar rooms with distinguished experts and famous names that normally you’d only see on TV.  And I even got to ask them questions.  What a gift!  As an experienced autodidact, I took notes at the events I went to, when something of actual note occurred, and thought that the next step would be to invite others to contribute their notes from the events they went to that I couldn’t attend so that all that wealth of information could be captured, a community commonplace book.

Recently, I’ve noticed there has been a shift from talking about mitigation to adaptation to resilience when dealing with climate change.  From my perspective, this is not a bad development as resilience focuses on practical preparedness for immediate hazards.  This can partition change into small increments that are readily understandable and remove the polarized politics of climate change from the discussion.  If you’re talking about measures to prevent system failure because of a weather emergency, it tends not to matter what your position is on greenhouse gases because everybody remembers the last hurricane, flood, or blizzard.  In addition, resilience measures can also be adaptation and, even in some cases, mitigation strategies for climate change as well.  At least, this is what I’m observing here in the Boston area and what I’ve heard out of post-Sandy New York and other areas.

This week I attended a discussion at the Boston Society of Architects about a new report, Building Resilience in Boston

pdf alert:  http://www.greenribboncommissi…  

Before the meeting, I spent some time scanning the document and found it to be superlative work, a great introduction to the concepts of urban design for resilience and emergency preparedness and, most especially, a fine literature search of the state of the art all around the world.  If you want to begin the process in your own city or town, this document will give you plenty of useful ideas and show you where to get more.  It is useful not only for cities like Boston, London, and New York but also towns like Chula Vista, CA and Keene, NH.

Another indication of growing seriousness on these issues I noticed is that the dangers from temperature extremes are entering the picture, especially since there has been a 2,300% increase in casualties from heat waves and 189% increase from cold snaps in the 2001 to 2010 decade (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/16/1224282/-World-Meteorological-Organization-Heatwave-Decade).

According to Christina Figueres of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, whom I also saw this week, there are over 300 cities around the world which are actively working on mitigation, adaptation, and resilience in the face of climate change.  So while international organizations are struggling to find actionable agreements and individual countries are fighting to avoid responsibility, municipalities around the world are taking practical steps.

There’s a great exhibition at the Boston Society of Architects down by South Station called “Reprogramming the City” (http://bsaspace.org/exhibitions/reprogramming-the-city/).  It is all about small but significant design tweaks for urban infrastructures, imaginative and enlivening, from all over the world.  There are lamp-posts that include deployable umbrellas for shelter during rain and snow, bus stop walls that light up during the darkness of winter to prevent seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and billboards that become bamboo forests to clean the air or have small apartments attached to their back sides or that gather and store potable water.

My favorite is the Dutch Goedzak:

Meaning both “good bag” and “do-gooder” in Dutch, Goedzak is a bag for Amsterdam residents to use when packaging their trash for pickup, ideal for items that are still useable for others, and just in need of a new home.  

Goedzak is, says Waarmakers [the designers], “a friendly way to offer products a second chance and stimulate sustainable behavior.”

The exhibition closes on September 29, 2013 and, if you are in Boston, it’s a fine way to stimulate your urban dreaming.

For the last few years, I’ve been publishing a weekly listing service on Energy (and Other) Events (http://hubevents.blogspot.com) that happen around Cambridge, MA in the colleges, universities, and the community.  This week, I noticed that there is a lot of practical activity around energy and the churches.  From now until Thanksgiving, there will be three energy upgrade parties at three different churches in three different neighborhoods of Boston and two “sustainable house of worship” workshops, one in the suburbs and one in the city.  

The energy upgrade parties are organized by the Home Energy Efficiency Team or HEET (http://www.heetma.com/) which for years now has been  teaching volunteers hands-on skills in lowering their energy bills and carbon emissions while making the building they’re in more energy efficient.

The workshops are organized by Massachusetts Interfaith Power & Light (http://www.mipandl.org) which has been helping houses of worship reduce energy costs through energy efficiency and a heating oil buying club through MA Energy Consumers Alliance.  One of the workshops will be happening in conjunction with a HEET energy upgrade party.

I’ve always thought that this is how energy organizing should be done: practical efforts that increase end use efficiency, save people money while making them more comfortable in their own neighborhoods, and speed the transition to renewables.  Solar barnraisings, energy upgrade work parties, we should be building our energy future now, as an act of protest against the status quo and a mechanism of liberation from it.  

Power to the people, as an actual practice.

http://www.sierraclub.org/sier…

7 of the 162 Sierra Club “Green Schools” were in MA, in order of standing:

Harvard 16

UMass Amherst 27

BU 88

Hampshire 89

Mount Holyoke 124

Worcester Polytechnic 125

Suffolk University 148

It was the seventh year the Sierra Club has asked colleges and universities to fill out their questionnaire.  According to one source, MIT didn’t participate.