Who lives in the pyramid at the Top of the Smith Tower? These lucky bitches...

When I was a freshman at UW, I was looking for a part-time job. I came this close to landing a job working as an elevator operator and tour guide for the Smith Tower, the iconic 1914 skyscraper where this incredibly lucky family lives in the pyramid at the very top.

This has to be one of the most sought-after, out-of-this-world penthouse apartments in the entire city of Seattle. It's like being a 21st century pharaoh in your very own terra-cotta pyramid.

According to the NYTimes article linked above, one of the residents is an energy and recycling executive, and his wife is childhood friends with Dale Chihuly. It's good to have a dream, right? Especially one that involves having a giant glass ball in your attic and living at the top of a 35-story urban legend.

Via: NYTimes

One more reason to see the Amazon before it's all gone

The Amazon rainforest is the world's hotspot for biodiversity, more so than any other ecosystem. This is almost a cliche, thanks to Planet Earth. But just how much of a hotspot? How many potentially revolutionary plant and animal discoveries are we missing out on each day we burn it to the ground?

According to the World Wildlife Fund, scientists have discovered over 1,200 species in the past 10 years in the Amazon. That equates to a new species to science every three days for a decade. 

This includes included 637 new plant species, 257 fish species, 216 amphibian species, and 39 mammal species. Click here for the full report.

Many of these species have proven to be the missing ingredients to life-saving pharmaceuticals, or the key source of new components for industrial applications. Some of our most everyday products, from rubber to chocolate to bananas to anti-malarial drugs originated in the Amazon.

Rio acari marmoset, one of the new species discovered since 1999

Unfortunately, our own foresight as a species is lacking. Since 1960, about 17% of the Amazon has been destroyed and paved over to make room for new cities, cattle ranches, and soybean plantations (even those used to make Brazil's famously "green" biodiesel). This equals an area twice the size of Spain.

This is one more reason we need to refocus our efforts to protect what many scientists call the "Earth's lungs" for their incredible absorbing powers of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Without this crucial carbon sponge (not to mention the biodiversity within), we are shooting ourselves in the foot in the battle against climate change.

Via: World Changing

Amazing Hanging Garden from Japanese Artist Shinji Turner-Yamamoto

Aside from the horticultural expertise it would clearly take to get a full-size tree to grow completely upside down, roots suspended midair, this art installation in an abandoned church in Cincinnati is pretty freakin cool!

Here's the artist, Shinji Turner-Yamamoto, discussing the project in more detail:

Via: GOOD

Electric highway soon to be a reality on the I-5 Corridor, but will we like it?

Electric cars are certain to remain a green novelty/luxury item if there isn't a readily accessible network of charging stations to refuel them. On the other hand, no government will be willing to make the massive infrastructure investments needed to make charging stations as ubiquitous as the corner store if they believe no one will buy electric cars. Is it the chicken or the egg?

This is the dilemma that planners are facing as they develop an electric highway of 15 charging stations along I-5 in Washington State. Two charging stations will be located at either end of the Washington State border, including the highly-trafficked US-Canada crossing at Blaine.

The chargers will take 15-30 minutes for a complete charge and will be located on the private property of a for-profit business, replicating the experience of driving into any gas station - food, drinks, shopping, and car servicing could be part of the package.

The project is administered by WSDOT and a $1.3 million US Dept of Energy grant, and is part of the West Coast Green Highway program that one day hopes to extend from Canada to Mexico along I-5. Washington could become a springboard for other, more advanced EV infrastructure if this initial spur - the first of the WCGH - is a success. Not slow to follow suit, the State of Oregon has recently secured a $2 million federal TIGER II grant to do a project of the same scale within its borders. 

Unfortunately, the program is far from a complete solution to the problem of lack of EV infrastructure. 

There are currently no plans to create any EV options for East-West highway traffic. So any EV drivers attempting to Seattle from Spokane or Idaho (which has exactly zero charging stations in the entire state) would be shit outta luck. 

Hawaii was originally conceived as the poster child for EV infrastructural success, as it is an island where no single car trips could possibly exceed the battery range of the vehicle. However, news coming out of Hawaii after four EV charging stations were installed there is hardly encouraging:

To date, four public charging stations have opened in Hawaii. “It's pretty sad,” Leone said. “Nobody wants to install them because the cars aren't here, and people are reluctant to buy the cars because the infrastructure isn't there yet.”

San Francisco-based Better Place's revolutionary battery-swapping technology was briefly considered as a solution to the impediment of having to wait 15-30 minutes for a full battery charge. However, WSDOT turned this option down, allegedly due to problems with the standardization of battery models in the more popular EVs on the market today: the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt, and electric Ford Focus.

According to the project manager,

“In theory, it seems like a good idea, and it might work” in countries smaller than the United States, such Israel and Denmark, where swapping programs are in fact underway and technologies are more homogeneous. "

Until these technical issues are resolved, it may be that the I-5 electric highway will end up being about as useful as the Seattle Center monorail or the South Lake Union Trolley (SLUT) - expensive, privately-financed toys that are flashy, high-tech, and contribute about zero to getting us out of our gas-guzzlers.

For more info, be sure to check out updates from the West Coast Green Highway project.

Via: Crosscut

The Ultimate Questions - courtesy of Old Spice

Garden-sharing! There's an app for that, too :)

Originally posted to the CEP blog, Fruit from the Tree.

I know how many of you CEPsters secretly (or not all secretly!) want to get your hands dirty with your very own little plot of urban garden. I can taste the organic tomatoes already! Many of you may even have done, or will do, your Senior Projects about urban gardening.

One of the major stumbling blocks for tapping into the public's desire for urban gardening is the lack of available space; most P-Patch gardens in Seattle, like the one near where I live in Eastlake, for instance, have a year-long waiting list. By this time, for many aspiring gardeners, the initial passion is gone and the effort is wasted.

Thanks to the efforts of some smart web developers, however, we now have Craigslist-like interactive directories of available garden space for the taking in Seattle and many other cities.


For instance,  a simple search on We Patch reveals at least a dozen available plots within two miles of the UW campus. In addition to listing available spaces, it creates a powerful and easy-to-use community of fellow gardeners, connecting landowners who have extra yardspace to eager gardeners ready to plant. Other sites like Urban Gardenshare allow you to create a Facebook-like profile to narrow down your preferences and find the exact right plot for you.

Portland's Yardshare does the same thing in CEP's sister city. Even the City of Santa Monica has recognized the long wait-times for new gardeners to its programs and created a garden-sharing registry for gardeners to sidestep the bureaucracy and get established in their plots on their own.

For those of you still looking for Senior Projects, or really anyone interested in urban food systems, I would highly recommend reaching out to these organizations that could be real assets to CEP!

Institutional Car-Sharing Takes Off!

What do the New York City Dept. of Transportation and the BMW headquarters have in common?

Both are on the cutting edge of institutions that use car-sharing, in which drivers reserve a shared fleet of vehicles for a flat administrative fee, to save both budget $ and greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

Car-sharing differs from traditional rental car agencies and carpooling in several ways:

• Carsharing is not limited by office hours
• Reservation, pickup, and return is all self-service
• Vehicles can be rented by the minute, by the hour, as well as by the day
• Users are members and have been pre-approved to drive (background driving checks have been performed and a payment mechanism has been established)
• Vehicle locations are distributed throughout the service area, and often located for access by public transport.
• Insurance and fuel costs are included in the rates.
• Vehicles are not serviced (cleaning fueling) after each use, although certain programs such as Car2Go continuously clean and fuel their fleet

In short, car-sharing is a low-cost, low-maintenance, and low-emissions of way of getting access to cars to people only when they need it. In most cases, car-sharing has thrived in dense urban areas where access to walking, transit, and biking is widespread. For urban residents who need just the occasional one-off car trip, there is a huge cost-savings versus car ownership and the high insurance, maintenance, and purchase cost it entails.

In the US, the most successful car-sharing company has been ZipCar, which claims to remove 15-20 personal vehicles from the roads for every car-sharing vehicle it puts out and reduce an average of 5,500 vehicle miles traveled (VMT) for the average user. 

While individual drivers are the fuel that powers companies like ZipCar, institutions with larger user bases and even greater potential cost savings have started to catch on. This change from personal to institutional use could be the catalyst for ZipCar to become an economic engine in its own right, with a political influence to rival a Ford or a GM.

According to GOOD, New York City's Dept. of Transportation is beginning to replace its former in-house fleet with car-sharing to cut costs in the wake of the city's budget problems. About 300 department employees will share access to 25 ZipCars for work-related trips, saving the department $500,000 annually. Nearly all of the Manhattan-based cars will be Toyota Priuses. 

New York will join Washington DC and Philadelphia, where this car-sharing program has already been successful. The project will likely spread to other NYC municipal departments, further cementing the city's newfound green reputation. Mayor Bloomberg, you're all right!

According to Inhabitat, BMW is implementing a similar car-sharing program at its own headquarters in Munich, Germany. Cars will be available to all BMW employees and the general public at costs ranging from $22-45 per hour, which is not as expensive as it sounds, considering some of the available models run $100,000. If all goes well, the program could expand to all of BMW's facilities across Europe. A car-sharing platform that can rent out ANY model of Beamer any time, day or night? I could sign up for that.

What are the wider implications of institutional car-sharing? What we have long known as "the company car" may be soon obsolete, replaced with a more efficient, publicly available, and sustainable alternative.