The real winners of the 2010 Natural Talent Design Competition are likely to be the residents of the Broadmoor section of New Orleans, a low-lying neighborhood flooded after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. That’s because the four innovative home designs selected as finalists in the contest will be built in that community in the coming months, bringing affordable, LEED platinum-certified, handicap accessible 800-square-foot houses to a place still badly in need of rebuilding five years after the storms. The designs, created by students and emerging professional architects, will be on view at the Greenbuild Expo in Chicago November 17-19, organized by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC). Once the houses are constructed and evaluated for energy conservation and other aspects of sustainability, a grand-prize winner will be chosen and announced at next year’s Expo. The lucky inhabitants of the soon-to-be-available houses will find rewards over the long term, as the structures are intended to be more efficient than typical homes, and thus reduce living costs.
     Pictured with this posting are the houses designed by a group of recent Cornell graduates who have formed ZeroEnergy Design, an architecture and energy consulting firm. The group’s models, titled The Little Easy, feature storm water collection systems, wheelchair lifts for physically impaired occupants, and front porches that serve to tie the new houses to the surrounding properties.
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As China goes, so goes the rest of the world. That’s how British journalist Jonathan Watts frames the future. In When a Billion Chinese Jump, (due out this month from Scribner), Watts outlines two possible trajectories for the world’s biggest carbon emitter: it can reset its current fossil fuel-powered industrial development by becoming the first green superpower, or it can continue on its current course of staggering expansion against a backdrop of diminishing natural resources. On a six-month journey from the foot of the Himalayas to the country’s flat northern grasslands, Watts provides an account of China’s race into the 21st Century and explains the severity of the consequences of its decisions.
     The extent of the industrialization currently taking place becomes shockingly apparent in chapters detailing the construction of the world’s largest dams, emerging mega-municipalities like Chongqing, with its thirty-one million citizens, and the pulsating Chinese manufacturing lifeblood.
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This was supposed to be the year when the powers in Washington came together to pass new legislation on energy. Instead, it is a year that may best be remembered for an unprecedented oil spill and a missed opportunity at seriously addressing climate and energy security concerns. The announcement that the White House is being fitted for new solar panels comes as a potential sign of newly recharged aspirations, but for now the lack of a clear forward strategy simply means that these issues will only gain greater urgency. This places even greater relevance on the recently published tour de force of an energy guidebook, The Powers That Be (The University of Chicago Press, $35) by geologist and science writer Scott L. Montgomery. While conceding that a precise picture of the future is still impossible to draw, the book presents an encyclopedic account of the current landscape and a preview of the transformations and challenges awaiting us.
     The decades ahead will be ruled above all else by energy pluralism, according to Montgomery, given the fact that a greater set of options now exists than ever before and with advancements continuing to take place in each case. Yet in our energy present, 80 percent of the globe is still powered by fossil fuels. There is a tremendous upward trend in demand, mollified only temporarily by the recession and led primarily by developing nations, such as China and India, which are relying to an alarming degree on their domestic coal reserves. The issue is not one of resource depletion.
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The dream of a clean energy future may seem as elusive as a desert mirage, but against the sandy backdrop of Ras Al Khor Wildlife Sanctuary in Dubai, the design team of Martina Decker and Peter Yeadon envisions what might be possible with the right materials and a vibrant imagination.
     Light Sanctuary, a maze of auburn-tinted solar panel ribbons, may only exist as a concept for the moment; but the Decker Yeadon firm’s innovative plan for a photovoltaic installation could prove to be less a mirage than an oasis of clean energy generation. The design was created as a proposal for the Land Art Generator Initiative, a contest seeking environmental art projects that function as sources of renewable energy that are geared specifically toward one of three sites in the United Arab Emirates.
     Though extremely ambitious, a fully realized, completely assembled version of Light Sanctuary is absolutely possible, according to Decker. Spread across nearly 100 acres, Decker and Yeadon’s sculptural energy plant would incorporate twenty-five miles worth of dye-sensitive solar cells that would collectively generate 4,592 megawatt-hours of energy each year. These flexible solar panels are a cutting-edge third generation photovoltaic technology, which makes use of the light-absorbing capacity of organic dyes derived from plants. Though the panels aren’t known to produce as much electricity as other solar technologies, they are most effective under higher temperatures, making the hot desert a prime location for the installation.
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Having focused his lens on illegal logging practices in Madagascar and on the thirty-two coal-fired power stations in his native England for past investigative photo essays, reportage photographer Toby Smith now turns to the promising renewable energy sources of the future. For his first exhibition in the planned series that he is calling The Renewables Project, he has captured snapshots of a power generation scheme that is actually far from new and has in fact been supplying electricity for decades essentially free of carbon emissions.
     Over the course of three months last winter in the Scottish Highlands, Smith exhaustively studied the region’s hydroelectric dams through his camera. With simple composition and framing, and by using long exposures, he has produced images that affectingly convey the vastness of the engineering systems at work and of the surrounding environment. The project is consistent with his regular approach of examining the nexus between ecology and human activity in a manner that brings to mind the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s reliably astonishing industrial landscapes. Before heading to China, where he will continue to explore alternative energy sources, Smith spoke to PLANET about the photos that he hopes will inspire an honest debate.
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The summer monsoon rains arrived in Pakistan last month. And with one-fifth of the country now submerged, they have yet to stop. The rain continues to fall and the flood waters keep rising, making for a waterlogged crisis of Biblical proportions: an estimated 1,600 Pakistanis are dead, but that figure only begins to hint at the disaster’s scale, as 20 million have been displaced, according to the country’s prime minister. All of this adds up to the region’s worst flood in eight decades.
     For a nation already afflicted by widespread poverty and with half of its labor force devoted to agriculture, the months ahead will be extremely trying now that 17 million acres of farmland are under water and 200,000 head of livestock have been lost. The extended food shortages resulting from this situation will require generous donations of international aid, but so far the world has been slow to respond. As of last Tuesday, less than 40% of the U.N.’s requested $459 million in relief funds had been made available (though an additional $43 million had been pledged). The United States has been chief among the countries responding to the disaster, but aid organizations have been reporting donor fatigue in the wake of the tremendous outpouring of funds after the Haitian earthquake earlier this year. In a time of economic hardships across the globe, we may be seeing evidence of limits to generosity and of public weariness at the prospect of managing the fallout from yet another catastrophe in a remote corner of the world. But the disaster’s proximity to other calamitous events makes it no less severe.
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