The New Green Economy

With the recent flooding throughout the Americas these last few months, I thought to address a little known, but extremely important, forgotten grass: bamboo.

Bamboo is an arborescent (treelike) grass belonging to the family Poaceae, subfamily Bambusoideae.  The family Poaceae, true grasses, is thought to comprise 20% of the known vegetation covering the Earth.[1] Grasses are extremely important to both the ecology at large, as well as to humans specifically.  Grasses provide us with a host of benefits, three of which are supplying staple food crops, conserving soil moisture, and preventing soil erosion.

Like common lawn grasses, bamboo spreads by roots called rhizomes and must be removed by digging up the roots themselves.  An entire grove of bamboo is usually just one plant, for the roots are all connected and grow from the mother clump.  Bamboo is classified as either a clumping bamboo or a running bamboo.

Clumping varieties grow slowly and spread through very short rhizomes that keep the bamboo stocks close to the mother clump.  These varieties are easy to contain and rarely get out of hand before the property owner notices.  Running varieties grow more rapidly and spread far and wide, growing very long rhizomes that can be unmanageable when left unattended for years on end.  Clumping and running bamboos can be herbaceous (foliage stocked) and deciduous (woody stocked), as well as tropical and temperate.

Unlike common lawn grasses,

With all the talk on carbon credits, cap and trade agreements, and proposed policies regarding carbon “pollution”, one question needs to be considered: what is carbon, and why a carbon tax?

Carbon is life.  It is the 6^th element on the Periodic Table of Elements.  It is one of the four most abundant elements in the universe: hydrogen, helium, oxygen, and carbon.  All life is composed of carbon.  Carbon is the chemical basis of all known life on Earth.

If carbon is the basis for all life, are we as a nation proposing a tax on life?

Green is understanding, respecting, and incorporating the lifecycle of any given product, by-product, material, and/or additives of such product into the designing, manufacturing, storing, delivering, installing, and restoring the individual materials and product to an equally, or superior, reusable form.

Simple put, being green is understanding the lifecycle of any given product, and properly restoring the nutrient to the cycle in which it belongs.

In the book Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough and Michael Braungart illustrate this point brilliantly with their description of the two nutrient cycles of all matter; described as either a biological nutrient or technical nutrient.

In the last three steps, we discussed the method of implementing sustainability by using the C.O.R.E. Technology for shelter, food, water, and electricity.  While this technology addresses the four basic systems of life, rejuvenation is a multifaceted endeavor, with many integrated parts.

For rejuvenating our society, from a disposable mindset to a sustainable one, we must begin to think in sustainable terms, and really understand how they relate to our Intent for Life.  Intent for Life is taking personal responsibility for all our thoughts and actions, and focusing them with purpose.

On Jan. 13, 2009, Yuldeson Associates, a leading-edge green building consulting firm, projected that “Green Building will continue to grow in spite of the global credit crisis and the opening economic recession”…with more people going green each year, and nothing on the horizon projected to stop this trend.

This past Friday, plans for the world's first offshore wind farm took a big step towards approval. In what has now become a rather bitter fight, the decision over whether to build 130 windmills across 25 miles of federal waters in the Nantucket Sound hurdled past proposed environmental concerns.