Things Are Good

Over at Treehugger they have a good slideshow about the state of green roofs in architecture.
Sometimes they developed naturally and organically, like this rooftop garden in lower Manhattan that like Topsy, just grew. And grew, and eventually evolved from a New York roof garden into what they now call a Green Roof.

If you enjoyed [...]

Guangzhou, China will have the world’s most efficient skyscraper when it’s completed in 2010. The country that is known for bad air quality in its cities is realizing that things need to change and they’re working on it.

The Pearl River Tower, now being erected in Guangzhou, the provincial capital of Guangdong province, is being billed [...]

Not much to add to this: study proves that people are universally optimistic.
“These results provide compelling evidence that optimism is a universal phenomenon,” said Matthew Gallagher, a psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas and lead researcher of the study.
At the country level, optimism is highest in Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, and New Zealand and [...]

Tempohousing uses shipping containers to create housing and other buildings for places that can use it. Simple, modular, mobile, and funky.
In 2002, the city of Amsterdam had a very urgent need for student housing and was looking for new and original ideas to quickly solve the problem. Only temporary building sites were available (as [...]

Hemp, part of the cannabis genus, is a great building material according to researchers in the UK. EcoWorldly has a good write-up on the hemp housing research.
Technically speaking, hemp is the common name for plants of the entire Cannabis genus, although the term is more typically used to refer only to strains of industrialized varieties [...]

There is a lot of information out there on how we’re destroying our planet and there’s tons of information about how we can save it (this site looks at saving it). David J.C. MacKay has written a book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air that takes all the climate change information and creates an [...]