In Part Three of KLCC's Special Issues series on The Road to Eugene '08, Jes Burns explores how “green” the US Olympic Track and Field Trials at Hayward Field will be in terms of recycling, local food initiatives and renewable energy.

Listen to the full story, plus extra interviews at klcc.org.

Noted author and environmental activist Bill McKibben will speak at the University of Oregon on Tuesday, Oct. 30! His lecture, "Building the Climate Movement," will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the EMU Ballroom, 1222 E. 13th Ave.


"It's no longer time to debate global warming; it's time to fight it," McKibben said.


McKibben will discuss the need to build a climate movement and precisely what is at stake. He will also touch upon some of the moral and spiritual dimensions of the problem, and will offer some practical advice about what each of us can do right now to help fight global warming.

UO Sustainability Report

Jill Aho, UO Daily Emerald

The Campus Sustainability Assessment noted that University's environmental efforts are decentralized and that an Office of Sustainability should be created.

A report that comes in the wake of University President Dave Frohnmayer's commitment to the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, which promises to reduce the University's greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, concludes that the University's efforts are numerous and decentralized.

Green Homes As people become more interested in buying green buildings and homes it becomes more important than ever to have a strong green rating system. The USGBC and NAHB both have their own systems, and those along with countless regional rating systems are vying to become the standard. But until that happens, uninformed buyers are struggling through conflicting rating systems to try to figure out what a green building is.

Read more at MSNBC.com

Greywater Guerrillas

LAURA ALLEN’S modest gray house in the Oakland flatlands would give a building inspector nightmares. Jerry-built pipes protrude at odd angles from the back and sides of the nearly century-old house, running into a cascading series of bathtubs filled with gravel and cattails. White PVC pipe, buckets, milk crates and hoses are strewn about the lot. Inside, there is mysterious — and illegal — plumbing in every room.

Eugene Courthouse: in the AIA/COTE Top 10 Green Buildings

Love it or hate it, the Eugene Courthouse is one of the AIA Committee on the Environment's top ten green projects. Rated in terms of Land Use, Site and Water, Energy, Materials and the Indoor Environment, the courthouse gets top marks.

>> More information...

Open Architecture Network

At 8am this morning Architecture for Hummanity launched the beta version of the Open Architecture Network, a stand alone site that will allow designers, community groups, NGO's and others to post projects, browse others, comment and review projects, discuss relevant topics, contribute to shared resources, collaborate with each other and access project management tools to support their work.

USGBC's Annual
Greenbuild ConferenceFrom Metropolis Magazine Online >>

Podcasts about green building from the USGBC's annual conference, Greenbuild:

Episode 1: Green Standards

• Jason McLennan, CEO Cascadia Region Green Building Council: Post-Platinum
• Scot Horst, chair, LEED Steering Committee: LEED’s evolution
• Jay Bolus: Executive Vice President, Benchmarking and Certification for McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry: Cradle-to-Cradle, the product

George W. Bush's Green Home
From Treehugger.com >>
Is it possible that George Bush is a secret Green? Evidently his Crawford Winter White House has 25,000 gallons of rainwater storage, gray water collection from sinks and showers for irrigation, passive solar, geothermal heating and cooling. “By marketplace standards, the house is startlingly small,” says David Heymann, the architect of the 4,000-square-foot home. "Clients of similar ilk are building 16-to-20,000-square-foot houses."

> > Listen online!
Building Greener
G.Z. Brown, professor of architecture at the University of Oregon in Eugene, energy expert and director of the Energy Studies in Buildings lab was featured on National Public Radio earlier today. Along with Jim Motavalli, editor of E, the Environmental Magazine, Ray Tonjes, a green home builder in Austin, Texas, and Amy Tighe, real estate agent for a green condominium development in Cambridge, Massachusetts he talked about ways to save money and save energy in designing the built environment.