There are many things I love about running my own building company, but chief among them are the communities that my business connects me to. Whether it is the large community of NESEA that I have written about elsewhere in this blog (Sept 18) or...
The Problem of “Green Building” As a student and aspiring practitioner of green building, I have observed with some frustration a number of impediments to its growth. The first of these is simply a reflection our social and economic reality. Our world is developing at a...
My father is a mechanical engineer with heart and a conscience. It is just those qualities that drew him to Volkswagen’s fabulous turbo-diesel engine. The engineer in him was inspired by the technical competence embodied in its design. His heart was fired by its gutsy...
In November of this year, NESEA will be hosting the Building Energy Bottom Lines Summit. As a member of the Bottom Lines program, as well as a participant on its steering committee, I have been mulling over the purpose of such a summit; while on...
I am a member of Bottom Lines, a peer review network of builders and architects sponsored by NESEA. The fundamental mission of Bottom Lines is to support companies in their efforts to attend to a triple bottom line: profits, people and planet. The group has...
Have you ever seen one of those remora fish cleaning the inside of a shark’s mouth? That has to be one of nature’s most terrifying jobs. But the little guys just soldier on, swimming into the massive toothy mouths of nature’s perfect killer so they...
Early last fall the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) once again named Massachusetts as the most energy efficient state in the country. Massachusetts qualified for the distinction in no small part because of its utility sponsored efficiency program, known as Mass Save. The...
In the movie, The Company Men, we see what happens to people when corporations are awarded personhood, both legally and emotionally, and shareholders, driven by an obsession with daily increases in stock prices and a rabid fear of price falls, are given the reins of...
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand portrays the conflict between two world-historical forces. Her Eugene Lawson, the “banker with a heart” announces proudly, if a bit plaintively, “I am perfectly innocent, since I lost my money...
Paul Gilding's The Great Disruption is quite the read. Marx-like, he predicts the collapse of global capitalism under the pressure of its own forces. His math is simple and hard to refute. Capitalism lives and breathes on numerical growth. Our planet and global civilization are...