NEWSGREEN BUILDING

My name is Romic, and I am a teenage Houstonian who loves astronomy.

I can clearly remember when I first became interested in astronomy, not too long ago in November, 2010. We had just finished up our astronomy unit in Science and there was a lot of hype about Jupiter making it’s closest approach in nearly 50 years. Ever since then, I was outside every night with my binoculars trying to get a good view of Jupiter. Even without a telescope, I’d always scan my binoculars across the sky every night and see what I could find.

Before my interest in astronomy, I tried to remember if I had ever seen the stars, and I unfortunately realized that I had never really seen any stars in the sky!

It was in November when I began looking up at the sky more often and then realizing that the stars were actually there. After many months, I received my first telescope for Christmas and started reading books and articles on astronomy. I then learned about light pollution and realized that the stars I looked at every night were only a fraction of what I could have been seeing.

School inspectors have decided that a child care facility in Moorsetown, NJ is just too dangerous to let well enough alone. The danger is not in water quality or lax staff background checks. The threat can be found in the playground.

Specifically, they've ordered any tree with branches below 7.5 feet from the ground to be removed. The inspectors have decided that these branches are a danger to children who might run into or trip over them. It's a piece of logic that makes about as much sense as a set of two-foot-tall monkey bars.

Set aside the fact that New Jersey does not, in fact, have children so tall they are in danger of tripping over a branch five feet off the ground, and you still have the obvious objection: We're talking about trees.

Childhood and tree-play has gone together since time immemorial. We have nursery rhymes that place babies in treetops. This order is another in a long line of parental friendly-fire decisions that would damage a natural resource for the sake of perceived caution.

For the children's sake, sign this petition telling the Supervisor of the Child Care Quality Assurance Inspections at the New Jersey Office of Licensing to chill out.

It takes a lot of time to be a responsible consumer. Time that many of us, if you’re like me, just don’t have. That's why independent certification bodies exist to make socially-conscious shopping easier.

Groups that put a seal of approval on products telling us that our coffee is fair trade, our cosmetics aren’t toxic, our milk is really organic or that our paper has been sourced sustainably are supposed to do the work for us, to distinguish the green from the bad.

But what happens if one of them is lying?

Turns out, that’s exactly the case with paper and wood products certifier the Sustainable Forestry Initiative. According to a new report by ForestEthics, the industry sponsored group has been putting their seal of approval on furniture and paper that's made from destroyed rainforest.

I've seen many a way to kill a rat in New York City, but this weekend was a first. Strolling a narrow strip of park along the Hudson River on Saturday, I stumbled upon a family of four red-tailed hawks and spent 20 minutes watching the baby tearing apart and consuming the flesh of its big, fat gray-tailed furry prey.

Though Saturday was a good day for that urban hawk, it was a bad day for other city birds. New York City is smack-dab in the middle of the Atlantic Flyaway, a major aerial highway for migratory birds making their way down south for the winter. And the path through the City That Never Sleeps is a huge hazard for our feathered friends. According to the Audubon Society, every year 90,000 birds meet their demise in building collisions in the five boroughs alone. Sometimes there's foggy weather and birds don't see the window glass in time; often, it is nighttime, and the birds are also confused and/or attracted by the lights emanating from inside the city's skyscrapers.

In the last decade, September 11th has become a more hazardous day to be a bird in Manhattan than most. That's due to a well-known 9/11 tribute—two blinding beams of light pointed skyward on the Twin Tower grounds—launched every year by the Municipal Arts Society. Some years, depending on weather conditions, this is not a big deal for birds. Others, birds aren't so lucky.

This year was one of the unlucky ones.

Last week, a Montreal suburb mayor proposed a new rule: All new roofs in his jurisdiction should be painted white.

No, he's not indulging some crazy design fetish. Instead, he wants his jurisdiction to take a chill pill. Energy experts say white roofs rather than your usual dark ones can cut air conditioning bills by about 10 percent—saving money and reducing energy consumption and fossil fuel emissions to boot.

Mayor Croteau is far from the only local leader embracing a new "cool roofs" trend. He is joined by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who collaborated this summer to coat 1 million square feet of rooftops in reflective paint. And one cool roof advocate—Hashem Akbari of Montreal's Concordia University—is on a mission to get many more big city mayors around the world to commit to at the very least making their municipal roofs join the cool crowd. He calls his program "A Hundred Cool Cities," and, according to NPR, Philadelphia is also on the verge of accepting his challenge. 

Hurricane Katrina laid bare a whole host of unseemly truths about our nation, many which we would have continued to blissfully ignore had the waters not broken through New Orleans' levees five years ago today.

As it happens, this summer's oil spill hit the region at the worst time -- not when it was on its knees, but when it already had one knee up, poised to push itself into a standing position.

Everyone from President Obama to Spike Lee is reflecting on the anniversary this week; The media is bursting with stories of hope and despair, of progress and setback, of inspiration and anger. So it's pretty clear this is a story with no ending yet. Here are five major themes that I take away:

1) New Orleans' new levees are a big improvement, but the Gulf is still losing 32 football fields of wetlands every day.

Mortgages. They're not exactly the sexiest topic in the world. In fact, before the Great Recession slapped us all in the face with the ugly truth about our crooked financial system, I pretty much tuned out when an acquaintance started going on about their fixed rate, this or that.

But the SAVE Act—a bill that would require mortgage lenders to consider energy costs before granting a borrower a federally-insured mortgage—has gotten my attention. Backed by Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, the SAVE Act would apply to all government-sponsored mortgage enterprises. That includes our pals Fannie and Freddie, as well as the Federal Housing Administration. According to The Economist, those three amigos currently guarantee more than 90 percent of all new loans.

Why should lenders care about energy efficiency? Because borrowers who spend less on utility bills have more cash to drop on their mortgage payments. Jonathan Hiskes at Grist breaks it down: the average energy costs over a 30-year loan amount to $70,000. Lay that on the table next to $170,000, the median home price in the U.S., and you start to see how significant a consideration energy costs should be.

This time of year marks "Back to School" for millions of children. For students in Greensburg, Kansas, though, this week means a whole lot more—a brand-new, state-of-the-art, $50 million green school. This more than just your same-old bland sustainability story, however. The old school, and most of Greensburg actually, was leveled 200-mile-per-hour winds in a tornado three years ago.

Now, thanks to the innovative thinking and dogged determination of Greensburg's leaders, school is not only back in session, but Greensburg has gotten a whole lot greener.

"There wasn't a book, a ball, a bus, a building [after the tornado struck]," Superintendent Darin Headrick told NPR. With water, power, sewer and gas services gutted, the entire town was uprooted.  The population that numbered 1,400 before the storm dropped to as low as 900. There were doubts about whether Greensburg would ever be able to recover. Headrick said the  biggest concern "was that if we didn't have a school in town as quickly as possible, people wouldn't have a reason to move back."

That's when community leaders dusted off their shoulders and stared clearly into the future: Not only were they going to rebuild the area's schools, they decided but they were going to build them sustainably. They hired Kansas City-based architecture firm BNIM to design the building. They leveraged insurance, partnerships, and federal support so that the building will be paid off a few months after opening its doors.

So far, it seems like Greensburg's grit has paid dividends.

In fact, Greensburg has been so successful that the new building went "platinum," earning the highest ranking for sustainability in the "LEED" green building certification system. Greensburg today stands as a model to our representatives of how we can use renewable energy in public schools to reduce costs and pollution.

The school started by implementing energy-saving and water conservation measu

Some people clip coupons, I save stories I see about people deciding that less is more. And lately, this hobby has been keeping me quite busy. In the last week alone I've easily read a half a dozen stories about folks who are opting for less stuff, smaller houses, no cars. Could Thoreau's admonishment for us "simplify, simplify" finally be catching on?

Here's one story from the New York Times. The Strobels had a two-bedroom apartment, two cars and full-time jobs that left them in a "work-spend treadmill." So they quit. They donated their stuff, got rid of their cars and downsized to a 400-square foot studio. Mrs. Strobel whittled her possessions down to 100 items.

Right-wing pundits around the nation are up in arms about the "ground zero mosque," which is really an Islamic center planned for a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center memorial site and an entirely wonderful example of religious freedom and tolerance in this nation. If anything, as The Daily Beast reports, the facility is a ground zero for a whole different movement: It will be the first mosque to earn an official green building certification, known as LEED.

What's important to note is the larger theme this represents. World religions, from Christianity and Islam to Judaism and Hinduism, have all long-recognized the importance of preserving the planet and respecting their deities' creation. Lately, as worry about climate change has taken hold, more and more faith groups are getting back in touch with those roots -- if they ever were straying from them in the first place.

The Daily Beast article is written by Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, a sustainability policy adviser for Mayor Bloomberg and author of a just-published book called Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet. He notes that the mosque's real name, Park51, reflects "a desire to emphasize the intricate (though widely unknown) connections between Islamic teachings and environmentalism. For example, Islam calls upon people to be "stewards of the Earth" and to treat all things in nature as sacred."