Image courtesy of Portland Ground: Fremont Bridge Bike Ride.

Portland, Oregon is strengthening its reputation for incorporating environmental sustainability into urban planning. In 2008, SustainLane ranked Portland as the most sustainable city in the nation, based on sixteen factors including tap water quality, planning and land use, city innovation, and green building.

The rank is built on a 30-year history of green thinking in Portland, beginning in the 70s when city planners focused on urban density and implemented the urban growth boundary. This kind of thinking paved the way for current approaches to sustainable, earth-friendly development.

A summit hosted by the Portland Sustainability Institute (PoSI) at the end of October 2010 focused on developing neighborhood-scale sustainability by establishing eco-districts. The challenge in Portland will be to transform existing urban areas into eco-districts with sustainable features such as renewable energy, green building development, and transportation systems designed to reduce carbon emissions.

A similar project, Living City Block, is underway in Denver, Colorado. By 2012, Living City Block plans to reduce energy consumption in its pilot neighborhood by 50%. By 2016, the area should be creating more resources than it consumes. Living City Block aims to drive economic development as well, creating jobs, stimulating business, and creating thriving communities.

In Portland, five urban neighborhoods are currently being targeted for eco-district development: Lents, Lloyd District, Gateway, South Waterfront, and Portland State University. PoSI hopes to generate results by concentrating resources, funds, and strategies on specific neighborhoods. If the approach works, these neighborhoods may serve as models for sustainable development throughout the city, the United States, and around the world.

Photo courtesy of Sanjay Acharya/Wikimedia

The University of California, Davis, has unveiled a teaching and research facility designed to integrate food and beverage production with the scientific study of nutrition and health. The 34,000 square foot complex cost $20 million and was funded with private donations.

The facility integrates academic research, technological advances (including the first wireless wine fermentation system), and environmentally sustainable design. Administrators hope the facility will serve as a model for production systems across the nation and around the world. It has also been designed to meet the international standards for LEED Platinum certification.

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification is the highest rating for buildings meeting criteria established by the U.S. Green Building Council. The certification system utilizes third-party verification for structures or communities that, according to the USGBC, were “designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance across all the metrics that matter most: energy savings, water efficiency, CO₂ emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts.”

Located at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science on the UC Davis campus, and managed by the Department of Viticulture and Enology, the facility will serve as a laboratory for production methods that conserve resources. The facility itself is designed to be self-sustainable in terms of energy and water usage. Environmentally friendly features include the use of photovoltaic cells to generate solar power, rainwater capture for landscaping and toilets, recycled glass for flooring, and sustainably harvested lumber.

Ongoing plans for the facility include capturing carbon emissions from production processes to reduce any impact on global warming, resulting in a carbon zero footprint.

And the products? Everything produced at the facility – from wine, beer and dairy products – will meet state and federal mandates for human consumption. It might not be the next wine tasting stop on the drive from Sacramento to the Napa Valley, but the facility is sure to bolster the international reputation of UC Davis as a leading educational resource for food science and production.

The Original Green is about “the sustainability our ancestors knew by heart. Originally (before the Thermostat Age) they had no choice but to build green, otherwise people would not survive very long. The Original Green aggregates and distributes the wisdom of sustainability through the operating system of living traditions, producing sustainable places in which it is meaningful to build sustainable buildings. Original Green sustainability is common-sense and plain-spoken, meaning ‘keeping things going in a healthy way long into an uncertain future.’ Sustainable places should be nourishable because if you cannot eat there, you cannot live there. They should be accessible because we need many ways to get around, especially walking and biking because those methods do not require fuel. They should be serviceable because we need to be able to get the basic services of life within walking distance. We also should be able to make a living where we are living if we choose to. They should be securable against rough spots in the uncertain future because if there is too much fear, the people will leave. Sustainable buildings should be lovable because if they cannot be loved, they will not last. They should be durable because if they cannot endure, they are not sustainable. The should be flexible because if they endure, they will need to be used for many uses over the centuries. They should be frugal because energy and resource hogs cannot be sustained in a healthy way long into an uncertain future.”

The book is divided into four parts: What’s the Problem? (The Top 10 Problems with Our Current Green Efforts), What Can We Do? (The Top 10 Better Ways of Being Green), What’s the Plan? (The 8 Foundations of Sustainable Places & Buildings), and What Can I Do? (The Top 10 Things You can Do to be Green). It begins with an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Additionally, the 245 images in the book will be made available  on Mouzon’s Zenfolio site for download and use in presentations and the like.

With so much rhetoric on “green” and “sustainability,” narrow your focus and chances for success by picking up a copy of The Original Green. Learn more at www.originalgreen.org.

Editor’s Note: Over the next year or so, Brian Awehali, cross-posting at www.BrianAwehali.com, will share his adventures as he investigates green planning and sustainable development efforts in Taiwan and China, pausing along the way for as many marvelous things as possible. A writer, designer, and editor of LOUDCANARY, Brian will check in periodically from Taiwan (where he posts his first report, below), Chengdu, Dongguan, and, luck holding, his yurt-to-yurt horseback travels in Mongolia. We hope you enjoy, and look forward to, these posts as much as Terrain.org does.

Part 1: Unamerican Activities

By Brian Awehali

Chushan (lowlands) tea farm and traffic safety mirror

We arrived in Hong Kong early in the morning, en route to Taipei to visit my partner F.’s family for Chinese New Year, and to work on a WWOOF-affiliated farm for two weeks. After that: mainland China for 6+ months, where I hope to learn (and write) as much as I can about the realities and propaganda of green development in the world’s most populous country.

Our landing was stomach-vanishingly rough. During the worst of it, I looked over and saw a stone-faced woman next to me with a jade pendant necklace that was hovering straight out from her body instead of resting on her neck. I suppose flight is for the birds and insects, and that most of us take it far too much for granted, rather than as the miraculous (if ecologically catastrophic) thing it really is.

After touching down in Taipei we took a bus and high speed bullet train to Chushan (or Zhushan; the Romanization varies), a farming town of about 30,000 in Nantou, central Taiwan. We’re staying at my partner’s mother’s family home, the center of what used to be a large farm, but is now just seven or eight homes arranged around a courtyard.

I didn’t sleep on the flight, so when we finally arrived, I was dead on my feet, and went to bed almost immediately, smelling fire under simmering bamboo soup, and many other things I couldn’t identify, and that my nose may well never have experienced before.

It’s worth mentioning that since taking a (highly recommended) perfuming workshop in San Francisco several weeks ago, my sense of smell has been in hyperdrive. On the plane, every foot, every lotion, and every other less-appetizing thing there was to smell crawled up into my sinuses and made a home. In the Chushan countryside, the smells are better. From my bed, I smelled well-seasoned Taiwanese sausages (rice wine, garlic, Chinese cinnamon powder, and soy sauce paste) curing in the next room, along with glutinous rice and daikon cakes that are fed to the gods at New Year’s, but then eaten by mortals once the gods have had their fill. It was explained to me that the gods eat only the cake’s essence, which works out well for everyone, I suppose.

Temple and tree together in Chushan as the Year of the Tiger begins

During New Year’s celebrations and worship, a ubiquitous ritual involves burning “joss paper,” or “ghost money,” so that it may reach ancestors and the gods in the afterlife. It was explained to me by an uncle that some Taiwanese environmentalists are opposed to this practice because it creates so much air pollution and because it contributes to deforestation. Apparently some people have started to burn virtual money for their ancestors, setting a computer up near the family shrine and extending the reach of computers into the spirit world. (I hope the IT professionals in the afterlife have more effective ways of combating identity theft!)

"Ghost money" offered to the river god on bridges at New Year's

After sleeping for 14 hours, I awoke to an eager rooster crowing well before dawn, and decided to walk into town, about 20 minutes away. I took a shoulder-less road flanked on one side by an open mountain spring-fed culvert, sniffing at the freshly-disturbed earth from various gardens, and drawing in moist air infused with about four parts plant life to one part exhaust. It’s more pleasant than it sounds. Then again, I also used to really love the smell of gasoline.

Roadside spring in Chushan

As I walked I saw several trucks with water barrels and long-nosed suction pumps pull over along the road, drivers climbing directly from cab to bed to extract some of this water, and was later told that people travel from other places for this mountain spring water, because it makes the best tea. (All drinking water is first boiled here, though the water quality is quite good, and I should note that the water for tea is extracted a bit closer to its source than the picture above might lead y0u to believe; the people I saw were farmers, getting water for their crops). Lush vegetation rioted happily in family gardens on all sides: banana trees, corn, plots of sweet potatoes, and more lettuce than I expected, given the seeming lack of lettuce in the Taiwanese diet.

I do not speak Chinese–yet, so my chances of communicating with anyone in a smaller town like Chushan are quite poor. F.’s grandmother and grandfather speak only Taiwanese, and everyone else in the family speaks both Chinese and Taiwanese. I keep making all manner of small mistakes relating to my cultural ignorance, then struggle to understand what I’m being told. For example: my first meal with the family, I put my chopsticks down in my bowl to rest, so that they were pointing upward. This is a no-no; chopsticks are to lay flat when not in use, and are only placed downward in a bowl when offering food to the gods, as if one is making it easier for them to eat. I felt stupid and sad to have made a disrespectful blunder, but, of course, I had no way of knowing about this custom. As an American, I marvel somewhat at the complexity and reverence displayed for the gods here. I have come to believe increasingly in an animistic world, where everything is alive and interconnected. Not only does this jibe with my knowledge of nature and quantum physics, but I also have this sense that the forces of materialism, monotheism and scientific ascendency have diminished meaning and magic from a great number of important and vital things.

One of Chushan's several earth god temples. This one, like many other temples in the area, has recently been renovated and expanded.

But it’s one thing to believe such a thing in an abstract intellectual way, and quite another to experience a culture where none of this is an abstraction, and where there are gods for everything, who must be respected and paid attention to. Offerings are made to the earth god, and it was explained to me that every region has its own earth god. The temple for the earth god of Chushan is just several hundred yards down the road, and the patriarch of the family, now over 90 years old and mostly deaf, walks down to pay his respects every morning.

Several miles into my early morning walk, the foggy countryside gave way abruptly to cityscape. There’s very little separation between the natural and man-made landscape in Taiwan. At 7am, the streets of the city were an organized bedlam, with pedestrians and people on scooters navigating what seemed to me, especially at first, like impossibly limited space. Many, if not most people in Chushan ride scooters — not just adults or boys. Grandmothers, fathers with daughters, mothers with three kids, mothers with two kids and large potentially explosive propane tanks nestled between their legs — everyone. (F’s nonagenarian hard-of-hearing grandfather rides his into town several times a week!)

Cars, scooters and pedestrians vying for space in downtown Chushan, Nantou, Taiwan

About half of those on scooters wear what appear to be surgical face masks. I say appear because that’s what I thought they were at first. Such masks were ubiquitous at the Hong Kong and Taipei airports, covering the mouths and noses of all food service workers and most administrative staff.

We were even given a “flu kit” as we left the secured area of Taipei Airport. It was surprisingly elegant: a bright red package containing a well-constructed face mask with cloth strings, some pleasant-smelling soap, and a packet of disinfectant tissues. F.’s was plaid and relatively tasteful. Mine had a tesselated pattern of hearts and American flags. Someone later explained to me that the people on scooters wear these not for flu-prevention, but in order not to breathe the noxious levels of exhaust they’re exposed to, and my brief walk through town convinced me of the wisdom of this. My sense of smell may be peculiarly heightened right now, but the haze in the air and sooty grime on any available surface corroborated what my nose was telling me.

Rapid industrialization and the attendant ills of air pollution are a significant problem for Taiwan. The tea grown here, expensive and prized as among the best in the world, must be grown at increasingly higher elevations in part because the air quality is too poor at lower elevations, and ruins the tea’s flavor.

I confess, with some shame, that I had a momentary impulse to judge the Taiwanese for ruining the air of their beautiful island, but then quickly reminded myself that my flight here, on its own, probably contributed more air pollution and carbon than any one of these scooterists could possibly produce in a year, and that the average American contributes far more to pollution and global warming than does the average person in Taiwan. Additionally, Taiwan has made great (and typically rapid) strides to address its pollution and emissions problems.

Translation: "No regrets for reducing energy consumption, let's join together to reduce carbon emissions, we love the earth and so will reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, everyone should get together to fight warming" The Sioulin Elementary School, built in 1954, serves pupils who live along Dinglin Road which goes up into the mountains to the east of Chushan. (photo D. Cowhig)

The soot and exhaust are offset, at least in part, by gardens and vegetation in almost every available patch, growing right up to the edge of the road, nestled next to busy intersections, in narrow alleyways, in planters on rooftops, and in tiny front yards. Such gardens are commonplace here in Chushan, and they make me wonder why more people, especially in the fertile climate of Northern California, my adopted home for the past seven years, are not doing the same.

F. and common roadside garden in downtown Chushan

Downtown Chushan riverside garden

Brian Awehali, a former editor at Britannica.com, founded and edited the North American magazine, LiP: Informed Revolt, as well as an anthology of its collected best, Tipping the Sacred Cow (AK Press). In 2010, he will be traveling through Taiwan, China, Mongolia and Guatemala. In China, he will be writing mostly about sustainable development and emerging “green” technologies. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and is most committed to the advance of The Marvelous. When not blogging for Terrain.org, he curates LOUDCANARY: One interconnected journey through everything and nothing.