Policy and Regulation

Archive for the ‘Policy and Regulation’ Category

Responsible Urban Design

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 01/24/2012 | 2 Comments »

Urban Ecological Design: A Process for Regenerative Places is a comprehensive and accessible guidebook on urban design with an emphasis on ecology and sustainability. Intended for students, design and planning practitioners, developers and public officials, it’s a good primer for those less familiar with the process and a useful reference for more experienced practitioners. The book’s [...]

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Climate Action Planning Is Good Community Planning

Posted in Climate Change, Environment, Policy and Regulation on 01/17/2012 | Leave a Comment »

Why should a local community create and implement a comprehensive policy to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change? According to Michael Boswell, Adrienne Greve, and Tammy Seale, authors of Local Climate Action Planning, “climate action plans have the power not only to reduce vulnerability to the hazards associated with climate change but to [...]

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China’s Climate Negotiator: “We Are Serious About Climate Change. We Mean What We Say.”

Posted in Climate Change, Policy and Regulation, Sustainable Transportation, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 01/12/2012 | Leave a Comment »

Su Wei, China’s lead climate negotiator, said that while “climate change is still a sensitive issue” in the United States, China is “serious about climate change. We mean what we say,” at the kick-off of the World Resources Institute (WRI) – National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) partnership focused on creating low-carbon cities in China, Brazil, and [...]

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To Frack or Not to Frack?

Posted in Environment, Policy and Regulation, Water Management, Wildlife on 01/11/2012 | 4 Comments »

New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation is poised to make a long-awaited decision that will determine if and how High Volume Horizontal Hydraulic Fracturing (or fracking) should proceed. The controversial practice of fracking involves pumping toxic fluids and other materials thousands of feet below the surface of the earth in order to release natural [...]

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A Fracked Landscape in Wyoming

Posted in Environment, Policy and Regulation, Water Management on 01/05/2012 | 3 Comments »

After three years of study, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released the first report arguing that chemicals used to hydraulically fracture or “frack” rocks in the search for natural gas polluted local water. In this case, the pollution is occuring in the Pavillion field in central Wyoming. According to CNN, immediately after the draft report was released, the Wyoming Department of [...]

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UN Climate Summit Moved Goal Post

Posted in Climate Change, Policy and Regulation on 12/22/2011 | Leave a Comment »

The Global Carbon Project, a collaboration of climate scientists, recently calculated that global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions grew a whopping 5.9 percent in 2011 (the largest annual jump on record) and total emissions jumped nearly 50 percent since 1990. Unfortunately, a recent agreement forged out of the latest two-week United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) summit in Durban, South [...]

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Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-being, and Sustainability

Posted in Active Design, Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces on 12/01/2011 | 1 Comment »

Here are but three of the somber statistics found in the new book: Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-being, and Sustainability: Two out of every three American adults twenty years or older are overweight or obese (Flegal, 2010). Since 2000, antidepressants have become the most prescribed medication in the United States (Olfson and Marcus, [...]

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Best Books of 2011

Posted in Climate Change, Environment, Exhibits, Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces, Renewable Energy, Smart Growth, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization, Wildlife on 11/23/2011 | Leave a Comment »

Last year, we only have five top books (see earlier post), but this year we’ve expanded the list. A range of great books came past our desk and any of these may be of interest to your favorite landscape architect. Here are the top ten books of 2011, along with five other notable books: Landscapes in Landscapes by Piet Oudolf (Monacelli Press, [...]

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The U.S. Needs a National Renewable Energy Standard

Posted in Policy and Regulation, Renewable Energy on 11/16/2011 | Leave a Comment »

At The Atlantic Magazine‘s Green Intelligence forum, which has become an annual event in Washington, D.C., Carol Browner, who was very recently climate change “czarina” at the White House and once head of the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.); Jim Connaughton, Constellation Energy, and former head of the Council for Environmental Quality under President George W. Bush; David Hawkins, [...]

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Are There Any New Ideas on Cities?

Posted in Landscape Architecture, Policy and Regulation, Public Spaces, Smart Growth, Urban Design, Urban Revitalization on 11/09/2011 | 3 Comments »

This was just one of many provocative questions asked by San Francisco Chronicle design critic John King, Hon. ASLA, at the 2011 ASLA annual meeting general session. For the two master landscape architects on the panel, Martha Schwartz, FASLA, and Laurie Olin, FASLA; Charles Waldheim, Affiliate ASLA, the godfather of landscape urbanism and chair of the landscape architecture [...]

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