

We think of our homes mostly in terms of memory and emotion - a magnificent meal prepared in the kitchen, a child's first steps across the living room, a basement that gives us the shivers. The longer we live in a home, the more the structure that once represented new beginnings and great milestones fades into the background. Our lives unfold within it, but we tend to forget about all the ways we continue to interact with and depend on the services our home provides.
At its most basic, a house is a tool for living, but most homes today are blunt, poorly designed tools. But better homes are on the way. A confluence of new technologies and approaches is beginning to allow us to create buildings of a whole new stamp.
Image: Zero (fossil fuel) energy home by Zoka Zola. Read more here

News from the team at large: Worldchanging correspondent Patrick Rollens has signed on as an editor for the relaunch of GreanBean, a Chicago-based resource for green building news. The website first debuted several years ago, directed by Erik Olsen...

Pressed for water resources, California's Orange County has spent millions of dollars to build and recently open a state-of-the-art water treatment system that processes and transforms formerly flushed sewage into drinkable tap water. The Orange County Water Replenishment System...

As biofuels imports increase in the United Kingdom, policymakers remain largely uninformed about the true environmental and social costs of producing these fuels, posing a significant challenge for efforts to mandate their sustainable use. In the first report since...

A small band of activists and scientists believe that farming done the right way can remove carbon from the atmosphere. by Jay Walljasper On an unseasonably warm and sunny winter morning—the kind that lulls you into thinking global climate change...

California's innovative energy efficiency loans are a model worth copying. A request: if you a) have anything to do with city or county government, and b) have any interest in, or authority over, property taxes, finance, or energy efficiency, please...

As renewable energy technologies become more competitive, investing in them is becoming a more viable venture. Yet, uncertainties about cost and ROI are still keeping some investors at bay. Wind blows, rain falls and the sun shines, but differently at...

For the last three decades, it's been more or less assumed that globalization was a force that moved in only one direction -- towards ever-greater integration. And due to the logic of global trade, the assumption of ever greater...

One of the challenges of innovation in the developing world is getting innovators to work on the right problems. This is especially tough when trying to work with folks in the developed world on developing world innovation - often a...

Several major U.S. utility companies may accelerate plans to integrate solar power into their electricity mix following a fact-finding trip to Germany. Twenty-three electric utilities were represented on the trip to Germany, the world's leading producer and installer of...

Stories of distant, weather-rocked communities, from Katerina to China, Thailand to Africa, are enough to make any news reader feel a little helpless. The problems are big, and the ways to support those trying to make a difference are often...
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