Green Architecture Means Thinking About the Environment
Jan 18th, 2008 by Pragati Goswami
Green architecture applies to us all as we all have to live in the environment we have. It may be a crowded city. It may be a desert. Or we may be lucky and live on a farm or in a village with a temperate climate. Wherever it is, we have to make the best of it. We could live with it, trying to do it no harm, or we could establish ourselves as the enemy and live with every intention of destroying it. The choice is ours. Living with our environment is a whole lot more sensible than trying to destroy it. One doesn’t straddle the wrong side of a bough when we are pruning a tree. Nor should we deliberately destroy when we can nurture.
There is now no doubt that our planet is getting warmer. Whether this happens periodically or not it is happening now to us. We are adding to the problem in a thousand ways. Some of them we can’t do anything about but we can start at home and in our gardens or balconies. Our crowded world is developing an enormous carbon footprint but if we all individually lighten our own treads we will lessen it. Ours may be an infinitesimal help but if everyone does it there is great power. If you live in a city try to lower the amount of driving you do – to work, school, or even shopping.
Try walking wherever possible. If others in your area want to do the same thing you might be able to join forces and walk together. It is certainly possible to walk children to school and back home again if you can arrange it with other parents. All these projects become easier with company. If you live too far from your job to walk there, think of using a bicycle. Modern bicycles are light years away from the way they were even twenty years ago. They are lighter and safer. If there are bicycle pathways in your city try using them. In the home itself, conserve energy in every way you can. Change the light bulbs to environmentally-friendly ones. Turn off lights and appliances in rooms not being used and turn everything off at night. Don’t even leave those red glimmers showing. What’s the point of pulling on carbon supplies when you are not even there.
Learn to use a pressure cooker to save energy. When you know how you can cook food in minutes instead of hours. Fast cooking is also possible in the microwave but that is another item that doesn’t have to flicker away in the 23 hours when you are not’t using it. Recycling is a natural form of energy saving. Whether you are in the city or the country save all food scraps and compost them for your garden. Compost is not hard to make and it is like black gold for pots and gardens. Anyone can have a garden even if they live in a single room. A window sill will provide herbs and a covered bottle is all you need to provide healthy sprouts. Making compost is really just a matter of piling it up, keeping it wet, turning it from time to time and not including meat to avoid putrid smells and vermin digging it up. Compost bins come in all sizes. In a really tiny space a worm farm may be the answer, but keep them well fed or they will migrate to other gardens.
The next thing to do to live well environmentally is to rethink your spending patterns. If you can cut down on over packaged goods in the supermarket and look for organic items, it will be so much better for Planet Earth and, incidentally, for you. But if you can cut down on buying generally you prevent those delivery trucks from thundering around. Even just putting off buying new clothes that you don’t really need it is a step in the right direction. Just try it and see how you go. Doing these things and buy using green architecture we can make a difference to the environment.
