Have you noticed how everybody's green?
Mayor Manny Diaz is hosting Earth Hour Miami on March 24th. Whatever that means.
How about more parks and better maintained parks in Miami, Mayor Diaz? That would be very green thing.
South Florida Business Journal announces, "Green Building gala: 'We have arrived'". How about supporting an end to suburban sprawl, green builders of Miami?
Here is more green: the unreformable majority of the county commission votes in April to reject all the applications to move the Urban Development Boundary.
County manager George Burgess fires department heads of environmental agencies who have embarrassed the county by allowing high risk to our drinking water supply.
County Mayor Carlos Alvarez announces he will propose tough new sanctions against rock miners, including a requirement that they pay up front all the costs for a new water treatment plant and ongoing maintenance expenses due to the impacts of their highly profitable industry on our water supply.
The Latin Builders Association adopts as its mascot, Natacha the Manatee, and establish a green educational fund for the YMCA to offer after-school programs in environmental awareness.
When that happens, it is fangless as a 14 year old dog.
Green building gala: 'We have arrived'
by Paul Brinkmann
South Florida Business Journal
Friday, March 21, 2008
The South Florida chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council celebrated a
banner year on March 15 with GalaVerde, a mostly black (and green)-tie affair
at the Bonnet House Museum & Gardens in Fort Lauderdale.
The chapter is the biggest local organization promoting environmental design
and energy conservation in construction. Members help certify buildings and
professionals under the Leadership in Environment and Energy Design (LEED)
program.
More than 300 people attended the $100-a-ticket gala, from business owners
to local mayors and other VIPs. Attendees wore green and blue lights on their
nametags, like fireflies in the garden area.
Chapter President Rob Hink addressed the crowd at about 9 p.m. He noted
the tripling of membership - to about 600 last year -- and the more than 400
LEED-registered projects in Florida. At the current pace, Florida in a few
years will pass states like Illinois and Georgia, which currently have more
LEED buildings.
http://www.bizjournals.com/southflorida/stories/2008/03/24/story16.html
6 comments:
Natacha the Manatee - wooooohoooo!!!!! LOL!
I know most of this was written tongue-in-cheek, but c'mon. Do we have to knock everything?
Diaz is finally getting behind real greening of Miami. The Miami 21 code rewrite is, at it's heart, an attempt to undo the damaging zoning in Miami and make way for more public - and green - space.
The global agreement includes plans to finally make the park space at Bicentennial a place worth visiting. Forget if the rest of the plan sucks, at least there's a desire to make the park project happen.
Not all builders are evil, and some even stood with the Hold the Line group. Carlyle gets a nod for speaking out against their own.
The city and county now have sustainability offices. The county has a green building requirement. The commission even insisted that the boondoggle stadium be green certified.
We cannot turn this ship around in a day and we have been steaming in the wrong direction for a long time.
Keep plugging away but at least acknowledge some of the progress that is finally being made.
If they delay Miami 21 any more, they're going to have to rename it Miami 22.
m
Gimleteye wrote:
In response to "not all builders are evil"... if this is true, then where are the builders who will stand up and publicly disavow the costs of suburban sprawl and the excesses of the condo boom that are about to unleash 10,000 additional units on a market flooded with inventory?
Jorge Perez, local billionaire, detested the movement of the Urban Development Boundary: did he utter a word of it in public? No.
The builders kicked the public interest from one end of the state to another, over the past decade-- dominating the news cycles and media and branding the public interest as "elitists" or worse.
For the Growth Machine to do any better, it has to come up with something better than "we're trying".
It has to come up with something better than "we may have made mistakes", something better than promises, because what we are getting right now is the possibility that every excess of the past decade leading up to the crash in the housing and condo markets is going to be passed on to taxpayers.
Today it's a few hundred billion: tomorrow, it's a trillion or two.
Why shouldn't there be a point of view, that takes an unrelenting view that to protect the public, the Growth Machine needs to be put on a tight leash and halter?
Our economy can't just stop doing anything, we have to keep building and expanding, and consumming, it hads to be in a more responsible way though. There's some great green options in the directory at http://www.greencollareconomy.com
To Gimleteye: the www.udbline.com site lists the Carlisle Group as a supporter. Last I checked they were builders. (www.thecarlislegroup.com)
The USGBC is made up of architects, engineers, builders and landscape architects. They signed on and wrote letters to the editor.
I did not say the list was deep. I didn't say that most of them shouldn't be drawn-and-quartered.
The point was not to crap on every little baby step in the right direction.
There are a lot of people in the system and outside of it working every day to push this community in the right direction. They could have fled to Seattle but instead they are slugging it out here. Give them a pat on the head every now and then.
Post a Comment