Green Gazette (Issue 18) South Park, Eco-TV, Al Gore and Safeway
ByGood Evening welcome back to sustainable stories, eco enlightenment and green gossip. It’s green gazette time and I barely have the energy to type having watched far too much World Cup qualification football so far today. Only one team I watched wore green and Ireland fell short 0-1 to France despite being at home in Dublin. Enough of that I’ve got a green gazette round up for you tonight.
I never anticipated being able to write about South Park in conjunction with our blog, so as unexpected as that is it’s also great to do so. The famous/infamous cartoon set in the mountains of Colorado now has a fully legitimate connection to positive environmental impact. The creators of the show Trey Parker and Matt Stone have built a very green mountain getaway (for writing?) just outside Steamboat Springs. The fully custom home will feature in a forthcoming edition of architectural digest but it’s the green aspects I wanted to focus on. The home features ceilings constructed from recovered railroad trestles that used to lay in the Great Salt Lake. In addition the home also features recycled carpeting and in floor radiant heating. The upmarket ski resort is primarily a holiday getaway for the rich and famous so it will be fun to think of these two comic mavericks having house parties up in the slopes. Kudos to the boys (wow…they are 40 and 38 respectively now…how did that happen?).
Although Phoenix has quietly become the 6th biggest city in the US it rarely makes national news but this week was a little different as the Green Build expo hit the desert. The 4 day event in the heart of the city featured over 1,000 vendors, dozens of prominent speakers and a keynote 
speech by former Vice-President Al Gora at Chase Field. Over 29,000 tickets were sold for the evening that featured Mr. Gore. Green Build has become one of the largest eco-focused conventions in North America. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend that evening but Al Gore spoke for over 40 minutes to an audience that contained many key figureheads in the eco-revolution that is taking the construction business by storm (at last!!). The growth in investment since 2005 is truly remarkable and leaves me with great hope that the upward curve will continue so that green build is considered the norm – and any tried and tested (wasteful) construction is gradually frowned upon and then ultimately not approved per city, state or federal code. Some key moments from Gore’s speech appear beneath.
Living in a house with children I was excited to read about this new television from Sony, an invention so simple, so obvious, so energy efficient and so subtle that I’m amazed it’s only just come on the market. The new Sony KDL-46VE5 brings you the quality you associate with a Sony with a neat little idea that’s been begged for by parents (and partners) for decades on end. What makes this TV so eco smart – it turns itself off if nobody is watching. The set has a motion detecting sensor which you can set for 5,30,or 60 minutes. If you leave the room (or sit completely still…I often feel motionless if Fox news is accidentally on…certainly brain dead) and then sensor determines nobody is watching it will turn itself of. If only it could do the same if the program is determined to be utter rubbish. Anyway, I can’t imagine the technology is that restrictive (to cost) so I hope other manufacturers will follow the lead of Sony and make all new televisions offer the same feature.
I’ll close with a quick story out of California (so often the epicenter for eco-ideas) as supermarket giant Safeway have opened their very first eco-Safeway in Santa Cruz. The store is 100% LEED compliant and when you stop to think the location is 60,000 square feet the green impact is truly measurable – being the equivalent of refitting 30-40 homes to the highest levels of green technology. Here’s hoping this becomes the norm for the giant chain that has over 1,740 locations throughout the US and western Canada.
