Cosanti

Defining Desert Living, September 2020

The legacy of architect, ecological pioneer, urban philosopher, artist and craftsman, Paolo Soleri (1919– 2013) thrives at Cosanti in Paradise Valley and Arcosanti in Cordes Junction, 70 miles north of Phoenix. Also in Arizona, admirers remember him for the Soleri Bridge crossing the Arizona Canal at Camelback Road in downtown Scottsdale.

From the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, Soleri and a cadre of apprentices and volunteers students designed and built Cosanti. These structures include the Earth House (1956), Pumpkin Apse/Barrel Vaults (1967), Soleri Studio (1959), CatCast Home (1965), Gallery (1961) and canopied Pool (1966); they represent Soleri’s pioneering vision to create a habitat balancing human needs and the environment.

Designated a culturally significant site on the Arizona State Registry of Historic Places, Cosanti is also where Soleri perfected his “earth-casting” technique for building structures and procedures for casting the now-famous bells; where he designed his great unbuilt bridges; and where he wrote Arcology: The City in the Image of Man, which inspired him to build Arcosanti.

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Culture & Sustainability

Green Living, August 2019

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Earth Day And the EPA Celebrate 50 Years

Green Living, April 2020

Discussing the coincidence of the 50th anniversary of EPA with the first Earth Day in 1970 was the agency’s administrator for District 9, serving the West from San Francisco, John Busterud, and Professor Noah Sachs at the University of Richmond School of Law in Virginia. The professor wryly noted, “The EPA is often called the federal agency no one likes to be the head of because it’s a punching bag for every interest, from the left to the right.” For sure, it’s been politically influenced over the years, and administrators with varying commitments to environmental responsibility have led it. Still, the agency has improved our lives, with cleaner air and waterways, a Superfund to remediate the mess we’ve made for more than a century and a robust recycling system, which now employs 757,000 people who receive $36.6 billion in annual wages. When EPA was founded in 1970, the national recycling rate was less than 10 percent. Today that has more than tripled to about 35 percent.

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For $ale!!! The Grand Canyon

Green Living, May 2019

Across political aisles, Americans support the preservation of our national parks, aligning with the goal that established the National Park Service more than 100 years ago: to ensure that these lands remain in perpetuity as shared national treasures. The parks, though, are threatened as well as our national forests, wildlife refuges, monuments, says author Stephen Nash in his Grand Canyon for Sale: Public Lands versus Private Interests in the Era of Climate Change (University of California Press, 2017). Central to the destruction is human-created climate change. Other assaults are attempts to privatize and commoditize them; overgrazing; mining on sensitive lands near the parks; the growth of gateway towns; and the noise of Grand Canyon overflights by scenic airplanes and helicopters. What do all of us do? Yell in the direction of Washington, D.C.

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The Challenges of Climate Change

Green Living, April 2019

Scientists agree that the earth has warmed during the last century and that human activities are the cause. The past four years (2015–2018), in fact, are the warmest since meteorological records started about 1880. The primary cause, the greenhouse effect, is an imbalance between the Earth’s retaining solar energy and reflecting it. These factors include burning fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Deforestation, the use of aerosols, for example, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), intensify this. Ozone is still another factor. In contrast, long-term climate changes occur across thousands of years as a result of orbital position. Our responsibility: Work together to change climate change. Recall the Kenyan proverb: “The Earth . . . was not given to us by our parents. It was lent to us by our children.”

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