Keith Rockmael

A shift in locale (from San Francisco to San Jose) did nothing to change the energy and the recent West Coast Green. As we any conference we tried to see as much new buildings materials, spy as much green washing and attend as many seminars as possible without suffering from green overload.

After scoring the main trade floor, we hit the Lawrence Group designed and SG Blocks built, Harbinger House, which impressed us more than last years version (despite the fact of its inside location) with its innovative use of shipping containers. Because we export hardly anything anymore, shipping companies have find new uses for these 8,000-pound containers, so rather than ship them back empty they sold them and here they built a 1700 sq. ft two-story house.

The simple yet functional interior fit right to our liking with Vetrazzo countertops, and bathroom vanities, and the Verve lighting control system. The Agilewaves caught everyone's interest with their web-based Resource Monitor, that monitors electric, gas and water usage in real-time, while automatically calculating carbon footprint. To be honest, we did catch one showerhead that appeared to not be low flow but if it is we want one for our shower.

For the seminars, the always engaging and entertaining Hunter Lovins along with William Hayward led our favorite seminar as they covered The Business Case for Building the Green Way with humor and aplomb. While most everyone continues to question the price of green building, Hunter runs the other way to show the ultimate cost of NON-green building. If you don't believe us then check out her presentation which she assures us will be uploaded on her website any day now.

Who wouldn’t appreciate Hunter's humor while the conference center room's ineffective and noisy HVAC system blasted out wafts of noise cool air? We do.

It sounds like a war effort or some great new candy bar, but it has been ten years in the making. Yes, the Academy of Sciences museum finally opens in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. We’re totally jazzed to have this Green building icon finally opening up, with some of the old exhibits, the completely updated planetarium and the sustainably based dining options by Charles Phan and Loretta Keller. While most of the advance crowd marveled at the Africa Hall, the various fish aquariums, even the albino crocodile, we turned our attention to the building itself. Yes, a LEED Platinum structure that supposedly marks the largest LEED Platinum building in the U.S. With a building so large, we decided to get cute (or maybe efficient) and do an outside and inside post. And because humans spend 90 percent of their lives indoors, we’ll start outside for a change. Well, actually upside.

Look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane no it’s a living roof. Not just a Green roof with scattered plants but one covered with 1.7 million native plants. Architect Renzo Piano designed the roof as an homage to the hills of SF. Even more creative is how the plants keep from slip sliding off the hills. Rana Creek worked with Piano to use 50,000 porous, biodegradable trays (called a BioTray®), that they made from tree sap and coconut husks as containers for the vegetation to keep the little green guys in place.

In addition to the natural habitat created by the roof, the roof reduces the Urban Heat Island effect and reduces the building’s temperature by an average of 10 degrees versus a nasty old standard roof. Additionally, the roof’s cistern system will captures 90-98 percent rainwater, with 3.5 million gallons of rainwater per year expected to be absorbed by the roof.

With all the time we spent outside the museum it’s a wonder we didn’t get sunburned. But of course we used sustainably concocted sunscreen. Next museum post, we’ll take a green look at the interior.

There’s nothing like Green to attract Green. In this case, the just concluded AlwaysOn Going Green 2008 Conference over in Marin attracted a slew of VC and Biz Dev money looking to invest their portfolios in green tech. The summit as a whole brought together serious money looking for innovative ideas but to say that all the ideas and companies behind them offered true green innovation and philosophies would be somewhat akin to out and out greenwashing.

Early conference sessions including the solar breakthrough panel discussed various solar advances such as the Mono-crystalline silicon solar cells yet to us dialogue seemed rather pat and lacked needed a jolt.

The abundant clean green water session got a little splashier and brought forth honest panel responses such as "The water industry is dysfunctional. Like a train wreck." To us it seemed appropriate with the water price gouging, privatization of water companies and the like that the panel compared the water policies of many companies to Pyongyang economics.

If the Agricultural Revolution discussion meant to deliver a shock and awe philosophy then they certainly did their job. From the outset the panel consisting of David Cope, President & CEO, Purfresh Inc., Michael Dowgert, EVP Marketing & Business Development, Netafim, Richard Hamilton, CEO, Ceres Inc., and Rengarajan Ramesh, General Manager, GE Water & Process Technologies managed to fill the discussion with ideas of Genetically Modified crops as sustainable. Not only that but they promoted GMOs and commodity crops as the saviors to our economic, energy and food shortage woes. Maybe we had stepped into a parallel universe? The panel basically wrote off the local-sustainable food buying trend as something not serious. They discussed that there might be a way to buy Chilean grapes without herbicides, and even so did they simply forget about shipping those grapes 6000 miles or so? To keep the party rolling, Richard Hamilton uttered, "Sometimes you want to buy produce at a farmers market and other times at WalMart”. That comment brought a slew of comments from the live chat room display including one that said, “Hamilton (Ceres) is scary.”

What the heck are these guys making up this “Green” panel anyway? We might as well had four guys from Monsanto up there uttering the benefits of GMOs and how many benefits they bring farmers. Ceres and Mendel Biotechnology (part of the Next Generation Biofuel panel) who made the Going Green Top 100 companies mentioned their partnerships with, among others, Monsanto. Oops did someone not do their green due diligence homework? Maybe they could add Exxon-Mobil as a top 100 green company and have their CEO speak as a keynote for next years conference.

Like a creamy scoop of Bi-Rite salty caramel ice cream that remains on your taste buds even though it's gone down the hatch, the Slow Food Nation aroma still lingers. Besides some of the panel discussions, the Slow Food Nation, of course, involved tasting so we persevered the long lines and made our way to as many of the tasting stations that was humanly possible.

We had to weave through 20 areas of slow food including ice cream, cheese, wine, in only four hours. Even though we skipped most of the demonstrations and classes it become challenging to sample all the offerings.

We had to remove the organic organic organic mentality from our minds as some, but not all, of the items had purely organic ingredients but the offerings did have varying degrees of local, sustainable, even biodynaimic.

Surprisingly, the liquid offerings didn't have the egregious queues so we sampled some among other things some of the gently spicy, not yet released Tru organic gin, where they care not only about the ingredients but they use packaging that is either recycled, recyclable or biodegradable.

Over in the beer section, we sampled a number of winners including the strong, savory Ruination Ale from the always trying to be green Stone Brewing Company. They just added a significant amount (over $2M worth) of PV panels to their operation and don't let high fructose corn syrup anywhere near their brewpub.

The event expanded the borders across the U.S. We broke bread and Cowgirl Creamery brie with Slow Foodies from North Carolina who assured us that slow food movement continues to expand there. And what about the Coffee Infused Honey and Lemon/Ginger/Garlic Infused Honey from Mockingbird Meadows that we sampled.  Although not certified yet, they farm using biodynamic principles. Part of their harvest involves carefully brushing the bees back into the hive without smoke whenever possible.  Biodynamic honey in Ohio! Watch out Sue Bee. The Slow Food Nation doesn't just thrive in the Bay Area. It drips slowly but surely forward.

Even at 9 a.m. in the morning, a buzz filled the air even before the first official Slow Food Nation event kicked off in San Francisco's War Memorial Palace. One of the food rock stars Michael Pollan moderated the discussion topic: The World Food Crisis with panelists Raj Patel, Vandana Shiva, Carlo Petrini, and Corby Kummer. Things got popping quickly with spirited remarks about the worldwide food shortage including one poke about biofuels by Patel, "It's preposterous that we should grow food to set it on fire" , as well as a comment about the famine in Haiti where local rice farmers have no chance to compete against subsidized U.S. rice imports. Haitians rioted against rice labeled "gift of the USA." Some gift, huh?

We loved the passionate Shiva as she spoke out about the spin toward getting GMOs into the world food chain. She noted that there has always been famine but now she sees this "pseudo crisis" as a movement to bring GMOs into the fold. She noted the difference between food and commodities. We agree with Shiva in her thinking the diversity of food that we help balance the playing field.

Patel startled the crowd and us when mentioning these new "zombie seeds" that Monsanto now produces, that remain dead until farmers spray a Monsanto product that allows them to grow.

Pollan kept the discussion lively with social and political. Many people don't realize that this food crisis remains deeply gendered as 60% of the people going hungry are women. The energy generated by Shiva got us and the crowd fired up by mentioning that the hygiene measures like banning street food are just agri-biz trying to kill local food. In our eyes she's a rebel. Even after she said that, "We need to be the Rosa Parks of food." Damn straight. We can't begin to convey the energy generated in the discussion but we and everyone in the audience left fired up. Now we're headed to our favorite taco cart for some slow food.