- 10 reads
Sustainable Living Audio Book – Learn From Looking – Chapter 4: Part 2
Our GREENandSAVE Staff is pleased to provide our readers with updates on new printed books, E-Books, and Audio Books that peak our interest. If you are an author and you would like us to review your book, please let us know: Contact Us
The author of Learn from Looking, Charlie Szoradi, has given us authorization to share the written content and drawings from his book with our readers. This is one of many segments that focuses on the overall theme of sustainable design and overall sustainable living.
Book Topic: Sustainable Living
Learn from Looking is about critical thinking and reaching a sustainable future more cost-effectively than ever imagined. The book's subtitle "How Observation Inspires Innovation" speaks to the core aspect of the content, given that the author, Charlie Szoradi, is an architect and inventor who has traveled extensively around the world over multiple decades and built businesses that range from energy saving lighting to indoor agriculture systems. Mr. Szoradi shares insights on "green" clean-technology that are increasingly key for sustainability, profitable businesses, healthy living, and raising intellectually curious children in a pre and post Covid-19 world. We give Learn from Looking five out of five green stars! Note that the audio book comes with the E-book for only $15 together. Click here to Order the Audio Book on Sustainable Living
Sample content from Learn from Looking:
A Clean Tech Definition
Clean tech is a term used to describe knowledge-based products or services that improve operational performance, productivity, or efficiency while reducing costs, inputs, energy consumption, waste, or pollution. This definition is intended to be universally appealing because it is not the stereotypical “green” language. Instead, it speaks to efficiency and cost reduction in the same breath as reducing pollution.
Declaration of Independence
The preamble has two phrases that are relevant to sustainability and Clean Tech for America (italicized):
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Ten Pillars of the Clean Tech for America Mission (From Original Draft in 2011)
#1: American Self-Reliance: We believe that our unalienable rights come with the responsibility to leverage the “powers of the earth,” referenced in the Declaration of Independence, to their highest and best use so that America reduces its reliance on overseas oil and thrives in the new global energy economy.
#2: American Jobs: We believe that that the breadth and scope of clean technology will become the foundation of a new energy revolution in the twenty-first century just as mechanical automation became the foundation for the Industrial Revolution that shaped the twentieth century. With this change comes an opportunity for Americans to intelligently train and rethink manufacturing and services to participate as creators as well as buyers of a whole new generation of consumer, business, and industrial products.
#3: American Health: We believe that clean tech is also about the process of making products with fewer toxins that we touch and digest. This form of preventive medicine in advance of a business or consumer sale may serve as a highly cost-effective solution over the life cycle of products to reduce unforeseeable diseases and sick-building syndrome for our children and ourselves.
#4: American Property Value: We believe that measurement is the key to management and American real estate offers an immediate platform to create efficiencies. According to the Department of Energy (DOE), buildings account for over 40 percent of all US energy consumption. It takes energy to make a new property, but it saves energy to retrofit an existing one. We believe in energy auditing and scoring properties on operating cost per square foot to determine the most cost-effective paths forward.
#5: American Transportation: We believe that America can create better fuel economy through clean diesel, currently led by German automotive manufacturers, and hybrid synergy, currently led by Japanese corporations. These technologies are bridges to the ongoing development of hydrogen vehicles, and fleet and public transportation can lead the way with natural gas as another bridge option to hydrogen. We also believe in a more robust development of car share and ride share carpool programs as well as mass transit and high-speed rail where reasonably possible within return on investment targets.
#6: American Five-Star Rs: We believe in the three founding Rs of the early environmental movement: reduce, reuse, and recycle, plus a fourth one for “renewable energy” and a fifth one for “rethink.” Reduce waste, reuse materials, recycle trash … and renewable energy through renewables such as solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, tidal, and other sources. Rethink—all of the ways that we have done things in the past to find new opportunities for efficiency, growth, and prosperity.
#7: American National Security: We believe that we need to focus on manufacturing and product development and intellectual property, because we are increasingly vulnerable to other countries.
#8: American Energy Mix: We believe in a balance with multiple renewable energy spokes in concert with traditional power supply and efforts to diminish the percentage of dependency from coal, offshore oil, natural gas, and nuclear. According to the Department of Energy (DOE), we use 25 percent of the world’s power with only 5 percent of the population, so we have to reduce wasted energy, but it will take a transition off of existing power supplies.
#9: American Political Candidates and Legislation: We believe in supporting candidates that look beyond party ideology to find local, state, and national solutions with an eye on American job creation and long-term sustainability. Beyond any candidate or public servant, we believe in supporting legislation that encourages American job creation and rewards clean tech and energy smart performance, without handicapping corporations from growth.
#10: American Stewardship: We believe in respecting the “Laws of Nature” referenced in the Declaration of Independence as they relate to human interaction with plants and animal life so that we strive to lead the world by example and coexist as better stewards of the environment for ourselves and future generations.
