By Adam Brock
Yesterday’s City Dirt has a nice mini-interview with ecological designer Andrew Faust, founder of the Center for Bioregional Living. A recent Brooklyn transplant, Faust has been spending the past several years practicing sustainable living on a homestead in West Virginia and teaching permaculture courses. These days, he’s got some clever ideas for reintegrating nature into the five boroughs: how about a backyard wetland to soak up hundreds of gallons of stormwater runoff? Or a series of floating plant filters to clean up the Gowanus canal:
I want to design floating pond remediators. These are rafts will host plants that clean the toxins out of the water. In China they created floating walkways to clean up the open sewage canals. Not only are the plants removing the toxins from the water, but you have a beautiful area for people to stroll through and enjoy the waterways.
Plant pods seem to be on everybody’s minds these days: a similar concept was proposed in H2Grow, one of the finalists in the Envisioning Gateway contest.
Faust, meanwhile, will be keeping busy this spring teaching a permaculture certification course in Manhattan on fridays. Email andrew@homebiome.com if you’d like to sign up.
The Wild Green Yonder 
Check out my post on these floating water purifiers:
http://hurricanecandice.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/diy-clean-up/
Hi
I’m interesed in Andrew Faust’s permaculture course and would like his phone #.
thanks
tom
I tried reaching him at Andrew@homebiome and the email was returned.
Carbon Neutral Buildings… NOW.
Here in the early part of the twenty first century we find ourselves trying to react appropriately to the changing climate of the earth. We attribute part of this changing climate to the activities of humans, specifically relating to the CO2 emissions from these human activities. We have also observed that these changes are happening faster than we expected from previous observations and that between 30% and 50% of the CO2 emissions are directly related to and coming from buildings. There is, in fact, at this point, a certain urgency relative to just how and when we react.