How are you celebrating Earth Day?

This year is the 40th anniversary of Earth day on April 22. Have you decided what will you be doing to celebrate this memorable day. Are you going to Wegmans to grab your free reusable bag this Saturday or sewing your own bag with your kids? Planting more trees, recycling your garbage or using bio-degradable, natural cleaning supplies. Apparently all these activities seem to be such a natural way of spending your Earth Day.

Have you ever wondered how sustainable it is for our mother earth to re-use historic buildings. Save millions of kilowatts of energy by not dumping the landfill with bulldozed building wastes. This thought for some reason does not seem to be very natural, Isn't it! Trust me! Reusing a historic building is the most sustainable act for our planet earth.

This Saturday on April 24, we at Landmark Society are celebrating the earth day by organizing its 24th annual regional preservation conference. At this conference you will learn all that is to know about reusing a historic building-- enhancing main streets, how do you green your historic building, preservation case studies and strategies from your very own Wayne County, new historic tax credits and design review process.

You still have time to make your Earth Day special by attending our conference! A wonderful way to commemorate this day! We are still open for registrations! Hurry and make earth day a special day!

For more details on registration please visit
http://www.landmarksociety.org/section.html?id=1&uid=23&pageId=295

Image Source: www.earthday.org

Posted by Nimisha Thakur, preservation associate

What is really Sustainability???

Perceptions of Preservation


I was recently a part of Sustainability Symposium at Penn State University. It was a 3 hour long session where we had talks by the Director of Center of Sustainability at Penn, outstanding students who undertook sustainability efforts on campus and a question hour session. You can check them out at http://www.cfs.psu.edu/

We had long discussions about recycling paper, plastic, cans etc.. on campus, composting, using energy efficient devices, doing little things like switching off lights when going out of the building. It was an interesting session overall.

I was most appalled by the fact that in this long session, there was no mention of preservation at all. It was nowhere on their radar screens. This made me realize that how much work we have to do in this direction. When such significant issue is not a part of a leading research university's agenda, then how can we even take it to local public and create awareness about it.

This makes me ponder what can preservationists do to tell the world that adaptively reusing a historic building is the most sustainable effort. This is sustainability! Does anyone know that just a single family home with an area of 1500 sqft has around 1050000 MBTUs of embodied energy in it? To find more such facts go to http://www.thegreenestbuilding.org/

With our 24th Annual Regional Preservation Conference at Palmyra, we are trying to unravel the myths about sustainability. To tell you exactly how reusing an old building is most sustainable. To learn more about it visit us at http://www.landmarksociety.org/section.html?id=1&uid=23&pageId=295

We look forward to having you with us on April 24' 2010 in Palmyra. Do join us if you really want to know what is sustainability?

Image Source: www.ew.govt.nz

Posted by Nimisha Thakur, Preservation Associate