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When will America, world make sustainability a priority?

Twenty years ago, I took a week off from my job at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources and attended the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development as a private citizen. At this conference, also known as the Earth Summit, nations of the world, including the United States, endorsed a nonbinding plan for a new form of development: environmentally sustainable development.
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From Carton to Carpet: Recycled Homes

North Americans are doing their fair share in reducing the millions of tons of domestic garbage that the country generates.  Each week they carefully sort their own waste and place it in a box near the curb for a pickup.  When the program began, some argued that recycling is no more than fancy garbage collection.  They were wrong.  Not only has recycling eased the pressure on our landfills, recycled products became the prime component in many construction products.
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It Is a Matter of Scale or What is the Connection between Brain Size and Sprawl

Scale is fundamental to urban design. If you get it right, and achieve a well-proportioned space between buildings, you have a sound basis to build upon. Even if the architecture is far from perfect, the public realm you create can be decent and comfortable. If you get the scale wrong and your master plan is built, even the most lustrous architecture won’t remediate the failure of space-making; people might still use it for utilitarian reasons (think the parking lot of a Wal-Mart), but will not enjoy it.

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