Sustainable Building Construction, Green House Designs, And Eco Friendly Development

Sustainability, in a broad sense, is the capacity to endure. In ecology, the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. For humans it is the potential for long-term maintenance of wellbeing, which in turn depends on the wellbeing of the natural world and the responsible use of natural resources.

Sustainability has become a wide-ranging term that can be applied to almost every facet of life on Earth, from a local to a global scale and over various time periods. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems. Invisible chemical cycles redistribute water, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon through the world's living and non-living systems, and have sustained life for millions of years. As the earth's human population has increased, natural ecosystems have declined and changes in the balance of natural cycles has had a negative impact on both humans and other living systems.Earth Policy Institute Natural Systems. www.earth-policy.org, Data Center. Retrieved on: 2009-11-07

There is now abundant scientific evidence that humanity is living unsustainably. Returning human use of natural resources to within sustainable limits will require a major collective effort. Ways of living more sustainably can take many forms from reorganising living conditions (e.g., ecovillages, eco-municipalities and sustainable cities), reappraising economic sectors (permaculture, green building, sustainable agriculture), or work practices (sustainable architecture), using science to develop new technologies (green technologies, renewable energy), to adjustments in individual lifestyles.

Sustainable design (also called environmental design, environmentally sustainable design, environmentally-conscious design, etc) is the philosophy of designing physical objects, the built environment and services to comply with the principles of economic, social, and ecological sustainability.

The intention of sustainable design is to "eliminate negative environmental impact completely through skillful, sensitive design".McLennan, J. F. (2004), The Philosophy of Sustainable Design Manifestations of sustainable designs require no non-renewable resources, impact on the environment minimally, and relate people with the natural environment.

Applications of this philosophy range from the microcosm — small objects for everyday use, through to the macrocosm — buildings, cities, and the earth's physical surface. It is a philosophy that can be applied in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, urban planning, engineering, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, and fashion design.

Sustainable design is mostly a general reaction to global environmental crises, the rapid growth of economic activity and human population, depletion of natural resources, damage to ecosystems and loss of biodiversity.Fan Shu-Yang, Bill Freedman, and Raymond Cote (2004). "Principles and practice of ecological design". Environmental Reviews. 12: 97?112. link

The limits of sustainable design are reducing. Whole earth impacts are beginning to be considered because growth in goods and services is consistently outpacing gains in efficiency. As a result, the net effect of sustainable design to date has been to simply improve the efficiency of rapidly increasing impacts. The present approach, which focuses on the efficiency of delivering individual goods and services does not solve this problem. The basic dilemmas include: the increasing complexity of efficiency improvements, the difficulty of implementing new technologies in societies built around old ones, that physical impacts of delivering goods and services are not localized but distributed throughout the economies, and that the scale of resource uses is growing and not stabilizing.

The motivation for sustainable design was articulated in E. F. Schumacher's 1973 book Small Is Beautiful. In architecture, sustainable design is not the attachment or supplement of architectural design, but an integrated design process. This requires close cooperation of the design team, the architects, the engineers and the client at all project stages, from the site selection, scheme formation, material selection and procurement and project implementation. Ji Yan and Plainiotis Stellios (2006): Design for Sustainability. Beijing: China Architecture and Building Press. ISBN 7-112-08390-7

Category: Image - :Kansas stc.jpg|thumb|right|200px|US EPA Kansas City Science & Technology Center.

This facility features the following green attributes:

*LEED 2.0 Gold certified *Green Power *Native Landscaping

Green Building, also known as sustainable building, is the practice of creating structures and using processes that are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building's life-cycle from siting to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation, and deconstruction. This practice expands and complements the classical building design concerns of economy, utility, durability, and comfort.http://www.epa.gov/greenbuilding/pubs/about.htm

Although new methods are constantly being developed to complement current practices in creating greener structures, the common objective is that green buildings are designed and to reduce the overall impact of the built environment on human health and the natural environment by:

*Efficiently using energy, water, and other resources

*Protecting occupant health and improving employee productivity

*Reducing waste, pollution and environmental degradationhttp://www.epa.gov/greenbuilding/pubs/about.htm

A similar concept is natural building, which is usually on a smaller scale and tends to focus on the use of natural materials that are available locally.Hopkins, R. 2002. A Natural Way of Building. Transition Culture. Retrieved: 2007-03-30. Other related topics include sustainable design, building resiliency, building adaptability, green architecture, and energy efficient buildings.

Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and perennial agricultural systems that mimics the relationships found in natural ecologies. It was first developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren and their associates during the 1970s in a series of publications. The word permaculture is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture, as well as permanent culture.

The intent was that, by rapidly training individuals in a core set of design principles, those individuals could design their own environments and build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements ? ones that reduce society's reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that Mollison identified as fundamentally and systematically destroying Earth's ecosystems.

While originating as an agro-ecological design theory, permaculture has developed a large international following. This "permaculture community" continues to expand on the original ideas, integrating a range of ideas of alternative culture, through a network of publications, permaculture gardens, intentional communities, training programs, and internet forums. In this way, permaculture has become both a design system and a culture of rewilding the human species.