Jason F. McLennan Guest Blogs about The Living Building Challenge, a Finalist in the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge

We are honored to be counted among the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Finalists. The Challenge’s Idea Index and the visionary concepts and optimism about the future that it showcases are proof positive that we have the capacity to rise to the seemingly insurmountable social, economic and environmental problems of our time. Each of these exciting and worthy projects embodies Buckminster Fuller’s belief in the power of “comprehensive anticipatory design science” to create a humane and ecologically balanced world.

The Living Building Challenge, our contribution to this effort, is premised on a simple but profound observation about human behavior. We believe that when provided with a clear and compelling vision of what is required and possible, people rise to the challenges they face – no matter how great. When small improvements are presented as the 'solution', change happens slowly and erratically. When people understand 'end-game' solutions, human innovation can work wonders.

By Sahar Ghaheri

Simon Berry, Founder of ColaLife, one of the thirty semi-finalist of the BFI seeks to solve some of the world's seemingly intractable problems. Studying the Coca-Cola crates, a well distributed item worldwide, he sees opportunity in the unused space between the necks of the crated bottles. As Berry explains, “1 in 5 developing world children (2 million annually in Africa alone) die before age 5, often from treatable causes such as diarrhea, malaria, poor nutrition and sanitation. Poor awareness and scant local availability of simple, cheap medical and health supplies are a key contributor; a function of poorly developed rural transport and distribution systems.” Why not use an already existing, successful distribution system to tackle the problems faced in the developing world? Why reinvent the wheel when we have the ability to leverage off of already existing systems?

We are lucky to have Simon Berry, as a guest blogger to tell us a bit about his experiences, his project, and the thought process behind starting ColaLife.

Simon explains:

In 1988 I was working on the British Aid Programme in NE Zambia. We were living in a place called Mpika and I worked mostly in the District of Chinsali. This was a very remote and sparsely populated part of Africa with only 2 people per square kilometre and where 'slash and burn', or citemene, was the traditional form of cultivation.


[Slash and burn agriculture, NE Zambia, 1988. Credit: Simon Berry]

By Ashley Thorfinnson
"The most important thing to teach your children is that the sun does not rise and set. It is the Earth that revolves around the sun. Then teach them the concepts of North, South, East and West, and that they relate to where they happen to be on the planet's surface at that time. Everything else will follow."

- Buckminster Fuller, 1983

By Jonathan Tucker

“A Call to Farm: FarmShare” is an initiative originally submitted to the Challenge in 2009 as “BK Farmyards,” and in that year it reached the finalist phase. The proposal offered by BK Farmyards’ founder Stacey Murphy is a strategy to turn under-utilized private and public land in Brooklyn, NY into small scale vegetable farms. This intriguing project has returned for the 2010 Challenge with additional layers of development, and has reached the semi-finalist phase.




The new approach of the organization is to utilize online social networking to help scale out and make more efficient the connections and discussions happening on the ground within this movement. FarmShare summarizes its intentions: “FarmShare reconnects farmers and consumers as co-producers of the foodscape. The strategy uses social media to pool all the resources of Brooklyn into a crowd-sourced decentralized farm. Urban farmers need organization to give political voice to the movement and legitimize these workers as farmers. The logistics of urban farming forces hundreds of farms to act individually, scavenging for land and resources. To make urban farming a viable business, new infrastructure is required for sharing experience and resources."

By Ashley Thorfinnson
What if we could transform one of our largest environmental hazards—and behavioral embarrassments—into a catalyst for change and a testament to human ingenuity? The BFI Challenge Semi-finalist entry Plastic Island proposes to do just that. By creating a self-sustaining island in the Pacific Ocean, Plastic Island will collect and recycle the ever-growing mass of floating debris that makes up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, while also creating awareness of the negative impacts of our own behaviors.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a gyre of marine pollution in the Pacific Ocean that kills millions of mammals yearly. Due to the improper disposal of plastic garbage by both land-based sources and ships, the Garbage Patch is dramatically increasing in size. From 1999 to 2004 the Garbage Patch doubled in size, and it is now larger than the continental US according to some estimates.

By Jonathan Tucker
The Barefoot College is an organization based in India whose mission is to train illiterate women from the most marginalized areas in the least developed countries around the world to become solar engineers and leaders in the transformation of their rural communities towards self-reliance and self-sufficiency based on decentralized, small-scale renewable energy infrastructures. The Barefoot initiative has spread to 13 states in India, 15 countries in Africa, as well as remote villages of Bolivia, Bhutan and Afghanistan, and will soon be implemented in a total of 27 countries around the world.


Bunker Roy, founder of Barefoot College, explains that their “approach has been designed to demonstrate the first technically and financially self-sufficient solar electrified villages, and by training the illiterate rural grandmother to be a fully competent solar engineer, there is no need for an urban qualified engineer, thus eliminating the dependency of communities on the urban expert. These women have proven that they are capable of fabricating, installing and maintaining solar lighting systems after undergoing six months of hands-on training without written materials, tutored by unschooled Indian women. This model instills pride along with new skill sets, and raises the social status of women as role models within cultures that are historically oppressive towards women.”


Roy believes that the very poor have every right to have access to, control, manage and own the most sophisticated of technologies to improve their own lives. First and most important is to respect, understand and accept that very poor people all over the world have the capacity and competence to be able to utilize their traditional and experiential knowledge, supplemented by new technical skills to raise their quality of life while simultaneously reducing negative ecological impacts.

Collaboration Among NGOs for Energy Independence

By Jonathan Tucker

Fossil fuel independence is critical for environmental sustainability, but carbon emission reduction is a narrow focus in the larger scheme of benefits associated with alternative energy sources. As one of the 2010 BFI Challenge semi-finalists, The Green Initiative demonstrates the diversity of positive ramifications enjoyed by truly comprehensive approaches to energy infrastructures, specifically in developing countries like Cambodia.

The Green Initiative (TGI) is developing a replicable strategy that addresses the need for non-government organizations (NGOs) in developing countries to achieve independence from polluting and expensive diesel fuel. John Tucker, who founded New Hope for Cambodian Children (NHCC) in 2006, in has set up an operation to collect and process used vegetable oil and is now supplying a group of NGOs with clean burning fuel at stable affordable prices. NHCC’s base of operations is in Phnom Penh, where Tucker provides a full range of housing, nutritional, health and educational services to meet the needs of orphaned and abandoned children currently infected with HIV/AIDS. The organization is well on its way to producing a large percentage of its food onsite and is utilizing a bio-digester for cooking fuel, and solar power for electricity. NHCC also provides social support to infected children and their affected families within the surrounding community. TGI is now in its next phase which is engaging the farmers amongst these poor families in growing oil seeds from Jatropha trees as a reliable cash crop which can be used to produce high quality biodiesel and a variety of other marketable products.

By Sahar Ghaheri

At the core of CitySink, one of the semi-finalists of the BFI Challenge, is the discourse of carbon sequestration and community engagement. It is an urban and regional systemic solution with many layers.

“I submitted the project because it’s very complex to be conveyed systemically and in theory, I’ve had a lot of buy in for individual apparatus, but communicating the big idea is what really needs to be pushed forward right now, “ explains, project lead, Denise Hoffman Brandt, about entering the Challenge.

What is Carbon Sequestration and why is it important? Carbon Sequestration is geoengineering technique, which captures and securely stores carbon dioxide emitted from the global energy system. It is said to be one of the most promising ways for reducing buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Sequestration activities can help prevent global climate change by enhancing carbon storage, also called sinks, in trees and soil, preserving trees and soil, and by reducing emissions of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide.

CitySink offers a systemic and strategic approach to the problems surrounding carbon emission, enabling New York City to adapt its landscape for more optimal absorption of CO2. The strategy involves a number of long-term sequestration apparatus. The sink apparatus are divided into seven strategies that work together. These parts of the apparatus are incrementally implemented overtime.

Technical Sink Apparatus:
Phyto-Labs: dispersed in vacant-lots and public parkland, phyto-remediation plots as formal gardens merge visual and experimental criteria.
Verge grasslands: optimize easily accessible, underutilized areas of infrastructure right of-ways as biomass/soil sinks.

By Jonathan Tucker
Launched in November 2006, the Living Building Challenge (LBC) has already proven to be a transformative program, with over sixty projects in various stages of development around North America and beyond. The Challenge inspires green building teams to leap forward and innovate new techniques – to demonstrate that ecological balance in the built environment is possible using current technology. To be “Living” the building(s) must achieve each of the Challenge’s environmentally critical imperatives (no exceptions). It must generate all of its own energy onsite using renewable sources; capture and treat all of its own water; be constructed of nontoxic, sustainably sourced materials; use only previously developed sites (ending sprawl); and be beautiful and inspiring to its inhabitants. Unlike LEED, Challenge certification is based on 12 months of actual, not predicted, performance, ensuring that environmental claims reflect reality – not hype. Thus, to be “Living” a building must both inspire and educate the people who interact with it, transforming end users and visitors into agents of change. This single unifying standard catalyzes comprehensive change within the built environment, while giving end-users and policy makers a clear path toward true sustainability. The Challenge is now poised to make a bigger leap into countries around the world.