Almost more than five weeks ago, I decided to change the color of my life. After living the bold strokes of the natural Painted Desert for the past ten years, there was a yearning for different shades of Green. I took my cue from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), and found myself moving to a "Sustainable Site" that would allow me to have an almost zero carbon and low-carb lifestyle.
The guidelines I chose in making this life-altering decision was molded by the five environmental categories of LEED. In this specific blog entry, I'll focus on the first of five: Sustainable Sites.
My sustainable lifestyle (Site) is centered in an urban area where there are more than 10 basic services that include a bank, convenience grocery, day care, cleaners, beauty salon, laundromat, library, medical/dental, park, pharmacy (there's one in every block!), post office, restaurant (the whole street level is flooded with good places to eat), supermarket, theater, fitness center, and museum---all within less than a half-mile from homebase. Access to these services are pedestrian-friendly. Because of this strategic location, I am able to utilize alternative transportation: my shoes. I find that my vehicle-dependency became less and less and this results in reduction of my contribution to pollution and other adverse impacts of automobile usage. By this bold move alone, I've realized that I have drastically reduced my carbon emissions by more than fifty percent.
This new home I refer to is Chicago, dubbed as the "Greenest City" in the USA. An architecturally-rich palette that became the canvass for a lot of Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark buildings.
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LEED(r) is a registered trademark of the US Green Building Council
