East Bay Cohousing - Berkeley/Oakland/Emeryville/SF

April 20, 2010 7:00 PM - 0 attended

Building Materials You Wish You’d Never Used: and what to do about it now (SF)

Every building material does damage to our environment and potentially to our health. But there are some materials that are far more hazardous than others.

On April 20th, Architects Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) and the Ecological Building Network will present information on a few of the more dangerous (and commonly used) materials, including PVC vinyl and the chemical flame retardants used in rigid insulation, foam cushions, and fabrics.

The extent to which these materials are used is frightening, even more frightening is the risk that they pose to the environment and to personal health and safety. Dr. Arlene Blum and Tom Lent will discuss not only the perils of these materials, but more importantly will offer solutions and alternatives that will reduce the dangers that we create.

We're listing this as an EBCOHO event for three reasons:

Every forming cohousing core group we've worked with spends a lot of time talking about how to build greener. This talk provides very direct advice on that topic.
ADPSR is an innovative green group, pioneering in this field for over a quarter century, providing lots of info relevant to cohousers.
One of the speakers, Tom Lent, is a co-founder and former resident of of Berkeley Cohousing, and I keep running into him at the farmer's market ;-)

Dr. Arlene Blum is the Founder and Executive Director of the Green Science Policy Institute. Dr. Blum is a biophysical chemist, visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Department of Chemistry, and author of Annapurna: A Woman’s Place and Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life. Blum’s research contributed to the regulation of two cancer-causing flame retardants used in children’s sleepwear in the 1970s, and prevented unnecessary flammability standards that would have led to the use of hundreds of millions of pounds of persistent toxic chemicals each year. Dr. Blum was selected by the National Women’s History Project as one of 100 “Women Taking the Lead to Save Our Planet,” received the Society of Women Geographers’ Gold Medal, and a top Purpose Prize from Civic Ventures. Please see www.arleneblum.com

Tom Lent is the Policy Director for the Healthy Building Network, and is responsible for defining HBN's guiding philosophy and policies with regard to building materials. Tom has spent nearly 30 years working on the environmental impact of buildings, materials, and energy in both the private sector and with public interest groups. A highly regarded expert in the field of green health care facilities design and operations, Tom was a founding coordinator of the Green Guide for Health Care, sits on the steering committee of the LEED Application Guide for Health Care of the US Green Building Council, and is an advisor to Kaiser Permanente. Tom is currently overseeing the development of the Pharos rating criteria and data entry, working closely with the Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies at the University of Tennessee. Learn more here.

RSVP here on the East Bay Cohousing website to see who else is going. Learn more, reserve your spot, and buy your ticket on the ADPSR website event page.

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Berkeley, CA

Founded Oct 22, 2003

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Imagine lively people-scaled communities dotting the San Francisco Bay Area - places co-created by their residents for raising kids, for retirement, for growing food or simply living well by sharing more. The Bay Area already has ecovillages, and cohousing neighborhoods, resident-owned housing cooperatives, and group houses -- real world places where we can live more sustainably through a more cooperative way of life. You can have both privacy and community when you know your neighbors on purpose, in day-to-day relationships based on common vision and values.

East Bay Cohousing (EBCOHO) is a Bay Area-wide MeetUp. We connect a wide variety of kindred spirits and resources. We support individuals wanting to learn more, forming groups looking to create community together, and members of existing communities. We are mostly in the East Bay and San Francisco; others are from the North and South Bay, Los Angeles, Nevada, and other parts of the US and Mexico.

There are over two dozen cohousing communities in the greater Bay Area, (more cohousing in Oakland than any other U.S. city). There are also dozens of other emerging and long-established intentional communities. EBCOHO members have recently bought or rented homes in cohousing neighborhoods and cooperatively owned apartment buildings in Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland , Pleasant Hill, Grass Valley, Santa Rosa, and Nevada City. We have members living in Swan's Market Cohousing, Triple Point, Temescal Commons, Berkeley Cohousing, Parker Street Coop, Berkeley Town House, Addison Court Coop and established forming groups like East Lake Cohousing (formerly North Oakland Cohousing).

Extra bonus for 2012: The National Cohousing Conference is coming to town in June!

We host EBCOHO events for members, and link you to other events featuring a global network of friends and allies: pioneers in cooperative culture and sustainable communities: urban farmers, affordable housing developers, green builders, and creative visionaries in the movements for more open, user-friendly and collaborative technologies, economies, and governments. There's a global reinvention of communiies going on - both on the ground and online -- and the Bay Area is one of the world's epicenters.

EBCOHO has more events than our MeetUp-based home page can show fully, so please click on our Calendar to see more. Join for free to get involved! There's no charge for basic membership, but supporting members get discounts on some events, including socials, and workshops, cohousing books, and Cohousing Coaching.

Join us for an orientation, for social events, discussion, talks with exciting speakers, and hands-on workshops to learn the tools for developing good group relationships, and the real estate development process.. Find others who share your vision for supportive neighbors. Do it for yourself, for your family, for your parents, do it for the Earth! Make 2012 the year to deepen YOUR community connections.