Friday Evening: Onstage at McKim: Talking About Green Building

In person and over the web, Building Sustainability is proud to present:

Paula Gordon, Kimberley, BC

Host of "The Paula Gordon Show: Conversations with People at the Leading Edge"(sm), Paula and co-host Bill Russell have since 1996 welcomed nearly a thousand luminaries exploring all aspects of the human experience. Among them are leading sustainability thinkers and actors including Ray C. Anderson, Janine Benyus, Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, Bill McKibben, Richard Leakey and Drs. David Orr, Karl-Henrik Robèrt, Carl Safina, Edward O. Wilson and David Suzuki. For 5 years, features drawn from the Show aired on CNN/Radio’s 2,300 radio stations worldwide and a variety of other broadcast and webcase outlets, others helped launch CNN.com. Video program selections are available on both YouTube and DailyMotion.com.

A regular contributor to HuffingtonPost.com, Paula is also president of Clarion Group Live, Inc. For more than 20 years, this consultancy has focused on communications challenges among diverse constituencies. As a Trustee of the Interdenominational Theological Center in the U.S., she was instrumental in the creation of “TheoEcology” there, and serves on the boards of Quantum Leaps, Inc., a global accelerator for women’s business; Public Intelligence, Inc.; and Investigations Group, Inc. Among her honors over the years was an Emmy® nomination for “Small World”, a weekly program she hosted for WMAQ/TV, NBC in Chicago. She and husband Bill Russell are sustainably restoring a long-neglected miner’s house in downtown Kimberley, eager for the day it will be their home.

Sarah Susanka, FAIA, Raleigh, North Carolina

Sarah Susanka, FAIA, is the leader of a movement that is redefining the American home and lifestyle. Through her “build better, not bigger” approach to residential design she has demonstrated that the sense of “home” we seek has to do with quality, not quantity.

She is the author of eight best-selling books including The Not So Big House, Home By Design, and The Not So Big Life. In March 2009, Taunton Press published Not So Big Remodeling, in which Susanka shows readers that it is possible to remodel a house in a not so big way, as time and money allow, in order to make it more functional, more inspiring and most importantly, more sustainable.

Susanka is a sought-after resource by industry groups and professional organizations around the country and regularly shares her insights with media such as “The Oprah Show,” “Charlie Rose,” USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

In 2007, Susanka received the Anne Morrow Lindbergh Award for outstanding individual achievement toward making positive contributions to our world, and in January 2009 she was recognized by Builder Magazine as one of the 30 most notable innovators in the housing industry over the past 30 years.

David Eisenberg, Tuscon, Arizona

David Eisenberg co-founded and leads the non-profit Development Center for Appropriate Technology (DCAT) in Tucson, Arizona. His three decades of building experience range from troubleshooting construction of the steel and glass cover of Biosphere2, to building a $2 million structural concrete house, a hypoallergenic structural steel house, and masonry, wood, adobe, rammed earth, and straw bale structures. Since 1995 David has led the effort to create a sustainable context for building codes. A former two-term member of the U.S. Green Building Council Board of Directors, he founded and chairs the USGBC Code Committee.
 
David has presented workshops, seminars, keynote addresses and lectures at dozens of conferences and universities in the U.S. and abroad, including a Congressional briefing and U.S. Department of Interior-sponsored symposium on straw bale affordable, energy-efficient housing for Native American communities. He has written for Building Safety Journal (magazine of the International Code Council), co-authored The Straw Bale House book, and has written dozens of published articles, forewords, book chapters and papers. David and DCAT received the 2007 International Code Council (ICC) Affiliate of the Year Award and a 2007 USGBC Leadership Award.
 
David currently serves on the ICC Sustainable Building Technology Committee drafting the International Green Construction Code intended to be part of the 2012 I-Codes. Recent presentations include keynotes at the Green Building Focus Conference in Birmingham, Alabama, in Belgium at the 2009 European Straw Bale Conference, and a talk sponsored by the Hastings, England Borough Council and the Hastings Trust, as well as to universities, public officials, and engineering and design organizations on a trip partially supported by the U.S. State Department to Amman Jordan, Riyadh, Dammam and Jeddah Saudi Arabia, and Tel Aviv Israel. As well, within the past year, David spoke to the New Zealand Institute of Architects in Auckland, the Warkworth, NZ Transition Towns Group, at City Council Chambers in Christchurch, NZ, and in Australia at the University of Ballarat, and at Sustainable Building 08 (SB08) in Melbourne.

Tang Lee, Calgary, Alberta

Tang Lee began designing solar heating systems in 1975, and in 1979 he formed the Calgary chapter of the Solar Energy Society of Canada. He teaches building science, indoor air quality, sustainable design, mechanical and civil engineering at several universities in Canada and abroad. He is on several committees of Health Canada, National Research Council of Canada and Canadian Standards Association. He upgrades the training manual and provides examination questions for safety codes officers (building inspectors). He is qualified as an expert witness in civil and criminal cases in the areas of architecture, building science, building codes, construction, indoor air quality and general health. Tang Lee is also an architect designing healthy and sustainable (solar heated) buildings and planning sustainable communities throughout Canada.

Stuart Cowan, Portland, Oregon

Stuart Cowan is a leading expert in the integration of the science of complex systems, ecological design, and finance. He has helped to secure over $325 million in financing for green buildings, renewable energy, and ecosystem restoration. He is the co-founder of Autopoiesis LLC (www.apoiesis.com), which has worked to build new financial models and metrics for sustainable businesses, communities, and regions.

Stuart was previously Transaction Manager at Portland Family of Funds, a sustainable investment bank, where he oversaw comprehensive triple-bottom-line metrics and worked on numerous LEED development projects, including the Portland Armory, the first Platinum LEED historic renovation in the world. Prior to that, he was Research Director at Ecotrust, where he led the creation of the Conservation Economy framework for bioregional sustainability (www.conservationeconomy.net), which has been used internationally.

Stuart is the co-author with noted green building pioneer Sim Van der Ryn of Ecological Design (Island Press, 1996/2007), which is widely recognized as a founding text in the field of sustainable architecture and planning and has been translated into 3 languages. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics (Complex Systems focus) from the University of California at Berkeley and has taught at several universities. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and daughter and grew up on Vancouver Island.