Blue Is the New Green - artigo de Allison Arieff no NYTimes

Excelente artigo de Allison Arieff no www.nytimes.com.

Fala sobre Água e a sua gestao e utilizaçao, sobretudo nos EUA, mas que se aplica penso eu a quase todo o planeta, sobretudo o planeta urbano.
Propoem de Green roofs y Live Walls, assim como algumas noçoes de reutilizaçao da agua das chuvas para efeitos domésticos como a rega de plantas, autoclismo.

Aponta que a crescente tendencia à procura de energias verdes é/foi fortemente influenciada pela escala dos preços do petroleo, e que desde que o preço do petroleo começou a baixar, essa tendencia também baixou... O que pode indicar que para o "mercado" essa tendencia era puramente de cariz economico e muito pouco ambiental.

Aqui vao uns excertos do artigo que está na sua totalidade aqui: http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/blue-is-the-new-green/

With gas back down in the $2 to $2.50 a gallon range, there was talk of this all being less urgent, something that could be addressed later. T. Boone Pickens even scrapped plans for the wind farm!

This is such a strange notion: that an interim price drop somehow solves the larger issue of our dependence on oil. And it's something we see with another precious resource: water.

As individuals we receive messaging about water that is dramatically similar to the messaging we receive about energy consumption — and constitutes an equivalent drop in the bucket towards solving the problem. Public service announcements urge us to, alternately, swap out conventional light bulbs for compact fluorescents, or turn off the water while brushing our teeth.

Both are important small steps; neither can begin to mitigate the larger challenges of resource depletion.

"We use huge infrastructure to move and deliver water," says landscape architect Josiah Cain of Design Ecology, who worked on the design for the California Academy of Sciences' distinctive living roof (below). "We wash our face with or take a shower with it, then we use that water, treat it with chemicals and dump it into our waterways. It doesn't make any sense. There's no such thing as waste water. We need to take advantage of water multiple times."

Living (or "green") roofs are one of several integrated water management systems.