University, College Win Livable Building Awards

The Center for the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley has chosen higher education buildings to be two of the three winners of its Livable Building Awards for 2007.

Carnegie Institution for Science's Global Ecology Research Center at Stanford University won for features such as a radiant cooling system that has helped to cut carbon emissions from building operations by 72%. Its wood doors were salvaged from old wine vats and it also has an energy-efficient water system.

Also a winner: The Kirsch Center at De Anza College and part of the credit for the award definitely belongs to the Cupertino, Calif., community college's own students. De Anza's student government earmarked $180,000 of its own funds for the center, which has gotten second-highest designation from the U.S. Green Building Council.

With green building so hot a topic on college campuses these days, it's perhaps not surprising that there was also a university among the seven finalists. Donald Bren Hall at the University of California, Santa Barbara was given an honorable mention.

Cool Heads At The Carnegie Institution

There's an interesting opinion piece in The New York Times this morning. Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, thinks it may be possible to cool the globe by shooting small amounts of sulfate particles into the stratosphere. He likens the strategy to the cooling that followed the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. It blasted large amounts of sulfate particles into the sky, which then reflected the sun's rays away from the Earth.

I'll leave it to others to discuss the scientific merits of Caldeira's proposal. The purpose of this blog is to look at where you can get an education in the environment, and the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology certainly qualifies as one of those places. Housed on the campus of Stanford University, it has offered research opportunities to undergrads, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and their professors since 2002. You can check out some of its recent research topics here. For the post-doctoral crowd, its Web site notes an opening for an associate in global ecology to conduct research on permafrost feedbacks to the global carbon cycle. The application deadline was October 1, but the post is still up and it notes that later applications may be considered.