Lost Mountain Assignment #2

I found the second assignment of Lost Mountain to be slightly less intriguing. I won't say it was not informative, but I did struggle to read it a little more this time and I think that is partly due to how depressing it is. Towards the end of the section, though, Reece has a chapter called "The Ecovillage" where he talks about just that: an environmentally friendly complex at Berea College. This chapter got me engaged in the book again, because it told me that there was hope and that some people are trying.

The Ecovillage was designed to take advantage of natural biological processes in order to filter and clean waste water. The same water that people flush down the toilet is being recycled as their drinking water, which sounds awful, but one man's waste is another's treasure. Of course I have no idea, but it seems like if we could make that filtering process the main process we use, we would save a lot of energy.

The heating and cooling system is interesting as well. A series of underground pipes take advantage of the fairly constant temperature of subsoil, around 57 degrees, to bring the temperature of the apartments down in the summer and up in the winter. The design of the building also contributes to this, by having most windows face south in order to utilize passive solar heat. Apparently a temperature guage can automatically open windows in the summer if it gets too warm, which seems unnecessary to me because most people could open windows on their own if they needed, but there could be a better reason that I just didn't pick up on when I was reading.

I'm sure there are disadvantages to living in such a place, but to me, it seems like an incredible advancement in "living green." If nothing else, the students will learn the importance of their actions on the environment, and getting people to understand is the first step in fixing the problem.