SOLAR CITIES: National Geographic Emerging Explorers Symposium, Washington DC

Monday, June 8, 2009

National Geographic Emerging Explorers Symposium, Washington DC

We've arrived in Washington DC for what must be the most exciting symposium I've ever attended: The National Geographic Emerging Explorer's Symposium where, for an entire week, we get to present our Solar CIITES work alongside what one of our colleagues called a veritable "pantheon of luminary explorers", among them Zeresenay Alemseged, Gregory D. S. Anderson, Tim Appenzeller, Robert Ballard, Kenny Broad, Christina Conlee, Wade Davis, Jared Diamond, Luke Dollar, Sylvia Earle, Kirsten Elstner, Mike Fay, John Francis, Terry Garcia, Grace Gobbo, Beverly Goodman, K. David Harrison, Kristofer Helgen, Fred Hiebert, Zeb Hogan, Ben Horton, Shafqat Hussain, Dereck and Beverly Joubert, Albert Lin, Malik Marjan, Boyd Matson, Sam Meacham, Kurt Mutchler, Robert Pitman, Reza, Dominique Rissolo, Eric Sala, Katsufumi Sato, Paul Sereno, Greg Stone, Josh Thome, Katey Walter, Jonathan Waterman , Ted Waitt, Spencer Wells, Michael Wesche, and Nathan Wolfe, and Cheryl Zook.
One of the joys of this is being able to bring our friends and colleagues from Cairo into the auditorium of National Geographic through the medium of the blogosphere. We are presenting our ''melodic-mnemonic'' music-video "Talkin' Trash" to bring science, urban planning, social and environmental advocacy and authentic voice from marginalized communities to the world and presenting a short video of Hanna demonstrating the "home kitchen-waste to cooking gas system" we built. Since you may not be able to make it to the symposium, you can view both here, in this "virtual classroom without borders" in the blogosphere:

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Nobody owns the sun? Think again!

Actually, it turns out that this assumption isn't true! Go back and reread David Ricardo and the principle of COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE, then look at this map in the 1/08 edition of "Welt der Wunder" Magazine. While economist Paul Craig Roberts notes that comparative advantage principles do not hold where the factors of production are internationally mobile (such as solar collectors), the solar radiation potential of different countries varies considerably. The yellow regions on this map show very clearly who will "own the sun" in Ricardian terms. (Note that Portugal could also produce wool and England wine, but Ricardo's logic turned England into an economic powerhouse.)

Our vision in brief: The Solar CITIES five year plan

2008: Year One, first half (completed): $25,000 US AID Small Infrastructure Grant: Domestic Solar Hot Water Capacity Building, 15 of 30 systems completed, serving 17 households (the professional system in Darb El Ahmar feeds 3 households) and 1 monastery cafeteria.

2008: Year One, second half: $25,000 US AID Small Infrastructure Grant: Finish additional 15 systems, Integrating Roof Top Gardening with Rooftop Solar Water Provision (Hot and Cold for bathing and drip irrigation and storage) in close cooperation with the AKTC Environment NGO and the Darb El Ahmar Development Company in seven beneficiary households.

2009:Year Two, first half: Rooftop Urban Biogas production to be integrated into Solar and Gardening Program by following in the footsteps of the successful ARTI model from India (see http://www.arti-india.org/content/view/46/43/ for details and diagrams).

The External Relations Manager in charge of the CSR program of Procter & Gamble has committed to helping us find funding for the initial pilot project. Pig waste and organic garbage are going to be used as raw material for this project, which serves homes that cannot benefit from solar energy as the sun does not reach them.

2009: Year Two, second half: Integrated Solar Hot Water, Rooftop Gardening and Biogas (from garbage) merges with household source separation and rooftop composting & fertilizer production. This project will demonstrate how households can use sunlight and garbage to provide heat, cooking fuel, as well as food.

2009: Year Two - Follow up from Year 1- The Spirit of Youth Association intends to secure a grant to revive the ancient public baths of Darb El Ahmar, providing a large solar hot water system much as the zabaleen used to provide the heating fuel from waste paper in the past. DONORS NEEDED AND WELCOME!

2010: Year Three first half, Capacity building for domestic electricity production; workshops in creating small-scale wind generator construction and solar electric installation (following the engineers without borders and Solar Energy International workshop model, see http://www.solarenergy.org/workshops/wind.html).

2010: Year Three Second half, Innovations and applications in domestic WATER RECYCLING. FUNDING WILL BE SOLICITED TO PURCHASE "SOLAR CUBES" FROM RSD TECHNOLOGIES AS A MODEL, AND GRANT APPLICATIONS WILL BE WRITTEN TO FUND MATERIALS FOR LOCAL CREATION OF FUNCTIONALLY SIMILAR SYSTEMS FROM INDIGENOUS AND RECYCLED MATERIALS.

2011: Year Four, Scaling up to light industrial: The Spirit of Youth Association having successfully demonstrated their capacity for self-provisioning at the household level, starts training and supplying small business and factory owners in Sareib with the ability to generate their own heat and power to keep production costs down and make small businesses competitive in the area even as inflation rises.

2012: Year Five, The team of the Association, expanded and experienced, tours the region offering workshops and training throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Members of the NGO will be recognized as the "environmental technology experts of Egypt."

Solar CITIES Staff Bios:

T.H. Culhane:

Thomas Taha Rassam Culhane (a.k.a "T.H.") was born near the Museum of Science and Industry on the south side of Chicago to an Iraqi-Lebanese mother and an Irish-American
father and developed his love of engineering by almost religiously attending the museum's forward-thinking science exhibits.

When his Newsweek journalist father, John Culhane, moved the family to New York, Culhane was chosen by Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus president Irvin Feld to be the youngest graduate of their Clown College at the age of 13 and he joined the "Greatest Show on Earth" the following summer. In the circus, during the Cold War, Culhane toured with Russian and Chinese acrobats, with Elephants, Chimpanzees and other wonderful animals and people from every country and culture, who all got along.

These experiences instilled in Culhane a belief that all God's creatures, Great and Small, could cooperate peacefully and harmoniously toward the creation of joyful productions, and that science, art and industry could be the drivers of positive social transformation.

After graduating with honors from Harvard in Biological Anthropology, this conviction was confirmed during a year spent on a Rockefeller Fellowship in the primary rainforests of Borneo where Culhane worked with Harvard Professor Mark Leighton studying orangutans and gibbons and then lived with Missionaries and Melayu and Dyak tribespeople. In the jungle Culhane found that most organisms in environments with large biodiversity and cultural diversity quotients adopted "evolutionarily stable strategies" that led to long term sustainability.

This experience led Culhane into "the urban jungles" of inner-city education in the ghettoes of Los Angeles where for nearly a decade he applied his insights to working with multi-cultural "at-risk" youth and gang kids and discovered that a focus on common urban environmental challenges and their technological solutions created a context for cooperation, improving young people's education and their peace making skills. (He and his ex-wife, Dr. Sybille Fruetel Culhane, who taught negotiation and conflict resolution at the Sadat Academy for Management Sciences, later applied those insights to connecting Egyptian youth with Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian youth at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies.)

In the late 1990s Culhane immersed himself in Urban Planning at UCLA, conducting field work in rural rain forest villages in Guatemala and earning a Masters in Regional and
International Development. He then entered a Ph.D. program in Environmental Analysis and Policy to explore how recent immigrants from rural areas to inner-city slums could transform their adaptive knowledge-base to facilitate survival in degraded urban environments while Culhane performed urban ecology experiments of his own in waste recycling, water and energy management and self-provisioning, living among the poor at the Los Angeles Eco-Village.

When his mother, Hind Rassam Culhane, a professor of psychology, returned to Iraq in 2003 to head their educational reform campaign, Culhane, eager to find a good dissertation topic nearby, moved to Egypt to work on environmental science education and training among the urban poor. He chose to work with Professor Randall Crane on hot water demand among the poor as a topic for his Ph.D. and with the Zabaleen community of garbage recyclers on local construction of solar energy systems for his "Ph.-do". He believes this is the easiest and most logical first step toward creating sustainable grass-roots industrial ecology systems, something that he feels could unite people of all faiths toward a common goal.

He believes, in true circus fashion, that though things may get tough, "the show must go on."

Solar Cities Surveys

Solar Power Isn't Feasible?? Amazingly, many government and business leaders and ordinary people in Cairo actually believe this! Some policy makers have gone so far as to try and block funding for training local communities to build solar hot water systems saying that "the poor don't need hot water"!

The following surveys are about household demand for solar energy services, so that we can see how Cairo residents compare with other people around the world.

We start with Hot Water Demand. We use this data to compare with an official Ph.D. dissertation survey being conducted in the poor communities of Cairo, Egypt, where 3/4 of the population report having no hot water heaters and where dozens of lives are lost and hundreds of people suffer third degree burns every year trying to boil water on gas stoves for bathing. It is hoped that the data will help us to change policy in Egypt so that the poor can begin to afford and use solar energy infrastructure to create a healthier , happier life. Your participation is greatly appreciated!

Click here to take the full survey now. The survey was created with eSurveysPro.com, a free online survey software.

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Monday, June 8, 2009

National Geographic Emerging Explorers Symposium, Washington DC

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