Trashy Skyscraper Grows Over Time

Yup, you read that headline correctly.

Smallman Construction and Electric report on a new type of architecture that might just been the weirdest type of building I've ever heard of, and its actually being built in London! Dubbed the "Organic Skyscraper", the materials that create this tower are all made from recycled and compressed plastic and paper that are generated within the building.

The Growing Skyscraper, credit

French designer Chartier-Corbasson Architects state that this skyscraper will be equipped with a recycling center so that all the wastes needed to create the panels for new construction can be produced on site--talk about zero waste in a closed loop system!

The in-house recycling system, credit

But wait, did I mention that that new construction will be happening on top of the old building at an "as needed" basis? Chartier-Corbasson took their inspiration from bamboo that grows upwards section by section; as business grows and new space is needed, the waste of the past is converted into new material to be put on top. The scaffolding structure of this skyscraper is also interlaced with a network of poles, much like asian bamboo scaffolding.

According to Smallman, "The Paris-based firm believe that in a year a single office worker uses 80 plastic bottles and 75 kg of paper, which can be recycled into one and two insulated panels respectively." That means that the occupants of the proposed tower produce enough waste to build the facade in one year.

Since the initial price of a full-grown tower is so expensive, it does make more economic sense to start small and add on as the opportunity grows. As the tower gets larger, its occupants will be able to supply building materials more quickly, make it grow faster, or lend materials to new organic towers, more quickly as well.

Could organic skyscrapers be the new norm as waste removal and sprawl take their toll? Can there be any downside to living in old trash?

While undoubtedly an awesome and very green idea, the tower's test run in London will let us know how it really works.

The Gaviota Coast: Southern California's Last Wild Coastland

During my senior year at UCSB I completed a nine-month long internship with the County of Santa Barbara, Long Range Planning Division. I worked under professional planners and was tasked with composing bits and pieces of real planning documents, including the Cumulative Impact Report for both the Gaviota Coast and Eastern Goleta Valley Community Plans, and the Gaviota Coast Future Buildout Calculations. I also helped with writing webpages, compiling notes, and writing memos for the Isla Vista Parking Program, the Winery Ordinance, the Smart Build Santa Barbara Update, and the Housing Element Update.

While I enjoyed every moment of my time working as a Planning Intern for the County, my first project was the most special to my heart: The Gaviota Coast Plan is a program-level plan that will, for now and into the future, protect one of southern California's last remaining swaths of pristine coast land.

The Gaviota Coast, credit

I was thrilled when I first learned I would be working on this Plan. After all, I could have been tasked with more humanitarian projects, like the housing for low-income families (a worthy cause, surely, but not entirely about the environment). I was excited to see that government really was working towards the presevation of our land.

The Gaviota Coast is 158 square miles of coast land west of the city of Goleta near Santa Barbara, CA. This land is almost entirely marked as rural, from its sheer cliffs and ocean at the south to the Santa Ynez Mountains at the north. Several communities of riparian, grassland, and woodland species dominate. The land is traversed by the Highway 101 and the Union Pacific Rail Road, which unfortunatly cut off both animal movement and human beach access.

The Gaviota Coast Plan area contains 1,006 Acessor's Parcel Numbers (APNs), the majority of which are owned by private entities. A minority of these APNs are owned by the state, the federal government, or by the Railroad.

Isn't it lovely? credit

If the land of Gaviota is all parceled up to private owners, they why hasn't it been developed like the cities to it's east? Coastal properties go for top dollar and would create a good economic boost.

The truth is, some of the land in the pristine, undeveloped coast is developed. Hollister Ranch is one of these private developments where around 133 parcels host ranchette style homes within a private community. Other such communities include the Zacara Ranch, though there are still more smaller individually owned "ranches" as well.

A Hollister Ranch ranchette, credit

The rest of Gaviota is open space, the pasture where cattle may or may not still exist. This is the land that the Gaviota Coast Plan is working to preserve forever. While privately owned, this land is defined in the Plan as agricultural, whether AgI, AgII or some other level (these levels of agriculture simply describe what kind of operation may occur. Think in the terms of a small family dairy versus a factory farm operation). The Gaviota Coast Plan proposes to keep these parcels in the agricultural zoning, or to even turn some parcels zoned for "open space", which is more easily turned to "residential" or "commercial", into "recreational". The zoning of recreational preserves land in much the same way that the "open space" zoning would, but it makes developing the parcels nearly impossible.

Parcels in the Gaviota Coast Plan area. Credit

The agricultural zoning that I mentioned above does allow for a certain level of development. Usually an Ag parcel may contain a main housing unit, a smaller secondary unit, and four farm-hand units. The secondary and farm worker units are all limited to some extent by the building code to avoid any development loopholes. Smaller structure such as pools, horse riding arenas, and greenhouses. While this level of development may occur, it is tightly regulated via the County's permitting system to ensure that no extra development does occur and that the Coast keeps the open, rural feel that we all know and love. In other words, a highly dense neighborhood could not occur in Gaviota because of the zoning restrictions. It is interesting to note that there is also an attitude of preservation in Gaviota. The owners of these million dollar homes do not want their views and peace interrupted by crowding!


For this project, I was tasked with creating the Cumulative Impact List (CIL) and the Future Buildout Calculations (FB). Both of these documents are somewhat difficult to understand at first because they both deal with a good bit of predicting the future. One must look at what projects and plans are occurring within and surrounding the Plan area, and then extrapolate that out. For the CIL I gathered ever project, plan, and permit that had been submitted or approved within the last three to four years within the Gaviota Plan area and in surrounding communities. I then divided these into four categories by criteria that I composed myself. Categories one and three were "county policy projects, programs, or initiatives or amendments to ordinances that have an overarching effect into the Plan area" and those that do not, respectively. Categories two and four were "substantial discretionary or ministerial projects within the plan area and major pending and potential projects spatially proximate to, but not necessarily inside the plan area including land annexations or large urban developments" and those that did not qualify, respectively. The CIL is a systematic way to compile these past, present, and future projects to assess how a project (the Gaviota Coast Plan) will impact the Plan area and all other relevant projects. It's a tricky task, but very important to assessing if a Plan should be accepted or rejected. 

The FB has similar intentions, to look at past buildout (or the total amount of all types of development) and extrapolate out how future development might look. FB allows us to understand if the project is appropriate for the environment and other landuses in the vicinity. We decided to use a "worse case scenario" in our FB, meaning that I was to calculate 100% buildout that could occur if this Plan were to be implemented. Using the data of currently developed parcels, and total parcels, I compiled an Excel spreadsheet that detailed how many units each parcel could legally build under the new zoning. Luckily for me, there are no industrial or commercial zoning in Gaviota. The Plan area contains only agricultural, residential, open space, and recreational, which helped to cut down the amount of calculations needed. 

In all, this internship taught me several valuable skills. I became very comfortable with local zoning laws, building codes, CEQA, and even NEPA. I was able to master the computer programs Photomapper and Dreamweaver. I learned to approach my superiors when I needed help but to also work independently and figure out my own difficulties. I had my first experience working in an office setting, and go practice with answering emails and phone calls in a professional manner. I really enjoyed this internship and hope to someday work in government again. 

The Unsettling Progress of Fracking

Following my last post about the dangers of fracking (especially in a drought), I bring to you a more recent and troubling news report on fracking that unfortunately hits me right at home.

Earlier this year, the Federal Government signed off on permit revisions for the Company DCOR that allows this oil company to both begin off-shore fracking without any environmental impact analysis (apparently fracking is exempt from CEQA and NEPA) and to dump over nine billion gallons of fracking fluid into the Santa Barbara Channel each year.  

Stern's Warf and the Beautiful Santa Barbara Harbor. Panoramio

The Santa Barbara shoreline has always been naturally covered in tar due to the unique geology of the channel; crude oil and natural gas happen to be trapped beneath a sub-aquatic layer of rock that formed between the mainland and the Channel Islands. From the prehistoric times of the Chumash Native Americans, pitch that washed ashore was used by people for waterproofing baskets and tomol canoes. More recently, the Santa Barbara coast has become pockmarked by oil rigs, which have inspired art (Crystal Ship by the Doors), created an oil economy, and most importantly, started a revolution.

In 1969, an oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel (which remains the biggest oil spill ever in California) resulted in devastating consequences for marine ecosystems in the Channel. The public outcry from this catastrophe was enough to spawn the first Earth Day the following year. This oil spill also resulted in the local University of California creating a new department of study, one that was mostly unheard of in other universities around the country: the Environmental Studies Program.

1969 Santa Barbara Channel Oil Spill from Platform A. Edible Communities

Both this annual holiday and new college program were centered on the ideal that we, as a species, could live more simply and be more aware of our impact on the planet and all of her resources. At UCSB, this flower-child philosophy has evolved over time to become a world-renowned and scientifically-backed program of study, from which this proud author recently graduated.

With all of this history being said, it deeply saddens and angers me that this injustice is happening once again right where the environmental movement began. As stated by the Farron Cousins, perhaps the public is not becoming enraged because this dumping of toxic sludge is no accident. Being a federally approved act of pollution, no one seems to mind.

A map of the Santa Barbara Channel and Oil Rigs (pink diamonds). Mission & State

DCOR and government officials have stated that any used fracking fluid will be sent on-land for processing and filtering before being taken back to the oil rig for dumping into the ocean. However, it is highly debateable whether any of these efforts taken to filter the fracking fluid will truly reduce its toxicity (see my previous post for more information on the dangers of fracking).

So what can we do to stop fracking and dumping alike? Support the Center for Biological Diversity in their February 2014 legal petition to the EPA to stop fracking or tell Governer Brown to stop fracking now.

What the Frack?

Fracking and Groundwater, courtesy of EcoWatch

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking for short, is a process of injecting a high-pressure mixture of water, chemicals, and substrates into a drilled pipeline in order to release oil and natural gas from solid shale. While some fracking advocates argue that this practice is in the public and environment’s best interest by providing vital energy without drilling new oil wells, many anti-fracking activists, most notably in California, are not convinced in the slightest. 

In my opinion, no person with any sense of social or environmental responsibility could promote this practice, especially now as we endure the third year of drought in Southern California. Environmentalists are now hailing water as the next nonrenewable resource. Water conservation programs instituted by private and public agencies alike are becoming common, as is the practice of saving water in private residences. We are all aware of how much we rely on water, and we are all experiencing this global change phenomenon right in our own backyards as living organisms shrivel and die in the unrelenting sun; and the rain just won’t come.

If my dramatics haven’t painted it clearly enough, we are in a dire situation where water could hardly be more valuable for our environment, wildlife, and ourselves. And yet, energy companies want to mix this precious resource with carcinogens and sand, and pump it into the earth? Mind = blown.

Let’s pretend for a moment that we are not in the driest year of the last 119 years. Even when there is water to spare for fracking (if there is ever such a time in water-scarce So-Cal), this water must be mixed with “up to 600 chemicals, including known carcinogens and toxins” including formaldehyde, mercury, lead, uranium, radium, and hydrochloric acid". This toxic slurry, called fracking fluid, then is pressurized and sent down into the well to fracture shale deposits, which then releases the prized oil and gas we so crave. 

Yet there is no action without a reaction, and oftentimes contamination occurs. Natural gas and those toxic additives may escape and pollute groundwater supplies. Even worse, between 50-70% of fracking fluids are unrecoverable, and are left in the well to continue to pollute water supplies in the long term. In California alone, 16 million people depend on our groundwater supplies. In case you had any doubts about how dangerous fracking can be to public health, “There have been over 1,000 documented cases of water contamination next to areas of gas drilling as well as cases of sensory, respiratory, and neurological damage due to ingested contaminated water" (DangersofFracking.com).

With so many people, nearly half the population of California, relying on groundwater for survival, can we choose fracking in good conscious? Now let’s recall that we are in the most serious drought in recorded weather history in Southern California. How can fracking be justified when we know that water is a precious and nearly non-renewable resource? How can we pollute the small supply we have left? 

The only outcomes of continued fracking seem bleak; once the clean water disappears and the only reserves left are too polluted to drink, our only options will be to pump water in from elsewhere or desalinization. These choices leave extreme expense and environmental destruction in their wake. The final outcome, once we have stripped this land of all its precious liquids and gases, is of course desertion. We will leave our major southern California cities in mass for more northern places where water still flows, creating a new Detroit of desert. 

To you, I send out a plea: vote no on fracking measures to your local state representative, in California and beyond. We need to let our voices be heard, to say no to polluting our ground waters and yes to other, alternative, renewable energies. We need to beat down the big-oil titans and let our Governor Jerry Brown know that this practice is unacceptable, on or off the coast. Follow this link if you wish to contact your local representative.