HuffPo’s Best Green Innovations List

This morning, I chanced across Green Inventions: 10 Hot Eco-Innovations That Could Change The Planet on Huffington Post Green. It’s a good list, including such modern wonders as LED lighting, industrial-scale composting, and LEED green building certification. However, it’s far from complete.

At the end of the article, readers were offered a chance to add to the list. Here’s what I wrote:

There are so many wonderful innovations: Zero Waste, passive solar design, urban rooftop farming (something I’ve been advocating since about 1980), small-space vertical gardens for apartment dwellers, lower-impact adaptive technology like using a tiny wheelchair hatchback instead of a big galumphing gas-guzzling wheelchair van (the hatchback door becomes a ramp–no hydraulics needed), solar chargers, the Stretch building code…the list goes on and on.

It’s an exciting time, and I am optimistic. Yes, it would have been easier to make all the sweeping changes 30 years ago–and we already knew how. I know of a house deep in the Colorado Rockies near Aspen (think snow, cold winters) that was designed so well–in 1983–that not only doesn’t it need a furnace, it has banana trees in the sunroom. But we can still get it together and reverse the damage to the planet while creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. All we need is the will.

I realize I didn’t even mention the money we save when we do these things, though I did get one of the economic arguments in (jobs).