Edinburgh's Most Famous Native Son

Dateline: Edinburgh, Scotland

Grave of Adam Smith

Who knew that Edinburgh's most famous native son was Adam Smith? Even more interesting, the grave of the father of modern free-market capitalism is behind a museum dedicated to the proletariat! The exhibitions in the museum trace the conditions of the working class through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

Carbon Offsets: Who Should Be Picking Up This Tab?

Last month I purchased a round trip airplane ticket online for a trip to Denver from Detroit. At the end of the transaction, Delta airlines invited me to contribute $11.74 to the Nature Conservancy to "offset your share of carbon emissions for this trip." The distance traveled will be approximately 2,300 miles.

Maybe I am missing something here. But who is the carbon culprit in this case? Shouldn't Delta, who is producing the carbon emissions and making a profit in doing so, be making the carbon offset donation?

Some Laughs to Start Your Weekend!

With special thanks to John G Colby, a retired, Northern Virginia real estate developer and a very old friend. Even if these are photoshopped, as Colby puts it, "the images are certainly credible, and funny!"

CONTRACTOR OF THE YEAR

The Nominees are: 

(1 & 2)

(3 & 4)

(5)

(6 & 7)

(8)

(9)

No, You can't have your money!

(10)

AND The Winner :

(Imagine some drumbeats here)

Welcome Aboard the Salant Express

Welcome to my remodeled website and my blog.

After 8 years it was time to get more connected (my blog and Twitter remarks on my website’s home page!). And, it was time to reorganize my archived columns to highlight my current interests and the sea changes that have occurred in the home building and remodeling business since 2003 when I started the website.

Some categories are new.

“Emotional Intelligence,” one of the new categories, focuses on the connections between “house” and psychology. For example, why does it take the hanging of photographs and art work and the displaying of family treasures and knick knacks from travel to make your new or new-to-you house feel like it’s home? Hint: it’s more than just the visuals.

“The Big Picture” is another new category organized around this question: In this post-McMansion era, what will be the next version of the American Dream?

“Remodeling” is also new. In the current economy more people are remodeling than are building new houses, and more readers are interested in this.

“Green and Greener” was needed because I have written so many columns on green building I needed to organize them into subcategories. The number of green building products available in nearly every building category has exploded. And, the environmental impacts of home building and home owning have become critical as we have become more knowledgeable about the connections between home energy use and climate change. In the U.S., most households use energy derived from coal, natural gas, and oil. When these fossil fuels are burned to produce energy, they also produce the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global warming.

With the blog I also hope to share the nuggets of useful info that often end up on the cutting room floor as I write my regular Housewatch column. For example, now that summer is here, you can reduce the energy needed to run your central A/C by about 24 percent if you simply turn the thermostat up two degrees from 72 to 74. If the air is humid, moving air across your skin will keep you comfortable. The energy needed to run a floor or a ceiling fan is much less that the amount needed to run the A/C.

Look for new posts on Tuesdays and Fridays!

Is Your Ecological Footprint Shoe-Sized or Cello-Case Sized?

The recent UN-sponsored Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen focused on the ways mankind is adversely affecting the earth’s atmosphere. But in fact we are adversely impacting every natural system on the planet, not just our atmosphere.

The Ecological Footprint is a way of quantifying this.

The originator of the concept, environmentalist Mathis Wackernagel, converted all the earth's resources, including the oceans, crop land, fresh water resources, forests and the atmosphere into a single unit of measurement, productive hectares of land. He termed these “global hectares.” Then he calculated each person's share. That's the Ecological Footprint. With 6.9 billion people on the planet, the average stands at 1.6 global hectares per person. (1.6 global hectares equals about 2 acres.)

The size of an average American's ecological footprint, however, has ballooned to about 9 global hectares. If everyone on earth lived like we do, we would need five planets, clearly an unsustainable proposition.

What’s the size of your Ecological Footprint? The links below offer several different ways to measures it.

You may discover that your lifestyle has more impact than you think. Running the numbers for my regular routine in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which I had always considered benign, my scores were a bit over the average American’s and ranged from 5.06 to 5.4 planets (that is, if everyone lived like me we would need more than 5 planets).

I also plugged in the data for Manhattan, where I lived for the last year, and my score went down by only one planet. I had expected the difference to be greater because in New York we lived in a small, high rise apartment and used the subway exclusively. But air travel, meat consumption and not buying 100 percent locally raised food (buying any local produce was almost impossible in our neighborhood on Roosevelt Island) consume an enormous amount of resources no matter where you live.

Best Foot Forward www.ecologicalfootprint.com

Earthday Network Footprint Calculator http://earthday.net/footprint2/index.html

Center for Sustainable Economy www.myfootprint.org

Global Footprint Network www.footprintnetwork.org

Ecology Fund http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/res_bestfoot.html will give you the size of your footprint if you lived in the UK. Mine was  about half the size of my American footprint because Europeans use far fewer resources than Americans.

A great read on the state of our planet – Lester Brown’s “Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” (W.W. Norton $16.95)

A Kitchen for a Bad Hair Day

Who says that kitchens must be dreary, utilitarian spaces? Only those bean counters who have never cooked a day in their lives!!!

As British kitchen designer Johnny Grey says, the places that we inhabit affect our lives so why not have spaces that affect them for the better and make cooking a pleasure even in a bad hair day!