Thursday, July 26, 2018, 12 noon WPKN 89.5 FM www.wpkn.org
Host: Duo Dickinson
Climate Change has microclimatic origins, but microclimate consequences: and the once place where everyone wants to control their environment is when they are at home. Weather in New England is varied, but its history has been volatile – Boston Harbor used to freeze over, there have been unending record high temperatures, and hurricanes overwhelm with zero predictability.
This leaves our most precious and most vulnerable structures, our homes, facing a changing future. How do we address this new reality? Design, law, technology, even our culture responds in the homes we build, and change, and sometimes, now, remove…
Joining us in studio is Joe MacDougald, Professor-in-Residence and the Executive Director of Center for Energy and Environmental Law at the UCONN Law School. Joe is also a board member and Director of Applied Research of CIRCA, the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation, where he focuses on Sea level Rise and it’s effect on Connecticut. Joe was a longtime public office holder in Madison Connecticut, including a selectman during both Hurricanes Irene and Sandy.
We will call one of the great advocates of environmentally sensitive architectural design for the last 40 years, architect and author Donald Watson, a Fellow in the AIA, but more a prolific writer, educator and designer of buildings. often homes, that are designed to use the environment and protect their owners from our changing climate. Don Watson has won dozens of awards, and been a consultant in environmentally sensitive design on many buildings all over the world. He has been the Dean at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s School of Architecture, taught at Yale, and written any number of publications and books, including “Climatic Building Design” published by McGraw-Hill, and most lately contributed to an encyclopedia of sustainability, “Bioclimatic Design”.
After that, we will talk to Sara C. Bronin, another UConn Law professor focusing on environmental, land use, and energy law. Outside the classroom, she has tackled climate change from several angles: as a development strategist, working for super-green projects like 360 State Street in New Haven; as the chair of the City of Hartford’s Planning & Zoning Commission, overseeing award-winning, pro-environment changes to the zoning code; and as the leader of the Climate Stewardship Initiative, which adopted Hartford’s first Climate Action Plan. She also chairs the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, which espouses the mantra that “the greenest building is one already built.”
Our homes are feeling the heat: but they are just the most obvious victims of world wide change brought to our doorstep.
