Living Green
Putting colour on environmental protection
By ASST PROF ATCH SRESHTHAPUTRA
Decades ago, building green meant incorporating a lot of green scenery in our environment. Major construction projects in town were required by law to have sufficient open space and a reserved vegetational area.
Housing schemes deployed the idea of having more-than-stipulated green space as a main selling point. Many even located their residential projects outside the city in order to acquire cheaper and bigger plots of land to support the green concept. Clean air and a quiet environment on the outskirts of the nation's capital was something Bangkokians who could not tolerate downtown congestion looked for.
The word "commuter" is used to describe middle-class people who can afford cars and gasoline. It is now obvious that wherever there are expressways, real estate development is there, and the developers' customers are to commute if the cost of transportation is offset by clean air and large, open green spaces.
This phenomenon has taken hold of other countries, too. It is called "urban sprawl". The dilemma is: When some people try very hard to go for green living, they have no idea that they are also destroying the greenness of other people at the same time.
How many trees have been cut down to pave the way to the suburbs or for highways? How much "natural" greenery has been destroyed and replaced by "artificial" nice-looking trees? Who cares?
As long as the government spends our tax money on the construction of expressways, local construction workers get paid, building material suppliers sell more, and farmers are happy to exchange their farmlands for cellphones and motorcycles to ride to work in factories.
This kind of development seems to make everyone happy, so it is the direction in which the country has been heading.
Today, with erratically soaring oil prices and the increasing green house effects that have caused rising concerns among the vast majority of us, it is clear that only real green can actually save us.
So what is real green? Real green does not mean just "for here and now", but "for all and forever".
This notion would appear to be directly related to the term "sustainability", a word that is easy to say but difficult to do. Basically, we can grow new trees that will mature in 10 to 20 years, but we cannot build a new ecosystem. New suburban residential projects are mushrooming, but this fact does not seem to have spurred the authorities into placing more-stringent regulations on land development, such as retaining a portion of the existing trees or setting the maximum distance to the nearest community services (to save fuel).
On the contrary, the authorities have merely set rules for housing projects to have more green space - usually grass lawns for children's playgrounds. Some projects try to have more trees in their compounds by uprooting trees from elsewhere and replanting them on their vacant land. Trees have become a symbol for helping to create a green image for all housing projects. Well, this is not a bad idea, but it's not good enough.
What is really sad is that no new trees are actually being grown on Earth, while existing ecosystems are being destroyed.
Thanks to the recent soaring oil prices, the rise of urban sprawl has been halted, although not completely stopped, for the cost of commuting 100 kilometres a day to and fro to go to work could eat up half of a commuter's household income.
Suburban housing schemes are being abandoned because potential buyers want to own homes that are close to their workplaces to save on gasoline. This situation has opened the way for downtown development, especially in areas near subway and Skytrain stations.
High-rise condominiums are sprouting at full speed. Many are sold out within a day or two of their booking dates. For downtown residential projects with more than 79 living units, a new rule was set: One tree must be provided for every one tonne of air-conditioning used in the project.
This rule was formulated by the EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) Committee based on a study that showed that a fully grown tree has a cooling capacity equal to one tonne of refrigeration (i.e., 12,000Btu/h). This caused a lot of headaches for condominium developers because a 40-storey condominium could consume 1,000 tonnes of cooling power.
How could they find enough open space to grow 1,000 trees? How many trees must be moved from their birthplaces to downtown to enable the projects to pass such a ridiculous law, a law that was very likely based on suspicious research findings?
Fortunately, this rule has been rescinded.
This leads to a series of questions. For example, why don't we limit the need for cooling in condominiums by enacting more-serious building energy codes?
So, do you see how "green" is misconceived by the authorities, developers and customers? Of course, trees are green, but they are not "green" enough if we think of them only as an image for doing business, rather than looking at their fundamental existence as a life form in the ecosystem.
Actually, apart from trees, there are many topics that we can discuss to create permanent real green or sustainable development. In the meantime, perhaps just leaving trees alone to grow as they were meant to in nature's scheme of things and where they were born is "green" enough.
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