Last week I walked into Roosevelt High’s environmental science classroom feeling pretty skeptical about the whole thing. The teacher, Ms. Martinez, had asked me to run some kind of community…
I’ve spent nineteen years designing outdoor spaces, and I learned pretty quickly that anything marketed as “sustainable luxury” usually means expensive greenwashing with a side of guilt-trip marketing. You know…
When my nephew Jake dragged himself through my front door last month, backpack hitting the floor with that particular thud that screams “I hate school,” I knew we were in…
You know what really gets me frustrated? Sitting through yet another presentation where some eager young landscape architect tries to convince me their drought-tolerant garden needs a misting system. It’s…
You know that moment when you realise you’ve been doing something backwards for years? That hit me hard walking through a cabinet manufacturing facility outside Flagstaff last month. The smell…
So I’m sitting in my kitchen last Thursday morning, wrestling with yet another zoning variance application that probably won’t get approved anyway, when there’s this persistent knocking at my door.…
There’s this spot in my garage workshop where the morning sun hits the concrete wall, and I noticed something years ago that completely changed how I think about windows and…
I was reviewing project specs at my desk last week when a colleague from the sustainability office stopped by with a question that caught me off guard. “Marcus, you work…
About six months ago, I found myself doing something I swore I’d never do again—touring college campuses. My sister had cornered me at Thanksgiving, asking if I’d cheque out Cornell’s…
Last month I was consulting with a local organic food startup on their packaging redesign when something finally clicked for me. They’d been wrestling with this problem I see constantly…