I am pleased to officially announce that my first published book about Sherwood’s work, “Sustainable Infrastructure: The Guide to Green Engineering and Design”, is being published by John Wiley and Sons and will be on store shelves this September! The book is a complete guide to integrating sustainable strategies into infrastructure planning and design, and it has been literally two years in the works. To give you a brief preview of what the book will contain, here is the table of contents:

Chapter 1: The Process of Applied Sustainable Engineering Design
Chapter 2: Sustainable Infrastructure Frameworks
Chapter 3: Water Conservation & Supply
Chapter 4: Integrated Water Management
Chapter 5: Energy and Greenhouse Gases
Chapter 6: Sustainable Site Planning, Built Systems and Material Flows
Chapter 7: City-Scale Approaches
Chapter 8: Applications for Sustainable Communities
Chapter 9: Building-Scale Sustainable Infrastructure

There will be two book launch parties, to be held at the AIA in San Francisco and New York City. For these events, which we are calling the Sustainable Infrastructure Summit, The Sherwood Institute and other sustainable infrastructure leaders will come together to host a forward thinking discussion. There will be a reception with a discussion and Q&A. We hope that you can save the date to attend these events and celebrate with us!

September 14, 2010:
AIA NY Panel Discussion + book signing reception
536 LaGuardia Place (in the Hines Gallery)
NY, NY 10012

September 22, 2010:
AIA SF Panel Discussion + book signing reception
130 Sutter Street (in the Gallery)
San Francisco, CA 94104

We hope you can make it, since in addition to these being fun events you won’t want to miss, you will also be the first on your block to see (and buy) the book in person. You can also pre-order the book on Amazon or direct from Wiley.

- Bry

Sherwood, global leaders in Sustainable Infrastructure design and planning, announced today that John Paul Peterson has been appointed to lead their Energy Infrastructure and Systems Design efforts. This addition expands their expertise of energy system design at all scales of planning, building integrated systems, energy performance, modeling, and life cycle cost analysis. For years Peterson has been at the leading edge in designing Zero Energy and LEED Platinum projects throughout North America.

“We see increasing demand for energy systems expertise and passive building design knowledge at the planning level from our partners and clients across the North America and Asia,” said Bry Sarté, founder and CEO of Sherwood. “We’re thrilled to have John Paul join the team and lead the Energy Infrastructure and Systems Design efforts for our firm. His experience and efforts will take our sustainable infrastructure services to a higher level and bring deeper value to our clients.”
“Sustainable Infrastructure is all about understanding and optimizing resources flows within, around and through a site,” said Peterson. “This layer of expertise is synergistic to Sherwood’s leading knowledge of infrastructure design solutions, and will allow our clients and partners to leverage a more complete site resource evaluation and plan. Sherwood has proven itself as a company that values creative problem solving; I’m very excited to be a part of this visionary team!”

Before joining Sherwood, Peterson was an Associate at Stantec Consulting in San Francisco (formally KEEN Engineering). Peterson holds a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Messiah College in Pennsylvania and is a registered Mechanical Engineer in the State of California. You can follow him on twitter at @petersonjp.

Bry Sarte, Executive Director at the Sherwood Institute, delivered a lecture yesterday at a special forum hosted by Stanford University’s Center for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness. In his talk, “Regenerative Urbanism: City-Scale Sustainable Water and Energy Strategies in China,” Bry discussed the Institute’s work in the Chinese city of Langfang to create and implement new policies in the area. The Sherwood Institute is working to create a comprehensive policy package for the city. The package will address urban water issues regarding stormwater, wastewater, rainwater harvesting, and general green design principles in water management. You can learn more about Langfang in this recent post on the Sherwood Engineers blog.

Stanford’s Center for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness believes that all future economic and business developments should be based upon environmental concern. They are working to fulfill this mission by promoting and teaching business strategies and leadership practices that will promote a sustainable and green environment.
The forum brought together speakers, academics, professionals and students to discuss opportunities and challenges in providing services in the environmental services sector in China.

Stanford’s Center for Sustainable Development & Global Competitiveness invites you to a special forum:

Providing Environmental Services in China

Wednesday July 14, 2010; 6 to 8:00PM
James H. Clark Center Auditorium, James H. Clark Center
Campus Drive West, Stanford University

Speakers:
* Margaret Wong, President and CEO, McWong Environmental and Energy Group. Environmental & Energy Project Opportunities in China.
* Bry Sarte, Principal/Founder Sherwood Design Engineers. Regenerative Urbanism: City-Scale Sustainable Water and Energy Strategies in China.
* Peter Haase, Principal Engineer, Fall Creek Engineering. Rural Wastewater Management in China: Program Development and Sustainability Strategies.

As China rapidly develops the country is devoting increasing resources and efforts to mitigating and preventing environmental damages, and improving environmental quality. Our speakers will discuss their China experiences, and the opportunities and challenges in bringing and adapting Western technology and expertise to China. There will be a brief reception after the forum.

Directions/maps
Questions?—contact Duc Wong, 650-725-2390

Sherwood has been asked to present two panels at the ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO in Washington, D.C., September 10–13. More than 6,000 landscape architecture professionals from across the U.S. and around the world will be gathered together to earn up to 21 professional development hours, enjoy the fellowship of our profession, and reconnect with the fundamental elements of design.

For the panel “Global Exchange: The Best Sustainable Codes, Standards and Policies” Bry Sarte will present alongside Jim Heid of Urban Green, Mary Muzynski of the Trust for Public Land, and Mark Spalding from The Ocean Foundation. For the presentation “Redefining Water Management: Landscapes and Buildings Under Water” John Leys will be joining Joan Krevlin from BKSK, Judith Hientz of WRT and dlandstudio’s Susannah Drake.

Liquid SPACES, a San Francisco based nonprofit dedicated to assisting emerging artists in the development and promotion of new work, is excited to showcase the work of San Francisco artist Emily Huffman. An innovative painter, sculptor, and installation artist working in a variety of mediums, her new show ‘Amalgam’ is a mixture of works from 2005 to 2010. Mostly oils on paper and canvas, as well as two mixed media installations, the pieces explore internal conversations about the nature and relationship of thoughts, body, feelings, and change.

Amalgam be showing at Sherwood’s One Union gallery from July 8th – August 31, and the opening reception is this Thursday July 8th from 5:30-8pm. Please come join us and celebrate the opening of this unique showcase of work!

Opening July 8, 2010
5:30-8:00pm
One Union Street (@ Front St), San Francisco, CA 94111
Food, Drink, and Music
Free! RSVP on Facebook

Sherwood’s John Leys spoke on Monday June 21 at the 2010 California Higher Education Sustainability Conference in Los Angeles. The conference is an annual event where UC staff, faculty, students, and a handful of professionals are invited to work through and set the future agenda for a variety of important issues in the UC system. John presented on both building-scale and campus-scale greenbuilding and green infrastructure systems as part of the Green Industry track.

The panel covered a range of issues as related to water and energy management in the UC system. John covered Sherwood’s experience with water management on building scale projects using UC Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law as a case study; on a building-complex scale, illustrated by our experience within the Barns complex at UC Riverside (which is composed of four buildings); and finally on the campus scale, using our experience planning green infrastructure systems within the Fort Scott district of the San Francisco Presidio.

An interesting item that John noted during the event is that UC Riverside didn’t have anyone in a “director of Greenbuilding” type role, whereas the other UCs have several people on staff with “sustainability” related titles. Not having the expertise on staff, UC Riverside had decided to hire an experienced group (including Fernau & Hartman, Timmons Design Engineers, and Sherwood) to advise them regarding sustainable building practices, energy systems, and water systems; an interesting approach to help them develop their plan for this unique and very visible project.

We are very excited and honored to have been asked to speak at Greenbuild again this year! The final details are filtering in but it looks like we will be speaking on three or four different panels. Greenbuild will be held in Chicago on November 16, 2010.

You may recall we wrote about the ASLA Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES) last month. Today we are pleased to report that SITES has announced the selection of three Sherwood Projects to be among the first landscapes to participate in a new program testing the nation’s first rating system for green landscape design, construction and maintenance.

The three projects – Penn Treaty Park, Boeddeker Park and Meadow Residence in Santa Cruz – will join more than 150 other projects from 34 states as well as from Canada, Iceland and Spain as part of an international pilot project program to evaluate the new SITES rating system for sustainable landscapes, with and without buildings. Sustainable landscapes include clean water, reduce pollution and restore habitats, while providing significant economic and social benefits to land owners and municipalities.

SITES, a partnership of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin and the United States Botanic Garden, selected these Sherwood projects based on their extensive environmentally friendly elements. Our projects join the Smithsonian Institution’s African American History & Culture museum, a New Orleans’ project to absorb storm water on the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward flooded during Hurricane Katrina, and other pilot projects that include academic and corporate campuses, public parks with hundreds of acres, transportation corridors and private residences of less than one acre.

We are pleased to have been selected and proud to be a part of the ASLA Sustainable Sites Initiative!

Sherwood’s work for the Presidio Sustainability Center was featured in the SF Chronicle last week:

“A new state-of-the-art seed and plant lab opened Wednesday as the new home for the workers and volunteers pushing to return the Presidio’s landscape to a vision of California’s past. The lab at Fort Scott includes an area for cleaning, sorting, drying and storing the native seeds and spores brought in by the nursery’s collecting crew, as well as an adjoining propagation lab where the seeds can be planted and started before they’re moved to the greenhouse. The new lab and its adjoining greenhouse replace the huge, battered World War II-era metal warehouse that housed the Presidio’s nursery center until it was condemned and demolished last year.”

Read the full article (and note Sherwood’s rendering of the site, which can be seen in the picture above) at SFGate.com.