By Sherwood Martinelli
If you do a couple of Internet searches, (Eco-Town and Greensburg) you'll see that a small town in America's Heartland, Greensburg Kansas, is getting a whole lot of attention. That's exactly what they need, since the tornado that strolled down Main Street, destroyed more than 80 percent of the city's infrastructure.
My own involvements with the community began some weeks ago when a close friend of mine, Bill Thomas of Green Home Solutions rang me up in the middle of the night and said, “I had a dream, and you and I are going to go spend a week in Kansas helping the people of Greensburg rebuild their town.” My first thought was, “Why Greensburg?” I mean any town or city devastated by a natural disaster deserves all the help we can give them--but too often there just does not seem to be enough help to go around, with the best known example being New Orleans, and the Ninth Ward--so why Greensburg?
CT and NY-based Involvement
All communities ravished by natural disasters deserve attention, and a growing group of us here on the East Coast have recently formed a new organization aimed at helping Greensburg, and other communities recovering from natural disasters to not only recover, but to re-build using green building materials, to rebuild a more eco-friendly sustainable community. Green Helping Hands will help get GreenTown what it needs.
The town and GreenTown want to build an eco village with six green homes cited in the village, another six built at other locations throughout the town, thus creating a real life model of sustainable green living that others can visit and study, which in turn will create eco-tourism for this small rural community.
So far, Green Helping Hands has the attention of GEM motorcars, manufactured by Chrysler, and McGraw Hill Publishing. We are also raising donations of green building products, books for the new library, and more.
Many Hands, Many Minds
Green Helping Hands has proposed to have a competition wherein the best architectures in the world could compete to have their plan chosen for these green home builds. The idea has been well received, so stay tuned or better yet, come and join us!