Journal of Environmental Accounting and Management
The New Chautauqua Game: Designing the Renewable City and Region Using E[m]ergy Accounting
Journal of Environmental Accounting and Management 4(2) (2016) 209--221 | DOI:10.5890/JEAM.2016.06.008
William W. Braham; Luke Butcher; Jill Sornson Kurtz; Mostapha Sadeghipour Roudsari; Janki Vyas
Department of Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
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Abstract
This paper presents the results of a simplified method for reconfiguring a small city and rural county to support its current population on the environmental energies available within the boundaries of the county. It is configured as a game, based on the simplifying assumption that the collection and concentration of renewable energies is almost entirely a matter of surface or land area, so that a renewable economy becomes a matter of competing land uses, of tradeoffs between land used for the production of food, fuel, electricity, and so on. Emergy accounting was used to translate different forms of consumption into equivalent land areas, while the many forms of production and consumption were reduced to 29 parameters that can be varied to test alternate scenarios for the county. The results have been coded into a web site for playing the game.
Acknowledgments
This paper builds upon work initially undertaken by Butcher and Kurtz as a final project (2013) in the Masters in Environmental Building Design program at the University of Pennsylvania directed by William Braham.
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