Tom Bender

Tom Bender is one of the American founders of the green architecture and sustainability movements.

He began to make his mark in the early 1970s as an educator, architect, historian of non-Western architecture, author, and strategic planner. He has since been visible also in the emerging field of sustainable economics.

His research, writing, and architectural design since the 1970s has been core to development of the relatively new field of solar and ecological architectural design. Bender was an associate professor of architecture in the University of Minnesota, and the Project Ouroboros he co-directed there with Dennis Holloway in the early 1970s was one of the first demonstrations of "resource-self-reliant houses."

Like Amory Lovins and some other modern analysts, Bender demonstrated the feasibility and benefit of major reduction of energy usage (often through the decrease of on-site energy wastage) rather than a massive increase of centralized energy-production facilities in a society.

Tom Bender moved to Oregon in 1974 to serve as an energy researcher for Governor Tom McCall during the early 1970s energy crisis. "Cosmic Economics", which he co-authored, showed the hazards of dependence on fossil fuels, the role of peak oil in global warming, and the benefits of extraction taxes for fossil fuels and minerals.

The term "sustainability" which he coined in his 1975 essay, "Sharing Smaller Pies", has become core to current progressive cultural perspectives.

During that decade, Bender was also the co-editor of RAIN: Journal of Appropriate Technologies. As a theorist and practitioner of the "green" approach to planning and design, has been a popular essayist since that time.

In the 1970s as well, Bender began to develop what he has termed "Factor 10" economics. These are principles of wholistic analysis and evaluation that he asserted can achieve order-of-magnitude improvements in economic effectiveness and sustainability. He asserted in his 1973 "Living Lightly" a number of ways to have an incredibly more satisfying life and culture with less energy, hours of work, and consumption.

These principles have received interest from governments of Austria, the Netherlands, and Norway, as well as endorsement by the European Union, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and UNEP.

In education, his 1993 "Vitality and Affordability of Higher Education" proposed electronic "lectures" for higher education, showing how to reduce higher education costs by 90%. Fire Mountain School, the community school he co-founded in 1983, has been innovative in student- and nature-centered learning. Featured on the cover of Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature, it was a 25 year precedent in both curriculum and design to "Biophillic Architecture" and to Richard Louv's "No Child Left Inside" movement.

In his 1972 "Feng-Shui: Energy and Place" he was the first to assert a geophysical basis to the Chinese "feng-shui", which is based on life-force energy. His books, DVDs, and architectural practice have clearly demonstrated the nature of life-force energy, the role it has played in virtually every culture worldwide, and the benefits and ways of using it in the design of our surroundings.

In 1971 and 1972, his Electronic Kinder-Garden and Telepa-Vision: The Communication of Mental Images called for new means of electronic learning and sending information to others via visual imagery. We receive the majority of our information visually, but at that point relied on words to send information to others. Obtaining and sending images is now almost instantaneous.

In his 1982 and 1986 True Security and The End of Nuclear War, (almost 20 years before 9/11), he showed in almost scary detail the vulnerability of a complex technological society such as ours to terrorism, and the changes needed for our safety. He showed the necessity for everyone to feel save and fairly treated for a society to survive.

He has repeated shown how the shame, anger, and pain caused by the structure of our culture perverts and twists all of our lives (From Rage to Love). Transforming that structure is essential to ending the mass shootings and violence so prevalent today. Having direct connection with the sacred in our lives and education, being able to love what we do, and to feel loved and needed, hold great power to transform and heal.

In local application demonstrating these concepts, he has been a co-founder of Fire Mountain School, the Lower Nehalem Community Trust, NeahCasa, and the local community center.[3][4] He lives on Neahkahnie Mountain, on the Oregon coast, and many of his writings are available on his website.

• California Affordable Housing Award (1981)
• Sustainable Community Solutions international competition award (the American Institute of Architects & International Union of Architects, 1993)
• National Award for Sustainable Design (AIA Architecture and Energy Program, 2001)
• Top 10 Green Buildings (2002) from the AIA for his Bank of Astoria project in Manzanita, Oregon.

• http://www.context.org/PEOPLE/Bender.htm
• "Commercial". Green Building Pages. Retrieved 6 July 2016. 

• "The five horsemen of our apocalypse", Daily Astorian, 6/11/2009
• "SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS: ECONOMICS, ARCHITECTURE, AND BANKING", GreenMoney Journal, Spring 2010
• Environmental Design Primer, 1973.
• Silence, Song & Shadows, 2000.
• Building with the Breath of Life, 2000.
• Learning to Count What Really Counts: the Economics of Wholeness, 2002.
• Building with the Breath of Life, DVD, 2003.
• The Cave Temples of India, DVD, 2004.
• The Physics of Qi Energy, DVD, 2007.
• The Economics of True Sustainability, 2013.