Having already begun a comprehensive energy and environmental retrofit of a key part of Denver’s Lower Downtown, the nonprofit organization Living City Block is now looking to do the same in a neighborhood in the heart of Washington, DC. It is a fantastic project that stands to become a model for the greening of mixed-use urban neighborhoods across the country.
Builders of Hope is a remarkable North Carolina-based charity that saves older houses from demolition (frequently moving them to a new site), thoroughly rehabbing them to green standards. They then put the homes up for sale at below-market rates to qualifying buyers. (In addition, some of the organization's homes are sold at market rates.) Even better, although the organization benefits from a lot of volunteer help, they also make a concerted effort to hire homeless and other people in transitional situations for their moving and construction work. That is worthy of a Thanksgiving post.
Strong, passionately held opinions have frequently divided Americans and the politicians that represent them. The divisions have been cut by fundamental, yes-or-no questions:
should some humans be allowed to hold others as slaves?
Can states secede from the Union?
Should money be coined in silver, easing the deflation that benefits banks and lenders and hurts farmers and borrowers?
Is society responsible for establishing a minimum standard of living for its members, or should it be every man for himself?
Will capital and corporations be brought under social control, or should there be free markets and less regulation?
What’s it to be, less government or more?
These lines of cleavage don’t admit of much compromise, and they’ve propelled Americans into sharp, sometimes violent division more than once in the history of the Republic.
There is now a new line of cleavage emerging, although only one side of the division seems to have recognized and capitalized on the change.
I’m going to start by being deliberatively provocative: "cities" may not matter nearly as much as we sometimes suggest. I surround the word with quotation marks, because I am talking about cities as municipalities with legal boundaries – which is not, by the way, how most people use the word. And that’s where we can get into trouble when it comes to policy.
Welcome to the eKos Earthship, your one-stop-shop for green diaries and series.
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Tonight's editor: LokiMom
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IT TAKES A REGION - 2010:
A WORKING CONFERENCE TO BUILD OUR NORTHEAST FOOD SYSTEMEARLY BIRD REGISTRATION ENDS TODAY!!
WHEN: November 12-13, 2010
Pre-conference trainings on November 11WHERE: Desmond Hotel and Conference Center, Albany, NY (Lodging availability not guaranteed after 10-19)
CHECK OUT THE GREAT AGENDA along with CONFERENCE INFORMATION: Visit http://www.ittakesaregion.org.
REGISTRATION: EARLY DEADLINE is Friday, OCTOBER 22.
Limited scholarships available. Link to online registration via http://www.ittakesaregion.org.HOSTED BY: the NORTHEAST SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE WORKING GROUP http://www.nefood.org. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I gave a presentation about sustainable communities on October 6, which happened to be International Walk to School Day. In my talk, I mentioned that, in 1973, sixty percent of American kids walked to school; by 2006, that portion had dropped to a paltry 13 percent. I’ve written before about school sprawl and how the location and design of some schools seems explicitly designed to prevent or discourage access by foot or bicycle.
To counter this, the National Center for Safe Routes to School has sponsored a number of programs, including Walk to School Day (or, as some places called it, "Walk and Roll to School Day").
The trendiest neighborhood in West Palm Beach is Northwood, a collection of historic districts, fading industrial areas, and blocks of small bungalows and grand Mission-style homes that is now hopping with cafes, boutiques, a monthly art and wine "promenade," new workforce housing, significant streetscape improvements, a new Maritime Institute, and a can-do attitude. Yet not that long ago it was a worn-down area with declining property values (pre-recession), empty storefronts, "slum landlords" and a dicey reputation. One local business owner lamented to Palm Beach Post reporter Rhonda Swann in 2008 that "Northwood Village [the commercial district] has been up and coming for 25 years, and that's sad."
In almost all American communities, if public transit exists in any meaningful way, it competes for patronage, primarily though not exclusively with driving. While some advocates seem to believe that the best way to attract more riders to transit is to make driving increasingly as unappealing as possible through fees, removal of or restrictions on parking, "road diets" and the like, I’m not fully in that camp. There is an appropriate context for each of the things I just mentioned, but for the most part I want to make transit better so that customers choose it not just out of necessity but because it is easily accessible, comfortable, and efficient.
I have been thinking about sustainability for a long, long time. Unfortunately, in my scientific analysis, it not possible if we continue on the route that we have chosen. This is an extremely complex topic, and might even deserve its own, new, date. I am thinking that Wednesdays might be a good time for it. This is more speculation than science, so it does not properly belong on Pique the Geek for the long term.
This will be the most controversial topic that I have ever tackled. I may be dead wrong in some of my speculations, but a lot of thought has gone into them. I offer no easy remedies but do ask the hard, horrible questions and illustrate them with facts. I will ask that you, my readers, tell me whether this deserves a new series, uncoupled from Pique the Geek. Please read further.
2010 has been a year of missed opportunities for the environment. From no progress or worse on the international climate action stage, to a clean energy bill in the U.S. Senate that is still on ice despite the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, it’s enough to make you want to throw up your hands and buy beach-front property on the Bering Sea.
In response to a comment in a recent post of mine, I replied,
"I think lots of us know what we have to do -- change radically -- but far too few are actually doing it. Problems abound, but so do solutions -- they're just expensive, inconvenient, and scratchy.
That's the theme of this diary -- that we can no longer be lazy, and that it can't be cheap, or convenient, or easy to save ourselves.
This is a great story: grassroots-driven gardening in western North Carolina is bringing diverse, underserved communities together around the cause of local sustainability, enlivening neighborhoods in the process.
There’s general agreement that the Bible has a word or two to say about man’s relationship to the environment. The most commonly quoted verse is from Genesis, 1:28:
...Then God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth (Gen. 1:28).
This can be read as God giving mankind free reign over every living creature, environmental consequences be damned. The more moderate view argues that man must act as responsible stewards for the earth and all its creatures. Both interpretations assume that Man, through the auspices of God, knows what’s best and that there’s a certain alignment between the notion of man’s continued ‘fruitfulness’ and a healthy environment.
But is that the case? What if man’s effort to ‘be fruitful and multiply’, to seek a stable food supply and to protect his species through the modest means of agriculture are actually what is causing (and has caused) environmental crisis after environmental crisis? Most available evidence indicates that’s exactly the case.
Whether it's called 'urban farming,' 'agricultural urbanism,' or by the seriously awkward word 'rurbalization,' it's all the rage. And, on his excellent blog Discovering Urbanism, Daniel Nairn proposes a model for a ‘garden city block’ that integrates agriculture into city fabric in a really nice way. I’m especially happy to see this, because some (definitely not all) of the contexts in which this sort of thing is presented can be troublesome if you believe, as I do, that keeping our developed regions compact, and our rural landscape rural, are important to sustainability and conservation of our heritage.
Whether for the sake of the fish or for the sake of sustainability, we all need to make the right choices in our eating habits.
From food.change.org:
If you want to know who's responsible for decimating the world's oceans, look no farther than your local supermarket. Throughout the world, grocery stores and restaurants continue to sell threatened fish species like Chilean sea bass, shark, bluefin tuna, and orange roughy, just to name a few. The situation's gotten so bad that experts say 75 percent of the world's fisheries have been pushed beyond their sustainable limits, while nine out of ten of the seas' large fish species have disappeared. At the rate we're going, years from now there really won't be other fish in the sea.
A number of factors have gelled for me into an important understanding, however unlikely it is to be original: Neither money, real estate, precious metals, nor any other tangible good or floating trade medium possesses rigorous intrinsic value - in each case, their value can be corrupted or undermined through various manipulative processes (e.g., stock market shenanigans, currency policy, fraud, etc). Even food, energy, or water, when provided by a producer to a consumer, can be manipulated in similar ways. But when something is produced by the consumer, pure economics is at work in how it is used - you have begun the process of vertically integrating your own personal economy. Such a move must necessarily begin with energy, so I will examine its purpose, implications, and how it may be approached.
E.C.S.T.A.S.Y. — End Consumption, Save The Air & Sea, Y'all!
A support group and discussion forum for those who want to kick the habits of consumption that are damaging the world we live in.
It's Independence Day! And while I have some diaries plotted for this series that will be profound and erudite and full of depth and insight...today I'm just going to brag on my garden a little.
Our little household will never be able to get off the food grid entirely (can't grow rice in the Boston suburbs! No room for the spaghetti trees!) but we've been getting better at it every year.
Let me describe our layout. We live on the side of a hill. 47 steps lead from street level to our front door. When we bought the house, the front yard was a very steep slope, covered with weeds and debris. There is a garage at street level, inset into the hill. When we bought the house, the garage had a peaked roof in wretched condition.
My job's taken me away from writing on the internet much of the past year, but I drop in with online news. Much of my past year has been spent developing an new undergraduate degree program. It is now up and running, and (as of early June) Roosevelt University's Sustainability Studies program has a new Sustainability blog with regular updates about food, energy, water, waste, biodiversity, policy, and courses.
Some sample topics below the fold.