I'm Seeing Green

Cycling Pics

Warms the cockles of my heart, these great photos showing that finally in New York City the great un-spandexed (and unhelmeted) multitudes may actually be joining the bicycling throngs. As I state endlessly, bicycling will become a normative activity only when it is seen as “normal,” and “everyday,” (as it is in much of the rest of the world.) And if it has the dress codes associated with the spandex speeders, it will never be embraced by most non-bicyclers. Herewith a trio of wonderful pics, the first two from streetsblog (glad they’re publishing such) and the third from cycleliciousness:

This generated tons of comments, many from those who professed concern for the biker’s safety; besides his uncovered head, he’s (gasp) riding one-handed and using a cell-phone! As I pointed out, he looks like he knows what he’s doing and probably does. It’s much less unsafe to ride one-handed at his speed than to ride two-handed at 20mph with your head down.

And this one from copenhagenize.com:

 

Club for Growth on the Rampage

Senator Lieberman has less and less to recommend him, now that he's become the gaffe-minder of John McCain and what little Democratic credibility he had is quite shredded. But he did sponser a climate control bill, so at least on that front he's in the right place

Which makes him a target; from msnbc.com,this story:

A conservative, free-market advocacy group will begin airing ads this week pressing Senate Republicans and Democrats to vote against a bill that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Club for Growth wants to scuttle a bill by Sens. Joseph Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, and John Warner, R-Va., that the Senate is scheduled to begin debating next month. Despite the ad campaign, the bill seems to lack the votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

With $250,000 in radio and television spots, the Club for Growth is targeting Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, and Democratic Sens. Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Max Baucus and Jon Tester of Montana. Dole, a co-sponsor of the bill, as well as Alexander, Baucus and Rockefeller face re-election this year.

Club for Growth President Pat Toomey, a former Republican congressman form Pennsylvania, called the legislation a "massive redistribution of wealth.''

Some might say that is one if its strengths.

Not that the Club for Growth likes McCain, either, again because he has a relatively reasonable environmental plank. "The fundamentals that Senator McCain seems to support are badly misguided,'' Toomey said.

Re-Construction Tips

I have become a fairly regular reader of the brownstoner, the local brownstone-related blog with its always entertaining riffs on prices, renovation, nasty neighbors and other fascinating subjects. On the renovation forum, I have always been interested, and saddened, to note the amount of money spent on tearing down ("gutting" in the parlance) and rebuilding what were probably perfectly serviceable residences. I'm convinced this is true as there have been enough before-and-after photos to illustrate the point.

Construction is the largest creator of landfill-destined material. And when you consider the energy used in ripping out and renovating...well... It's probably worth it to look at these simple tips from GreenTips, from the Union of Concerned Scientists:

According to studies conducted for the U.S Environmental Protection Agency, residential construction and demolition projects accounted for 58 million tons of waste in 1996, and as much as 90 percent of this waste is recyclable. To help address this problem, the American Society of Interior Designers’ Foundation and the U.S. Green Building Council recently released a set of guidelines for best practices in sustainable home improvement projects (see the related links).

With a little reading and advance planning, you can reduce the environmental impact of your next project—whether big or small—by adopting these strategies:

Reduce. Begin by thinking about the most efficient use of the available space and daylight, what materials or systems you can reuse, and

and how you can minimize the scope (and cost) of your project. You might even consider taking advantage of renewable resources such as solar energy (for electricity or water heating), wind power, geothermal energy (via a heat pump), or a combined heat-and-power system.

...

Deconstruct. When renovating an existing space, think “deconstruction” rather than demolition. Most things can be reused or donated, including flooring, siding, windows, doors, bricks, plumbing and lighting fixtures, ceiling tiles, unused roofing materials, leftover paints and varnishes, hardware such as nails and screws, and structural components.

Reuse. Before heading to the lumber yard or hardware store, look for a materials exchange such as Habitat for Humanity’s ReStores, which may offer both new (surplus/overstock) and used materials and building components.

Recycle Take whatever items you cannot reuse to a local recycling facility or materials exchange (see the related links). The EPA identified more than 1,000 asphalt and concrete recycling facilities nationwide as of June 2004, as well as 700 wood-waste recycling facilities and 300 “mixed-waste” recycling facilities that accept demolition debris.

Plastic Decomposition

Can plastic bags decompose? It's been widely thought that such bags remain in landfills practically forever. However, they do eventually break down, and a young scientist has isolated the mechanism. From the Canadian Record: [image from Record.com]

Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true.

After all, we produce 500 billion of them a year worldwide, and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the ocean and kill the animals that eat them.

Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster -- in three months, he figures.

Daniel Burd's project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.

Burd, 16, a Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life.

Burd placed polyethylene plastic bags, along with landfill dirt containing the bacteria which break down the plastic, salt and a yeast mixture for four weeks at a temperature of  86 degrees. He then concentrated the microorganisms by waiting for them to multiply after a few weeks, and found that the plastic had degraded by nearly 20%.

Industrial application should be easy, said Burd. "All you need is a fermenter . . . your growth medium, your microbes and your plastic bags."

The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide -- each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide, said Burd.

"This is a huge, huge step forward . . . We're using nature to solve a man-made problem."

Burn That Grass!

Coal power plants create a lot of pollution, with the US EPA saying "coal-fired power plants spew 59% of total U.S. sulfur dioxide pollution and 18% of total nitrogen oxides every year."

In Britain, still heavily dependent on old coal plants, the EU mandate to clean up the plants may result in several shut downs, according to this story from the Daily News, resulting in brown- or black-outs.

But this plant in England is trying to mitigate the effects of burning coal by substituting biologically derived products. From the Guardian:

Drax power station, near Selby. Photograph: John Giles/PA

The UK's largest power station, Drax, launched a £50m project today aimed at replacing 10% of the coal it uses with biomass. Mixing materials such as wood chips, sunflower husks or grasses with coal to generate electricity could reduce the power station's annual carbon dioxide emissions from coal by several million tonnes.

Executives from Yorkshire-based Drax signed a deal with Alstom to build a processing plant that could prepare 1.5m tonnes per year of biomass for use in the power station. Under the plans, biomass would be ground into a fine powder and injected directly into the power station's coal-fired furnaces. Building work for the processing plant will start later in 2008 and the first part of the facility is expected to be completed by the end of 2009.

Neil Crumpton, energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said that using biomass in power stations or combined heat and power schemes is a better use of the resource than, for example, turning it into liquid biofuels for use by diesel-engine vehicles. "Co-firing with biomass is a reasonable way forward - it's a logical extension of what Drax is already doing and I've got no qualms with it on that score. If it helps build the sustainable biomass market in the UK, then all well and good."

Food Prices on the Rise

The rising price of food is noted everywhere and many blame the diversion of crops to biofuel. US Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer and the Bush administration disagree, as they're pushing biofuels as an alternative energy source; from AP:

The Bush administration is defending its decision to push food-based biofuels as food costs rise at home and abroad, saying the renewable fuels are only a small part of the problem.

Some have blamed the food crisis in part on policies backed by the White House and Congress that divert corn, soybeans and other crops to fuel.
 
According to Department of Agriculture economists, higher corn prices increase animal feed and ingredient costs for farmers, ranchers and food manufacturers, but pass through to consumers at a rate less than 10 percent of the corn price interestingly

Interestingly enough, this article in the Nation seems to concur, suggesting it is policies by the WTO and the World Bank that are to blame:

When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices

The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?

That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded. Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton in January to more than $1,000 in April. Undoubtedly the inflation stems partly from speculation by wholesaler cartels at a time of tightening supplies. However, as with Mexico and corn, the big puzzle is why a number of formerly self-sufficient rice-consuming countries have become severely dependent on imports.

The concept of "food sovereignty" is considered an "alternate paradigm,"..."Farmers' groups have networked internationally; one of the most dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant's Path). Via not only seeks to get "WTO out of agriculture" and opposes the paradigm of a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture; it also proposes an alternative--food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all, the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like that of the WTO."

Hillary on my Mind

We all know that there's something about Hillary Clinton that brings out the hyperbolic side in people, from the right-wing conspirators (who actually did exist,) to  fading icons of the feminist movement who see sexism under every dark remark.

What gets lost in this avalanche of dubious analysis is both the reality of the state of sexism in these United States of America, and the weakness and errors in the campaign of the first potential woman President.

On the one hand, you have op-eds like these:

Misogyny I Won't Miss by Marie Cocco:

I won't miss reading another treatise by a man or woman, of the left or right, who says that sexism has had not even a teeny-weeny bit of influence on the course of the Democratic campaign. To hint that sexism might possibly have had a minimal role is to play that risible "gender card."

But for all Clinton's political blemishes, the darker stain that has been exposed is the hatred of women that is accepted as a part of our culture.

Cocco makes a big deal of the many Hillary t-shirts out there, without mentioning the Curious-George Obama t-shirts. The marketplace is an equal-opportunity put-down.

and Belittled Woman by Libby Copeland

The person who once conjured a vast right-wing conspiracy now refuses to exit a race she's almost surely lost, and it Drives. People. Crazy. "Poor Hillary" is their response, an attempt at death by condescension. Hillary hate is something profound, something that may never be fully unraveled. It is her very name, so polarizing; it is Slick Willy and Vince Foster and Whitewater and that nickname "Shrillary" and her supposed unending ambition and . . . something else, something ancient.

Copeland says '"Poor Hillary: right gender, wrong woman," goes the headline on the Web site of a Scottish newspaper as if you can separate the two."' But why can't you?  

And then there's Rachel Sklar's misguided rant in HuffPost, Hillary Hate: Making Sexism Acceptable. where she wonders why "people [are] so stubbornly resistant to allowing that sexism might have been part of this campaign?" Do they? All of them? No-one admits there's sexism?

It's good to note, appropos Sklar's story (which considers the previous two "great op-eds,"), that the collective wisdom of the Net's responses are almost uniformly against the notion that it was sexism that derailed Clinton's candidacy. There's more "fair and balanced" commentary (to use a loaded phrase) in the 200+ responses than in Sklar's original post.

And for a refreshing counterpoint there's the Guardian piece with the unfortunate title (Sklar would see more proof of sexism in it) Hell hath no fury by Michelle Goldberg:

Infuriated by Barack Obama's ascent, Geraldine Ferraro, erstwhile feminist icon, has transformed herself into Archie Bunker in heels.

In January, the venerable Gloria Steinem made a more sober version of Ferarro's argument in the New York Times, arguing (though she claims not to have been) that gender trumps race in the victim sweepstakes, and that if young women are voting for Obama over Clinton, it could be because of false consciousness.

The irony is that, for the overwhelming majority of women, voting against Clinton was never about repudiating second-wave feminism. But the more leaders of the movement insist on conflating their noble struggle for social justice with the fate of an uninspiring and nepotistic candidate, the less relevant it will be. Many progressives, male and female alike, see Clinton as cynical and narcissistic, pandering to interest-group sectarianism even as she compromises on important principals. It would be a hideous shame if they came to see feminism the same way.

Planting Seed Bombs

After moving to Brooklyn, we created a garden in the back yard. It was concreted over like many brownstone back yards, a concept that has been a source of great puzzlement to me...why would you want an expanse of sterile hard scape, prone to flooding and ugly to boot, instead of a garden?

Well, in the five years we (ok, mostly my wife) have learned about gardening upkeep. The garden looks pretty good, though being in mostly shade, there's not a lot of spectacular colors. But it's quite a joy to live with, and I can say quite unequivocally that I am a fan of all things growing green (or yellow, or red, or whatever.)

Some people take gardening to much greater lengths. I'd never heard about guerrilla gardening until I came across this entry in the Guardian about the Guerrilla Gardening Show. The term is defined in Ecospace as:

... a different definition of gardening. As [Richard Reynolds] writes in his new book “On Guerrilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries”:

Reynolds is not alone in his mission to turn vacant lots into “flourishing urban oases”. There are thousands of people around the world who take it upon themselves to garden land they do not own in a proactive initiative to beautify their surrounding landscapes.

From the Guardian's article:

The idea of guerrilla gardening was developed in the Lower East Side of New York in 1972 and has grown in popularity and become a direct action, quasi-political movement.

The gardens spread throughout Manhattan and up to the Bronx, until they numbered close to 1,000 in the city as a whole. But they were victims of their own success. As areas were improved so they became safer and, eventually, gentrified. Once the land underneath a garden had become attractive to build on, the garden was threatened. A series of planning battles followed in the late 1990s, and a number of gardens were bulldozed and destroyed.

Nevertheless, New York's guerrilla gardening movement has demonstrated what can be achieved. Many hundreds of gardens survive, and many have sprung up in other cities, including San Francisco and Vancouver. Essentially, guerrilla gardening makes unloved public spaces flower-filled by dropping seeds into the wasteland and allowing them to grow.

In keeping with the terminology, guerrilla gardeners drop "seed bombs" (which you can order, naturally, via the net) surreptitiously as they find open plots of land.

 

Another Way for Atlantic Yards?

From John Massengale's blog as to the right way to develop Atlantic Yards; his point is that development does not have to done on a mega-scale, with one developer (in this case, Ratner,) doing it all. Why not parcel it out to small developers who would  create individual buildings in context?

As he says, "Robert Moses was wrong. Jane Jacobs was right"

RICHARD BRODSKY and I have been saying the same thing: why aren't more people listening to our words of wisdom?

The Atlantic Yards and Hudson Yards sites are being developed in the wrong way: instead of selling them to mega-developers like Forest City Ratner and Tishman Speyer (who are both having trouble coming up with the cash), we should develop them the way New York was traditionally developed. That means platting the streets and blocks, and selling lots on those blocks. No eminent domain would be involved.

If the New York City Planning Department decides the highest and best use for the land being sold is rowhouses, they can sell lots sized and coded for rowhouses. If they want office towers or apartment buildings, they can sell lots sized and coded for those. Obviously a modern office building requires a larger lot than a rowhouse, and its lower floors should be coded for retail. If the market changes, the lot sizes can be changed if the codes are properly done.

Of course, rowhouses aren't what should be built on either of the railyard sites, because the infrastructure to build over the yards is too expensive: you need larger buildings to share the expense. And Atlantic Avenue is a wide and important street that should be shaped by taller buildings on both sides of the avenue.

The Unity Plan, an alternative to Ratner's mega-project, would involve multiple developers [image from website]

Not on my Horizon

There is no term yet for fraudulent organic claims, as "greenwashing"means fraudulent or excessive claims to be "green." But the business of organic, and the entry of large corporations into the organic food chain, inevitably raises warning flags

After years of buying Horizon organic products (owned by Dean Foods,) I started reading negative press about them. Horizon uses a mass production system much like conventional farming. According to this story from salon.com,  the cows "laze in crowded pens atop the brown hardpan of the Idaho desert," and have access to the outdoors (but only in summer,) but are hardly an example of "Happy, healthy cows produce better milk for you and your family," as the Horizon cartons state. They are also fed a grain-heavy diet which causes them to produce more milk, but is not healthy for them.

Then from the well-named Cornucopia Institute, whose Director Mark Kastel says "Factory dairy farms are playing loose with the organic rules."

After a three-and-a-half year battle with Dean Foods regarding the legality of milk it labels as Horizon Organic, the country’s most aggressive organic industry watchdog filed additional legal actions today. Dean, the nation’s largest dairy processor, with nearly $12 billion in sales and controlling 50 different milk brands, has obtained a large percentage of its organic milk supply from giant factory farms milking thousands of cows each.

The Cornucopia Institute has filed a formal legal complaint with the USDA claiming that one of Dean’s Horizon suppliers, a dairy in Snelling, California, was skirting the law by confining the majority of their cows to a filthy feedlot rather than allowing them fresh grass and access to pasture as the federal organic regulations require.

The Organic Consumers Association is organizing a boycott of Horizon and five other "private label" brands supplied by Aurora organic diaries.

On the one hand, it was encouraging that giants like Wal-Mart (one of the five above) would start selling organic foods. On the other hand, if the word "organic" is to have any meaning at all, it must be strictly enforced. The USDA is somewhat hands-off on this issue, as the definition of organic for milk products is fairly vague and its certification procedure lax.