“We don’t need to have a million dollars to improve our environment”

The environment and environmental quality have always been relevant to people of color living in cities.

The environmental movement has not.

Early in its history the U.S. environmental movement was, for the most part, viewed as being the exclusive domain of affluent white suburbanites in search of "feel-good" cause. Environmentalists seemed more concerned with the plight of endangered snails and beetles than they were with fellow humans who were suffering under the weight of poverty and political injustice.

When I embraced the environmental movement back in the late 60's, I was roundly criticized by my African American classmates who by that time considered the movement to be not only irrelevant but counterproductive to the civil rights movement. Calls for "limits to growth" didn't appear to offer any options for poor folks here and around the world to achieve any measure of economic equality with the already rich and powerful.

The connections between environmental quality, personal health, quality of life, renewable energy and green jobs has begun to change that. (GW)

In Public Housing, Talking Up the Recycling Bin

By Mireya Navarro
New York Times
July 4, 2009

Wearing a purple sweatsuit and leaning on a cane, Gloria Allen, 82, was hobbling down a hallway in a public housing project in Morningside Heights, knocking on doors and shouting, “Recycling education!”

There was no answer at the next apartment, but as soon as she detected movement inside, Ms. Allen, a retired printing-company worker, began her pitch.

“Please come out, baby,” she purred. “Please come out so we can educate you on how to recycle.”

The typical neighborhood environmentalist is often pictured as young and affluent, the kind of person who can afford a hybrid car and screen-printed hemp fabrics. But at General Grant Houses, a sprawling public housing development off West 125th Street in Manhattan, the eco-conscious are mainly people like Ms. Allen and Sarah Martin, who as leaders of the residents’ association fret as much about backed-up pipes as they do about recycling.

Proselytizing on the issue in housing projects is an enormous challenge but crucial, environmentalists say, given the incentive to cut back on energy and garbage disposal costs and a housing authority’s power to impose recycling rules building by building.

In New York, the incentive may be greatest of all. Only 17 percent of the city’s household waste makes it into recycling bins, and New York has the largest public housing system in the country, with 2,600 buildings, 174,000 apartments and more than 400,000 residents in five boroughs.

Yet the effort initiated by Ms. Allen and Ms. Martin originated as a grass-roots crusade of their own.

Margarita Lopez, the city housing agency’s environmental coordinator, said that residents who step up and organize the efforts defy cynical clichés about public housing. “There are people who think we’re not able to do this, who look at public housing as second-class citizens,” she said. “People would be surprised about how in tune the residents are.”

Polls show that concern about the environment is sometimes broadest in low-income communities because residents bear the brunt of problems like air pollution.

Ms. Allen and Ms. Martin say they see recycling as a way to address the health and quality-of-life issues associated with trash, including the emissions from abundant garbage-truck pickups.

“If we could reduce the amount of garbage in our community, it would reduce the diesel in the air,” said Ms. Martin, 72, a former medical assistant and school food preparation manager who wears hoop earrings under a baseball cap.

So she and Ms. Allen, who each live alone but have 6 children, 14 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren between them, have taken time from their full plate of tenant complaints to introduce, or reintroduce, the development’s 4,500 denizens to recycling, building by building.

While recycling is required by law, it had failed to take root at General Grant because the bins were not conveniently located and residents found it easy to ignore recycling signs, the women say.

Education is crucial, they insist, so they recruit volunteers and train them in which kinds of metal, glass and plastic items can be recycled. Then they guide them from door to door, distributing color-coded bags as they impart the fundamentals to neighbors who can be welcoming, indifferent or hostile.

“It’s not easy,” Ms. Martin said. “It’s not like you slap a flier on a door and say: ‘Recycle. It’s the law.’ It takes time, patience and energy.”

Some residents refuse to budge when Ms. Allen and Ms. Martin knock. And some object to their campaign. During one of their rounds, they were berated by a neighbor who insisted that recycling bins would attract vermin and should not be placed in front of the buildings.

“People are going to put garbage in there,” the neighbor warned.

But many readily embrace the effort. “This saves public housing work and money and it contributes to the general hygiene,” said Jose Morales, 51, an unemployed plumber and widower with two children who correctly chose a green recycling bag when Ms. Allen tested him with a flattened cereal box.

On other environmental fronts, efforts are under way by the city housing authority to make the apartment units more energy-efficient, using federal stimulus money to replace old boilers, water heaters and appliances. More than two dozen resident “green committees” have also been formed to help with projects like planting trees and recruiting workers for green jobs.

The recycling project at General Grant Houses got under way in 2007 under the auspices of the Morningside Heights/West Harlem Sanitation Coalition, a partnership that was founded in 1994 when residents of Grant and nearby co-ops realized they shared the same problems, from uneven trash collection to substandard grocery stores.

Ms. Martin and Joan Levine, an 80-year-old former teacher from Morningside Gardens, a six-building co-op just across the street on Amsterdam Avenue, are the coalition’s co-chairwomen.

Ms. Levine, who wears her gray hair in a Beatles bob and carries a handbag made of recycled juice box labels, said she was motivated partly by a resolve to confound stereotypes. “I’ve heard comfortable white middle-class people say, ‘Oh, public housing. They’ll never recycle. They don’t care,’ ” she said. “That really galled me because that wasn’t the case.”

Two years into the recycling program, General Grant Houses has five buildings down, one in training and three more to go. It has also evolved from a grass-roots effort into a pilot program with city and state financing that the city housing authority plans to expand to other residential projects.

Ms. Martin and Ms. Allen report promising results in the five buildings that are already recycling. Each now produces at least 10 fewer bags of trash a day, they said. Residents no longer leave mousetraps or car tires in recycling bins, as they did in the past when the city instituted recycling without an education program.

As president and vice president of the residents’ association, the two women also organize collections of electronic waste, from computers to TV sets, and lead workshops on topics like nontoxic cleaning products. Next on their agenda is finding a way to pay a stipend to resident monitors who will make sure that only recyclables go into the bins.

While they have to plead with the city to fix broken door locks and drafty windows, Ms. Martin said, “recycling we can control.”

“We don’t need to have a million dollars to do that and improve our environment,” she said.

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Paper, Plastic and Persistence

An energetic group of volunteers spreads the word about recycling to residents of one of New York City's public housing projects.

China's tradeoff: Less coal, more nukes

China is serious about reducing its global carbon footprint. The world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide has been challenged to balance its aggressive economic development agenda -- which has been highly dependent on coal -- with its commitment to significantly reduce those emissions.

China's leaders have responded with an ambitious alternative energy program that includes massive deployments of both onshore and offshore wind farms. The program also calls for a nearly ten-fold increase in nuclear power plants. (GW)

Nuclear power to rise 10-fold by 2020

China Daily
July 2, 2009

China is planning for an installed nuclear power capacity of 86 gigawatts (gW) by 2020, up nearly 10-fold from the 9 gW capacity it had by the end of last year, two people familiar with the matter said.

The revised target for nuclear power is part of the government's efforts to increase the share of alternative energy in the predominantly coal-based energy mix.

The goal, which is part of an alternative energy development roadmap covering 2009-20, seeks to have at least 12 gW of installed nuclear power capacity by 2011, the sources said.

The plan "will call for the government to accelerate nuclear power development in coastal provinces and autonomous regions, namely Liaoning, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangxi, Jiangsu, Shandong and Hainan," the sources said.

In order to achieve the goal, the government will also set up a "reasonable number of nuclear power plants in inland provinces in Jiangxi, Anhui, Hunan and Hubei", they said.

The target, which the people said had still not been finalized, was substantially bigger than earlier goals.

China, the world's second-largest power market, now has 11 working nuclear reactors, producing 9.1 gW as of the end of last year.

The country, which had previously planned to have 60-70 gW of nuclear power capacity by 2020, or about 5 percent of the total anticipated capacity then, had 22.9 gW of nuclear power capacity under construction as of last year.

China is now adding more than 24 reactors, which includes five plants scheduled to start construction this year.

According to the draft alternative energy development stimulus plan, the government is also planning to have 150 gW of installed wind power capacity by 2020, of which 30 gW will come from offshore wind farms, the people said.

Installed wind power capacity should reach 35 gW by the end of 2011, of which 5 gW will come from offshore wind farms, according to the draft plan.

China, which is now the fourth largest wind power producer in the world, had 12.17 gW in installed capacity as of the end of last year.

It plans to build seven huge wind farms with a minimum capacity of 10 gW each by 2020, Shi Pengfei, vice-president of Chinese Wind Energy Association, said earlier this week.

The seven bases, once completed, will have a combined capacity of around 120 gW, according to Shi.

Construction of these bases, which is spread across six provinces, would require an investment of around 1 trillion yuan, the official said.

The industry would attract investment worth 2.97 trillion yuan by 2011, creating 5 million jobs, according to the draft.

And, total investment in the sector would touch 13.5 trillion yuan and create 20 million jobs by 2020, it outlined.

China National Nuclear Corp, the biggest nuclear power operator in the country, China Guangdong Nuclear Power Holding Co Ltd and China Power Investment Corp, the parent company of the Hong Kong-listed China Power International Development Ltd, are currently the only players in the nuclear power sector.

Bringing the web and books closer together

As a kid I was fascinated by astronomy and cosmology -- a genuine geek. In the early sixties the discovery of quasi-stellar radio sources (precursors to black holes) created quite a buzz among professional astronomers and amateur geeks. I spent many a winter Saturday morning (summer Saturday's were reserved for baseball) going back and forth between Kay's Book Store and the Cleveland Public Library searching for any books that may have existed on the topic.

Well someday there may be a web page for every book that has ever been published. If that idea excites you, you're probably as big a geek as I am. (GW)

The library that never closes

By Bobbie Johnson
Guardian
July 1, 2009

The Open Library hopes to unite the net and the printed word by creating a web page for every book. Bobbie Johnson talks to the audacious project's leader.

Ambitious archiving projects by the Open Library and Google will provide easy access to millions of books online.

The internet's relationship with books, it is fair to say, has been a tumultuous one. Ever since the digital revolution started changing our relationship with information, the printed word – one of the most successful technologies in history – has been on the back foot.

Amazon has altered the face of the industry twice – first in the 1990s by changing the way books are sold and then, more recently, the way they are consumed, with its Kindle electronic book reader. Google has caused its own earthquake in the print world with its Book Search scheme – a plan to suck the text of millions of books into its search engine that has raised the hackles of publishers and authors alike.

Talk to workers at either of these technology companies and there is a feeling of technological inevitability: that the printed book is a stepping stone in the evolution of information, and now lies ready to be devoured by its hi-tech successors.

Not everybody thinks that way, however, including the Open Library – a project with an audacious goal that it hopes can bring the web and books closer together.

The scheme is to create a single page on the web for every book that has ever been published; an enormous, searchable catalogue of information about millions of books. It is still in beta, but already more than 23m books are in its system, drawing information from 19 major libraries and linking to the text of more than 1m out-of-copyright titles.

That is admirable work for just a handful of staff at the library, an arm of the non-profit Internet Archive (which itself has the vast objective of trying to keep a historical record of the web for future generations). But with information about books already being processed by hugely popular websites such as Google and Amazon, the question remains – why bother?

George Oates, the newly installed project leader, says it's a way to preserve book records for history and, crucially, make the information usable by anybody.

"It's remarkably difficult to unify this information," she says, when we meet at the Internet Archive building in San Francisco's leafy Presidio park, a former military outpost that is, rather aptly, historically preserved. "As much as the libraries attempt to have similar standards and orders, there are always gotchas and nooks and crannies that have to be worked out."

The locus position

More than simply bringing together cold lists of books from isolated libraries, however, she also believes OL can breathe life into books by grabbing information from around the internet.

"Imagine books more as a networked object, rather than a single entity," she suggests. "We start with this kernel and then we see what we can pile onto it … it's a locus for all the information about a book that's on the wider web."

In a way, it's like a Wikipedia for printed material (indeed, it runs on wiki software, allowing anyone to add their own notes on different books or editions). And Oates, who took over the project this year, is hoping to turn it from a skilful attempt to ingest vast amounts of data into something that is useful to ordinary people.

The site can potentially pull information from all over the web – retailers, reviews, book clubs, forums and enthusiast sites – as well as from social networks that already exist for bibliophiles, such as LibraryThing or GoodReads.

"It is about sharing as openly as possible – and that's really liberating … we're almost a non-threat to the rest of the web, because we're not keeping the property."

Oates knows a thing or two about sharing objects online. For the past few years, the Australian was one of the leading lights at the popular photo website Flickr – spending four years as lead designer, before moving to a role that included projects such as the Commons: a scheme to use Flickr as a window on publicly held photography collections.

Journey of discovery

The lessons from her previous work are carrying through to the project in obvious ways – a redesign is being mooted to make more palatable to those who don't have a degree in library science. But she is also hoping to introduce some of sense of serendipity or exploration to the records.

"Right now it's about search and retrieve, and there's no sense of browsing or skipping around," she says. "In the future we can start to do queries like 'show me all the popular subjects that were written about in 1934'. You can start to trend that over time, look at peaks and troughs in areas of interest. The data's all there, but it's about making connections that are inferred by the data itself – I'm really excited by that."

Propagating that idea could be made more difficult by Google, which last week revamped its book search to make it a more sleek and social experience. Oates says she doesn't see that in adversarial terms, however.

"The book search on Google is awesome – they've thrown a shitload of computing power at it, and you can see books that mention things, websites that mention those books and books on a map. It's useful, but it's really clinical." Oates won't say any more about Google, but her colleagues are less reticent. Peter Brantley, the archive's director of access, has been a vocal critic of the company's plans – even going as far as calling Google's attempt to gain exemption against future copyright claims as ­"disgusting".

There is certainly a tension between the two schemes, partially because their intentions are so similar while their approaches are so different. But, while Google has the backing of many publishers, who see the chance to make some extra cash in the deal, one crucial ally for Open Library may be the academic world.

If the scheme gives researchers and students the chance to use Open Library in their work – referring to an OL page as a citation source, or building a bibliography using its tools – they could get a core audience that spreads the concept. Plus, of course, the idea is that Open Library will remain just that – open – for ever. "The longevity of the work that we're doing is a bit of a culture shock, and a really curious solution to provide," she says. "How do we write stuff to disk that's going to be retrievable in 1,000 years? This is a very new problem for my brain – not that the systems I've worked on before would go up in smoke, but this is designed explicitly not to."

Neutral success?

Still, regardless of long-term vision, the scheme's success is not clear cut. Despite its meek appearance, the library world is big business – and it is not clear that big libraries are particularly keen on giving away the keys to anyone just yet. Organisations such as the British Library have their own projects to archive their vast collections for the web.

Still, Open Library is hoping that it can succeed by being a neutral space, without agendas or commercial imperatives.

"I want it to be a place where people can love books and contribute information about books," Oates says. Perhaps, in the face of the onslaught of digital ­information, the printed word has found a new way to evolve.

The angels are in the details

How serious are European Union leaders about combating climate change? Not content with simply setting renewable energy targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the European Commission has developed a template designed to gather details about how each member state will actually achieve their renewable energy commitments within the next decade.

This is another example of EU leadership on climate change that we're hoping U.S. leaders might take notice of and emulate. (GW)

EU issues template for national renewables plans

EurActiv
1 July 2009

The European Commission yesterday (30 June) adopted a template for national renewable energy action plans (NREAPS), requiring member states to detail how they intend to reach their national targets for the share of renewables in their energy mix.

The action plans are a feature of the new Renewables Directive, which entered into force last month, setting a binding target to source 20% of the EU's energy consumption from renewables by 2020 (see EurActiv LinksDossier). Member states must now fill in the template with sectoral targets for the share of renewable energy in transport, electricity, heating and cooling, and offer a trajectory for getting there.

The EU executive hopes that the common template will guarantee the completeness of the national plans, while making them comparable with each other and future implementation reports that member states will need to submit every two years.

European Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said the template would help member states to produce a "credible plan which in turn will help the EU to meet its targets on time".

A progress report published in April showed that the EU was falling short of its 12% renewables target for 2020, and the Commission had initiated 61 legal proceedings since 2004 (EurActiv 30/04/09).

The 40-page document asks member states to specify what policies they plan to enforce on biomass resources and on implementing sustainability schemes for biofuel. National action plans will also have to include details on "enabling measures", such as revision of building codes, information campaigns, support schemes and the planned use of flexibility measures.

Member states will also have to state what steps they are taking to cut red tape on administrative procedures and to spell out any "unnecessary obstacles". To further help the integration of renewable electricity into the grid, infrastructure development plans should be reported, including reinforcement of interconnections with neighbouring countries.

Each member state will now have a year until 30 June 2010 to submit its plan to the Commission, which will assess whether it reflects national targets and trajectories. Should the EU executive rule a plan insufficient, it can start infringement proceedings against the member state concerned.

The wind industry welcomed the template, saying it would allow for the anticipation of new wind energy installations. "What the filled-out template will do is to effectively provide the wind energy sector with 27 national roadmaps for its development up to 2020, and show the expected share of the different technologies year on year," said Christian Kjaer, chief executive of European Wind Energy Association (EWEA).

Kinship networks that span the centuries

Philosophy matters. Ideas influence how we think about the world -- whether we are consciously aware of our world views or not. Many believe that western philosophy is out of sync with the notion of humanity being in harmony with Nature. The discoveries and writings of Newton, Malthus and Darwin among others contributed to the creation of a world view that celebrates the virtues of economic growth fueled by competition and a belief that the "fittest" deserve to survive (even if that is not what Darwin actually said).

One thing in particular that western philosophies are virtually devoid of is language suggesting a commitment to future generations. In China, leaders are looking inward to build their own arguments about the wisdom of sustainability based on intergenerational linkages that extend backward and forwards in time . (GW)

How Confucianism could curb global warming

China openly debates the role of Eastern thought in sustainability.

By James Miller
Christian Science Monitor
June 26, 2009

Kingston, Ontario

Now here's a curveball to secular Western policy experts: China's intellectuals are openly debating the role of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism in promoting the Communist Party's vision of a harmonious society and ecologically sustainable economic development.

Nowhere is the question of what to do about the environment more vital than in China, the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases – especially because scientists agree that climate change disproportionately affects the poor and the disenfranchised and that climate change will affect future generations far more than the present.

Yet the general impression of China's role in issues relating to environment is one of foot-dragging because it hasn't bought into a Western model to address it.

But Pan Yue, China's vice minister for environmental protection, is calling for China to capitalize on traditional Chinese religions in promoting ecological sustainability.

He says, "One of the core principles of traditional Chinese culture is that of harmony between humans and nature. Different philosophies all emphasize the political wisdom of a balanced environment. Whether it is the Confucian idea of humans and nature becoming one, the Taoist view of the Tao reflecting nature, or the Buddhist belief that all living things are equal, Chinese philosophy has helped our culture to survive for thousands of years. It can be a powerful weapon in preventing an environmental crisis and building a harmonious society."

And this just might work.

As The New York Times recently reported, China is in the midst of a transformation to cleaner forms of energy.

Although much of China's energy needs are still met by inefficient, coal-fired power stations with poor track records in terms of emissions, China has begun to invest heavily in cleaner coal technology in an effort to improve efficiency and reduce emissions.

Because of this, the International Energy Agency reduced its estimate of the increase in Chinese emissions of global warming gases from 3.2 percent to 3 percent even as the same agency raised its estimate of China's economic growth. China is managing to increase its economic output at a greater rate than its emissions.

This is good news for everyone.

But buried innocuously in the middle of this report was the startlingly frank statement of Cao Peixi, president of the China Huaneng group, China's largest state-owned electric company.

When asked about his company's decision to invest in more expensive but cleaner technology he replied: "We shouldn't look at this project from a purely financial perspective. It represents the future."

The $64,000 question facing economists and politicians across the world is how to make decisions that take into account the big picture beyond the "purely financial perspective."

This is a hard question for Western economic and political theorists to answer, because their theories are based on the Enlightenment view of the self as an autonomous, rational individual.

But how are we to make decisions that take into account the interests of those who have not yet been born?

Being respectful to the interests of past and future generations is key to the Confucian view of the self and groups. To the question, "Who am I?" the Confucian answers, "I am the child of my parents and the parent of my children."

Confucianism begins from the proposition that human beings are defined by kinship networks that span the centuries. From this perspective the interests of the individual are bound up with the interests of the kinship group as it extends forward and backward across the generations.

This will be a key factor in the way China handles present and future environmental issues.

Consider the views of Jiang Qing, a leading Confucian intellectual. According to a recent report by Daniel Bell, a political theorist at China's Tsinghua Univeristy, Mr. Jiang proposes a political system that can take into account the interests of those who are typically ignored in modern democracies, such as foreigners, future generations, and ancestors.

"Is democracy really the best way to protect future victims of global warming?" he asks.

As China assumes a greater leadership role on the world stage, we can expect the emergence of a variety of models of sustainable development rooted in a plurality of cultural traditions, including Confucianism.

The time when Westernization was the only credible model of development is over.

James Miller is a professor of Chinese studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Queen's University, Kingston. He is currently researching the relationship between religion, nature, and modernization in China.

Rooftop revolutionaries

Back in 1970 Gill Scott-Heron recorded his classic "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised". Positive, creative examples of how to build a sustainable society are cropping up all over - literally. Some of these are being covered by the mainstream media. Even when they are reported they are rarely, if ever, connected -- to each other or to the larger sustainability movement.

But the design revolution is underway. It's up to all of us who are participating in it to reach out, connect with and support each other and take advantage of all possible venues to communicate what's going on.

That will create more than a buzz. It will generate levels of synergy capable of creating a world that works for everyone. (GW)

Urban Farming, a Bit Closer to the Sun

By Marian Burros
New York Times
June 17, 2009

THIS summer, Tony Tomelden hopes to be making bloody marys at the Pug in Washington, D.C., with tomatoes and chilies grown above the bar, thanks to the city’s incentives for green roofs.

Mr. Tomelden, the Pug’s principal owner, says he’s planting a garden to take advantage of tax subsidies the city offers in his neighborhood if he covers his roof with plants.

“If I can do something in my corner for the environment, that seemed a reasonable thing to do,” he said. “Plus I can save money on the tomatoes.”

There won’t be bloody marys at P.S. 6 on New York’s Upper East Side, but one-third of its roof will be planted with vegetables and herbs next spring for the cafeteria. The school is using about $950,000 in city funds that it has put aside, and parents and alumni are providing almost a half-million dollars more.

“For the children, it’s exciting when you grow something edible,” said the school’s principal, Lauren Fontana.

Aeries are cropping up on America’s skylines, filled with the promise of juicy tomatoes, tiny Alpine strawberries and the heady perfume of basil and lavender. High above the noise and grime of urban streets, gardeners are raising fruits and vegetables. Some are simply finding the joys of backyard gardens several stories up, others are doing it for the environment and some because they know local food sells well.

City dwellers have long cultivated pots of tomatoes on top of their buildings. But farming in the sky is a fairly recent development in the green roof movement, in which owners have been encouraged to replace blacktop with plants, often just carpets of succulents, to cut down on storm runoff, insulate buildings and moderate urban heat.

A survey by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, which represents companies that create green roofs, found the number of projects its members had worked on in the United States grew by more than 35 percent last year. In total, the green roofs installed last year cover 6 million to 10 million square feet, the group said.

Steven Peck, its president, said he had no figures for how many of the projects involved fruits and vegetables, but interest is growing. “When we had a session on urban agriculture,” he said of a meeting of the group in Atlanta last month, “it was standing room only.” Mr. Peck said the association is forming a committee on rooftop agriculture.

Tax incentives have accelerated the plantings of green roofs, particularly in Chicago, which has encouraged green roofs for almost a decade. The Chicago chef Rick Bayless uses tomatoes and chilies he grows atop his restaurant Frontera Grill to make Rooftop Salsa.

New York State has subsidies both for roofs with succulents spread out over a thin layer of soil and for edible plants covering a smaller area. A proposed amendment to New York City’s tax abatement for some roof projects would include green roofs. Most roof gardeners aren’t in it for the money, though.

After her Lower East Side co-op refurbished the 1,000-square-foot roof of its six-floor walk-up, Paula Crossfield persuaded fellow board members to spend $3,000 to put a 400-square-foot garden on it. They built planters and paved part of the roof so people can walk easily among the plantings.

Ms. Crossfield, managing editor of the Civil Eats blog, about sustainable agriculture, is paying for the seeds and will do the harvesting, sharing the bounty with her neighbors. (She and her husband live on the top floor.)

In the process, she estimates she carried up 500 of the 1,500 pounds of soil they bought and put in planters.

“My decision to start a garden is an extension of my work,” Ms. Crossfield said. “Growing my own food helps me understand better what I write about: how food gets to our table, the difficulties it entails.” It’s not all about agricultural policy, she added.

“The bottom line,” she said, “is that I harbor a secret desire to be a farmer, and my way of doing that is to use what I have, which is a roof.”

Two weeks ago Ms. Crossfield transplanted seedlings from her apartment onto the roof: golden zucchini, oakleaf lettuce, brussels sprouts, butternut squash, watermelon, rainbow chard, cucumbers, nasturtiums, calendula, sunflowers, amaranth greens, tomatoes and herbs.

In San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, Maya Donelson has filled planter boxes with vegetables on a 900-square-foot patch of roof at the Glide Memorial Church. For the last two years she has managed the Graze the Roof Project at the church’s Glide Center, a neighborhood social service provider.

The food goes to the center’s volunteers and children in the neighborhood who work in the garden one day a week and learn to cook what they grow.

“I’ve never had one kid who hasn’t wanted to get his hands dirty,” said Ms. Donelson, who studied architecture and environmental design. “They are willing to try anything if they see it growing and pull it out of the ground. We juiced the purple carrots and the kids drank that.”

Sustainable South Bronx, a nonprofit environmental organization, said it will help Alfred E. Smith High School plant a roof garden and has helped a company in Hunts Point put strawberry plants on its roof. (The owner likes strawberries, an official of the group said.)

One of the more ambitious projects is a 6,000-square-foot roof farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which will grow food for local restaurants and shops.

Ben Flanner, a transplanted Wisconsinite who’s running it, said he became fascinated with organic agriculture and was set to take an internship on a rural farm but then had a change of heart.

“I wanted to farm but I didn’t want to leave the city,” he said.

Mr. Flanner was lucky to find an environmentally aware company — Broadway Stages, a stage and lighting company — that wanted a green roof on one of its buildings. It paid to prepare the roof for planting and agreed to let him grow food on it. Mr. Flanner and his partner, Annie Novak, did the planting and will be able to keep all the profits from their organic vegetables.

“People are knocking on my door to buy the stuff,” he said. Andrew Tarlow, a partner in four nearby restaurants, including Marlow & Sons, has agreed to buy anything Mr. Flanner grows.

The roof cost $6,000 to prepare, according to Lisa Goode, who with her husband, Chris, owns Goode Green, a company that designs edible roof gardens. There are at least 1,000 seedlings planted in 16 beds, each about 60 feet long.

“A smaller roof would cost more per square foot,” she said. Mr. Flanner’s costs for the garden itself were less than $2,000, but Ms. Goode said it will take more than one roof for him to make a living.

“This is sort of a pilot to see if it can become a viable business model because he isn’t going to make any money from this,” she said. “If we can get the owner to do more roofs, he can then make a profit.”

Not long ago, edible rooftop gardeners were less likely to be thinking about sustainable food systems or the environment.

Lee Utterbach wanted to recapture summers on his grandmother’s farm. But there was no land around his house in the Mission district of San Francisco. So when he bought the building where he lives and runs a photo equipment rental shop, he turned the roof into a vegetable and flower garden. Since the roof slopes, all the planting was done along its perimeter. Some of it, like the rosemary, is so well established, it hangs over the front of the building.

Reaching the roof means a trip through the kitchen window, then up an incline. A small ladder takes visitors to his wife’s greenhouse and a hot tub, a deck , a composting toilet and the future guest room. In one area that his wife, Aly, describes as his “man cave,” Mr. Utterbach watches his 17-inch TV screen from a comfortable chair.

“I was probably eight or nine years ahead of the curve when I built this,” he said. “I just enjoy watering plants and digging in the soil.”

Peter Bergold, a neuroscientist who teaches at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, was also inspired by the past. Memories of the first asparagus and carrots he ate from a garden years before led him to start growing produce on the roof of his landmarked brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, six or seven years ago.

“That was my epiphany,” he said of the sweetness he was trying to recapture. “I assumed asparagus grew with a rubber band around them.”

Environmental awareness came slowly. “One of the things that got me interested,” he said, “was that between global warming and the thermal bubble of cities you can start things much earlier so you have a much longer growing season.”

Another benefit gardeners get from planting well above the ground is that they face fewer pests.

But roof gardeners also have to think about winds that can knock over tender vines. And while concentrated heat on top of city buildings can help tomatoes ripen, it also means more frequent watering, even if irrigation requires lugging watering cans up stairs.

Though rooftop gardens go back at least to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the modern green roof movement has made its way here from Europe, where for years government policies have encouraged or required green roofs.

The government benefits take into account the fact that gardening on the roof requires much more preparation than gardening on terra firma.

First, it must be determined whether the roof can support the weight of the soil, the plants and the water. It may need to be retrofitted. Barring that, gardeners can place planters around the perimeter, which is generally its strongest part.

The containers can be almost anything: ready-made planters; boxes made of reclaimed wood, old milk cartons, children’s wading pools. A screen at the bottom holds in a lightweight substance, like packing peanuts for bulk, topped with a barrier fabric so the soil can’t go through. Potting soil, mixed with ingredients to lighten it, is put on top.

When gardens are planted directly on the roof, a waterproof membrane is laid down first, followed by insulation and a root barrier. (A guide to roof gardening is available at baylocalize.org.)

All this work can be off-putting for landlords. Five years ago, Ms. Crossfield said, the owner of an apartment building on Sixth Avenue in the West Village told one of his tenants to get rid of a garden she had planted.

“He told the woman to take it off the roof,” she said, “because he didn’t see any benefit in it.”

That’s not so likely these days.

“Several years ago you might have seen a certain amount of resistance,” said Miquela Craytor, executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, “but now people are coming to us saying they want one.”

Playing for and Paying for Change

Change Is Gonna Come

Playing for Change

It has been a very rainy and dreary month of June here in Massachusetts. That trend continues today -- but with the promise of sunshine later this week. If you're experiencing a similar dreary Sunday (or even if you aren't) why not consider a good movie or some great music?

I posted a story on the incredibly inspiring project called "Playing for Change" about six months ago. The creators have now produced a CD that includes performances from around the world from both well-known professionals and equally talented but less well-known street performers.

Do yourself a favor and check it out. By the way, the video takes a while to load. You may want to pause it right after starting and then hit the play button after about a minute to avoid stops and starts.

If it you're more in the mood for a movie, how about giving "Food, Inc." a try? It's a documentary about factory food. I realize that summer and the last thing you probably want is to feel guilty about those grilled hamburgers and ribs you're planning to consume on the 4th of July, but watching this film just may inspire you to celebrate a healthy and sustainable Independence Day.

Go easy on the buttered popcorn.(GW)

Food, Inc.

"Food, Inc.'' serves up some righteous indignation

By Wesley Morris
Boston Globe
June 19, 2009

As you might gather from the title, Rob Kenner’s documentary “Food, Inc.’’ is, in part, concerned with the extent to which industrial food production has replaced farming in America. It’s part activism, part school-assembly lecture. If you’re told where most fast-food chains’ ground beef comes from, how much E. coli is in it, how much ammonia has been added to kill the E. coli, and how many illegal immigrants the meatpacking companies recruit, underpay, and leave prey to police raids, will you still want to eat that double cheeseburger? The filmmakers are guessing no. The whole thing is as subtle as a watermelon in a bowl of Cheerios but necessary, nonetheless.

Kenner takes us up and down the food industrial complex. He has hidden-camera footage of a hog-farm kill floor and pastoral images of Joel Salatin and his employees working on his modest, seemingly all-natural farm in the Shenandoah Valley. He tags along as Barbara Kowalcyk, a food-safety advocate and mother who lost a young son to toxic beef, makes the rounds on Capitol Hill. The film photographs Eduardo Peña, a union organizer in North Carolina, as he watches cops bang down the doors of Mexicans who work in Smithfield Foods’ slaughterhouse. We meet Carole Morison, a poultry producer for Perdue until she refused to make expensive Perdue-mandated upgrades to her chicken house that, she says, would have kept the birds in total darkness (by her own admission, they had it pretty awful in the first place). This is food and its vast discontents.

The movie covers all the bases, from possible government corruption to the bad consequences of good economic sense. With regard to the latter, Kenner finds a family of four whose mother says she buys fast food because its cheaper than fresh food. There’s not much room to argue with her. Almost everywhere, a pound of broccoli costs more than anything on the McDonald’s value menu. Her husband is a diabetic whose diet, like a lot of Americans’, includes foods loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener that helps use up the country’s abundant government-subsidized corn crops. But the mother is in a bind since they have to pay for his medical needs, in addition to their other expenses, while praying his poor health doesn’t cost him his job as a trucker.

One imagines a movie devoted almost entirely to the hard issue of eating and class, how processed foods are cheaper than fresh food. Of course, some nights the drive-thru is the easiest thing on earth. None of the heroes in “Food, Inc.’’ - and I’m sure Kenner finds all his human subjects heroic - is likely to buy that excuse. This isn’t a movie terribly big on listening to why you just ate that Baconator.

Folks like Salatin, Kowalcyk, and Gary Hirshberg, the founder and CEO of Stonyfield Farm yogurt (it’s organic), have specific but complementary points of view. And Kenner allows them their righteousness. In college Hirshberg was a hippie environmentalist, and he explains that his environmentally conscious company’s relationship with Wal-Mart (there’s a funny scene of some doofy Wal-Mart executives visiting a Brattleboro dairy farm) isn’t selling out. He’s doing good for everybody. He’s probably right, but like many of the people in this film, he so knows he’s right.

The movie itself is cleanly made and features the sort of imaginatively conceived graphic design that, lately, a lot of documentary directors use in lieu of actual filmmaking. A more visually expansive, soul-chilling, and lecture-free cousin of “Food, Inc.’’ is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s “Our Daily Bread,’’ a 2005 documentary that requires you to think for yourself about your relationship to what you eat. “Food, Inc.,’’ while more optimistic, doesn’t care for art or letting you make up your own mind. Time, it says, is of the essence.

Most of what Kenner tells us has been documented in other films and published to famous effect in Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation’’ and the books of Michael Pollan, both of whom appear in the film and consulted with Kenner on its making. That activist spirit extends all the way to the closing minutes, which feature a pamphlet-load of advice (“Plant a garden,’’ “Buy locally’’) while Bruce Springsteen sings “This Land Is Your Land’’ (I know, I know). As a blunt instrument of civic, moral, and social responsibility, the movie works, anyway. Releasing it during the summer seems like an iffy idea, though. This is a school-trip movie if ever there was one.

"We are creating the world we want"

The Design Revolution that Bucky Fuller predicted is humanity's only chance to save itself from itself is unfolding in a variety of ways, places and at various scales. Individuals are making a difference by making important lifestyle changes with regard to the food they eat, what they drive and how they power their homes. State and federal governments are providing incentives that support these efforts in addition to the construction of utility-scale renewable energy projects like windfarms.

Perhaps the most encouraging signs that we just might make it are efforts that are taking place at the municipal level. When entire communities pull together toward the common goal of sustainability, the resulting synergies are likely to be that much more profound. (GW)

Auto-ban: German town goes car-free

By Tony Paterson
The Independent
June 26, 2009

Vauban hopes to forge a model community without that great staple of modern life – the car. Now the sound of birdsong has replaced the roar of traffic and children can play in the street

The Germans may have given the world the Audi and the autobahn, but they have banished everything with four wheels and an engine from the streets of Vauban – a model brave new world of a community in the country's south-west, next to the borders with Switzerland and France.

In Vauban, a suburb of the university town of Freiburg, luxuriant beds of brilliant flowers replace what would normally be parking outside its neat, middle- class homes. Instead of the roar of traffic, the residents listen to birdsong, children playing and the occasional jingle of a bicycle bell.

"If you want to have a car here, you have to pay about €20,000 for a space in one of our garages on the outskirts of the district," says Andreas Delleske one of the founders and now a promoter of the Vauban project, "but about 57 per cent of the residents sold a car to enjoy the privilege of living here." As a result, most residents travel by bike or use the ultra-efficient tram service that connects the suburb with the centre of Freiburg, 15 minutes away. If they want a car to go on holiday or to shift things, they hire one or join one of the town's car-sharing schemes.

Because it has no cars, Vauban's planners have almost completely dispensed with the idea of metalled roads. Its streets and pathways are cobbled or gritted and vehicles are allowed in only for a matter of minutes to unload essential goods. Being virtually car-free is only the start of what has been hailed as one of Europe's most successful experiments in green living and one which is viewed increasingly as a blueprint for a future and perhaps essential way of living in an age of climate change.

Vauban is a southern suburb of Freiburg and home to 5,300 people. Its elegant, weather-boarded, four-storey homes are painted in subtle tones of blue, yellow and red or left as natural wood. They have wide balconies and large French windows that look out on to quiet, park-like gardens. The overall impression is of being stuck in a never-ending IKEA advertisement.

But if the district's surface texture is eminently middle class, an eco-revolution is bubbling beneath the surface. The windows of all the homes are triple-glazed. An intricate ventilation system fitted with heat exchangers ensures that apartments are kept constantly topped-up with fresh air at room temperature, even when the windows are shut. Most homes are powered by solar panels and smart co-generator engines that run on wood chips which provide domestic heating and electricity for lighting and appliances. One of the consequences is that most of Vauban's homes generate a surplus of electricity and sell what they don't need to the power companies that run the national and regional electricity grids.

With their 35cm thick walls, the homes are so well insulated that the temperature inside is directly affected by the number of people in each apartment. "If it gets too cold in the winter, you have the choice of turning up the heating or inviting a couple of friends round to dinner," Delleske says. He is immensely proud of the fact that his 90sqm, four-roomed "Passive house," which is almost environmentally perfect, costs a mere €114 a year to heat. "Most people pay that kind of money for heating each month," he says. The "Passive house" has even managed to dispense with drains for the toilets and showers. The waste is reduced to compost in special biological toilets and shower and washing-up water is filtered and used to water the garden.

Word about the Vauban experiment is spreading. Each day, six or seven busloads of visitors roll up – parking on the outskirts, needless to say – to witness the suburb's environmentally friendly living. At the entrance, they are greeted by slogan in big letters that reads: "We are creating the world we want."

Yet the suburb's origins were very remote from such idealistic themes. It started life in 1937 as the Leo Schlageter army barracks, a collection of three-storey stone buildings to house Adolf Hitler's expanding Wehrmacht army. It was named after a German hero from the First World War who was executed by the French in 1923. At the end of the Second World War, the barracks were requisitioned by the French army and renamed Quartier Vauban, after a noted 17th century military architect. After Germany's re-unification, the French withdrew and the district was handed over to the city of Freiburg in 1994, to be promptly occupied by squatters.

Soon after, a group of ecologically minded and mostly middle-class people became interested in the quarter. Many had taken part in the anti-nuclear movement as students in the 1970s and 1980s. They set up the Forum Vauban, which began negotiating with the city government.

Vauban's founders explain that much of the eco-friendly technology that has gone into the complex was conceived and developed around Freiburg as an alternative to nuclear power. The upshot was the formation of a series of loosely structured housing associations which commissioned architects to design new and ecologically sustainable homes on the site. Most of the old Nazi-era barrack buildings were torn down and more than 60 architects were engaged to reconstruct Vauban. Its three- to five-storey buildings contain apartments of varying sizes and 80 per cent are privately owned. A four-bedroom unit costs about €250,000.

The project is a reminder of the strength of Germany's green movement. Freiburg's city government is run by a coalition of conservatives and Green Party councillors and the Greens hold the most seats. During the European elections, the Green Party won up to 60 per cent of the poll in Vauban's constituencies.

The district also bucks Germany's reputation for having one of the world's lowest birth rates: nearly 30 per cent of its inhabitants are aged under 18. Ute and Frank Lits moved to Vauban five years ago. Their children, aged six and 10, can walk out the front door of their four-bedroom apartment into a communal garden equipped with a playground and a wood-fired pizza oven. "We wanted to buy our own home and we liked the eco-friendly principles of the place," Mrs Lits said. "But the main reason is that Vauban is prefect for children. They enjoy the kind of freedom that it would be difficult to find in a normal town apartment." The couple owns a car, but neither mind having to park it in a communal garage eight minutes' walk from their home.

If Vauban's brave new world suffers from anything, it is its own peculiar brand of middle-class monoculturalism. Sitting outside a former Nazi barrack building that now functions as an organic restaurant selling ricotta-filled ravioli and ostrich meat, its is difficult to spot anyone who is non-European, old or poor.

Wolfgang Konradi, a youth worker who spent years working in less sophisticated urban areas before coming to Vauban, says the district's teenagers behave like normal people of their age. "The problem is mainly the parents, they go around expecting their offspring to be perfect citizens, but that's just not realistic," he laments. Ina, his wife, said that since having their son, she had learned to appreciate the advantages that Vauban offered for children. But she added: "It's very nice here, but a bit like living under a bell jar. I certainly wouldn't want to live here forever."

Nuclear energy gaining friends in Washington.

The the Obama Administration is firmly committed to renewable energy and has made great strides in translating that commitment into tangible policies and programs. While most of the activity around renewables has been highly publicized, efforts to resuscitate the nation's dormant nuclear industry have been moving forward with little fanfare.

In fact, by seizing the opportunity to capitalize on public concerns about climate change nuclear energy industry leaders have successfully positioned nukes to play a prominent role in energy secretary Steven Chu's clean energy/climate change plans. (GW)

Duke Considering First New U.S. Nuclear Plant in 30 Years

by Laura Shin
Solve Climate
Jun 19, 2009

For the first time since the Three Mile Island meltdown, U.S. interest in nuclear power is heating up.

In southern Ohio yesterday, a coalition of energy companies, including Duke Energy, announced that it is considering ordering the nation's first new nuclear plant in more than 30 years.

Duke's group will have some competition: So far, 17 applications have been submitted to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission for 26 new reactors, reflecting how concern about energy supplies and climate change have changed the debate over nuclear power.

The plant discussed yesterday would be built near the site of an inoperative uranium enrichment plant in Piketown, about 100 miles east of Cincinnati. Duke's coalition, called the Southern Ohio Clean Energy Park Alliance, brings together nuclear companies USEC, Unistar and French AREVA, plus the Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative, a group working for the economic stability of the area.

They plan to seek funding from the Department of Energy, and they could find that federal support.

Nuclear energy has been gaining friends in Washington in recent months.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu is a strong supporter of nuclear power, and there has been discussion in Congress of financing new nuclear energy projects as the government's emphasis shifts toward cleaner sources of energy. The federal stimulus package proposed earlier this year initially offered a $50 billion loan boost for nuclear power, though that measure was dropped in the final negotiations.

The DOE is now preparing to award $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear facilities, and earlier this week, Chu announced $9 million for scholarships and grants for university research into nuclear energy.

“America’s leadership in nuclear energy research will be critical in addressing the country’s longterm energy independence and climate change goals," Chu said in announcing the scholarship program. He referred to nuclear power as an "important zero-carbon energy source.”

A look at nuclear construction under way around the world right now offers a cautionary tale, though.

A survey by analyst Mycle Schneider of the more than three dozen nuclear plants currently under construction found they long lead times, with plants taking over a decade to come online, and that about half ended up with construction delays and several had significant cost overruns. Finland's 3 billion Euro Olkiluoto-3 nuclear plant, which submitted environmental assessments in 1998 and saw the first concrete poured in 2005, was 1.5 billion Euros over budget by 2007.

In the U.S., while some state lawmakers have called for more nuclear power, they haven't been as quick amid the economic crisis to allow those project costs to be passed on to consumers, creating another funding challenge. That tripped up AmerenUE's plans for an Areva nuclear reactor in Missouri, where it wasn't allowed to raise its consumers' rates before the plant was completed. AmerenUE announced that it was suspending its Missouri nuclear plans in April.

Currently, nuclear power generated by the 104 existing reactors in 31 states accounts for 10 percent of all the installed electric capacity in the United States. That number jumps to 20 percent of the overall electricity supply and 75 percent of all carbon-free energy, according to Steve Kerekes, spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute.

It's been years since a new nuclear plant was ordered, though, and there have been no new orders since before March 28, 1979, when a coolant leak led to a partial reactor core meltdown at the Three Mile Island Generating Station near Harrisburg, Pa. (More than 40 plants that had already been ordered were completed in the 1980s and ’90s.)

Kerekes says the lack of new construction isn't entirely attributable to the Three Mile Island meltdown.

“Certainly Three Mile Island had an influence on our industry, but the primary reason thus far is that we haven’t had to build new plants because we’ve been getting electricity from what we have,” he says.

He cites gains in efficiency and the flattening of demand:

“We have operated plants so much better and have done so over the last 15 to 20 years, increasing our electrical output by the equivalent of 29 reactors since 1990 from existing resources. We've increased our overall electrical output from 25 percent to 30 percent."

He also notes that new U.S. power plant construction in recent years has been for medium-sized natural gas plants, not from the kinds of coal and nuclear plants that create baseload electricity.

In terms of climate impact, nuclear power is negligible. One University of Wisconsin study determined that, per Gigawatt-hour, nuclear power emitted less than 2 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted by coal – and about the same amount as wind, geothermal and hydroelectric power.

The likelihood that the federal government will put a price on carbon emissions in the near future is also spurring companies like Duke to investigate nuclear energy as a source of future electicity. About 70 percent of Duke's power right now comes from coal, with 27 percent from nuclear, 2 percent from natural gas and oil, and 1 percent from wind and hydro combined.

"At this point, there’s uncertainty with how federal regulations will address greenhouse gases, so we've got to look for ways to serve our customers in the future – clean energy ways," says Rita Sipe, a Duke spokeswoman.

While nuclear power could cut the nation's greenhouse-gas emissions if it replaced coal plants, it still has waste issues throughout its lifecycle, from the uranium mines it relies on for raw materials to the disposal of its spent fuel, which remains hazardous for thousands of years.

A few environmentalists, notably the Greenpeace co-founder-turned-nuclear booster Patrick Moore and James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia theory that the earth is a super-organism, support nuclear for lowering greenhouse gas emissions. However, most environmental groups still question the risks nuclear power and its waste pose to the environment and humanity. Greenpeace outwardly opposes new nuclear plants.

Kerekes, meanwhile, envisions a wave of construction, with about 30 new nuclear plants being built in the United States over the next 20 to 25 years. The first four to eight of those he expects to come online between 2016 and 2018.

Laura Shin is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and other publications.