Not Quite Hippie - The Tumblr

[shared via Google Reader from Grist]

A version of this article originally appeared on Transportation Nation.

Photo by Ed Yourdon.

Let’s go back in time to December 2010. The city’s tabloid editorial pages are just beginning to sink their teeth into the transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, for — among other things — her avid support of bike lanes and pedestrian plazas. In Brooklyn, well-connected residents are preparing to sue to remove a bike lane.

On Dec. 9, 2010, New York’s city council holds a standing-room-only, overflow-room-inducing, five hour-plus hearing on bikes and bike lanes in New York City. Bronx council member James Vacca, who chairs the council’s Transportation Committee, kicks things off first by warning the crowd to be polite, then sets the stage by pointing out “few issues today prompt more heated discussion than bike policy in New York City.”

In the hours that followed, he was proven correct: Sadik-Khan was grilled, interrupted, and accused of ignoring the will of the public, prevaricating, and acting by fiat.

And she was put on the defensive, repeatedly exclaiming “That’s what we do!” when yet another council member excoriated her for not soliciting sufficient community input.

At one point, Lewis Fidler, a council member from Brooklyn, told Sadik-Khan her answer was “kind of half true. I don’t say that to be snooty. I say it because I think maybe you’re not aware.”

And then he reeled himself him. “This is not like you’ve got to be for the cars or you’ve got to be for the bikes or you’ve got to be for the buses. It’s really not … the cowmen and the farmers can be friends.”

The mood at this week’s Transportation Committee hearing, held in the same room as the 2010 hearing — and with many of the same players in attendance — was markedly different.

Now more New Yorkers are biking. More than two-thirds give the city’s bike share program, which is launching in July, a thumbs-up. Traffic fatalities are at record lows.

“I want to first off say thank you to the agency,” Fidler started, before launching into an encomium. “Quite frankly I don’t always get the answer I like from DOT [Department of Transportation], but we get a lot of answers from DOT. And they’re very responsive, your agency; your Brooklyn office continues to be a very responsive one.”

He then waxed on about major construction work going on on the Belt Parkway — a roadway almost entirely in his council district. “I will say for a project of that size to have gone on, without my getting repeated complaints from constituents — that says something all by itself, and the work that’s been completed looks really good.”

Back in 2010, Fidler’s questioning of Sadik-Khan was one of that hearing’s most contentious exchanges, with the two of them repeatedly interrupting each other. Fidler at that time told Sadik-Khan that her answers were “half true”; he later accused the DOT of failing to solicit community input on bike lanes — a charge Sadik-Khan repeatedly denied.

On Tuesday, Fidler asked Sadik-Khan to look into repairing a bike lane in his district (a lane under the Parks Department jurisdiction since it’s on their land. Sadik-Khan said she’d make sure her office reached out to the parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe.)

So maybe the cowmen and the farmers might be friends after all.

To be fair, Tuesday’s hearing was not one in which members of the public could comment (public hearings on the budget will be held next week), and biking wasn’t the only topic on the agenda.

But still:

Peter Koo is the Queens council member who represents Flushing (a neighborhood so heavily trafficked by pedestrians that the DOT said Tuesday that it’s slated for a sidewalk expansion project.) At the 2010 hearing, Koo complained that bikes lanes had been implemented at the expense of motorists and pedestrians, and that they were empty. “I hardly see any people using the bike lanes,” he said at the time. (Transcript here [PDF]; Koo’s remarks begin on page 39.)

At Tuesday’s hearing, Koo had a different complaint. “I find a lot of bicycles chained to the fence, to the trees, light poles, meter poles, everywhere.” He wants the New York Police Department to cut the chains of bikes that are illegally parked. But before that happens, he said, “we have to find a place for them to park.”

Letitia James, long a bike-lane supporter, put the cherry on the Charlotte Russe. “Commissioner, I want to thank you for all the docking stations in my district. I want to thank you for the bike-share program. I want to thank you for using my picture, my image, on your website, on the bike — it’s absolutely fabulous. Thank you for the plazas in my district … thank you for all the street renovations … thank you for the bike lanes, thank you for recognizing that we all have to share the space and no one is entitled to a city street.”

A few minutes after James spoke, the May 29 hearing ended.

“I do think since that hearing in 2010, many actions my committee has taken, and the legislation that we have passed, has brought New York City DOT to a realization that they could do a better job when it comes to community consultation,” council transportation chair Vacca said in a phone interview.  “I think there’s been more outreach, there’s been more involvement, so I think that the strongly held views that existed in 2010 have somewhat been mitigated by DOT realizing that it’s better to work with local neighborhoods where possible and to try to seek areas of consensus.”

And is he happy with bike lanes? Yes — even though he said the ones in his Bronx district weren’t heavily used. “I do think in time, though, people will be bicycling more in neighborhoods where they are not bicycling now. And I think the groundwork that we’ve laid legislatively will make that reality more positive, have a more positive impact on neighborhoods throughout the city.”

Vacca said the Bronx bike lanes have been successful in reducing speeding. “They’ve had an impact in slowing down vehicular traffic, and that’s always a positive thing,” he said, adding that that’s a persistent issue for his constituents. “In my neighborhood there’s not a block party I go to, there’s not a civic association I go to, where people are not demanding speed bumps, where they’re not demanding police enforcement for ticketing of people who speed in their cars.”

Next up for the city council: reigning in rogue delivery people — a project they’re collaborating with the DOT on. “We cannot have commercial bicyclists driving the wrong way on one-way streets, we cannot have them ignoring red lights, we cannot have them on sidewalks,” Vacca said, adding that he’s working on legislation to address this. “I think within the next several weeks we should have a consensus bill that will reflect my views as well as the views of the Department of Transportation. We’re working together to come up with type of bill, and I think we’re making good progress.”

[shared via Google Reader from The Underground Blog - Denver Urban Gardens]

Applying Lessons Learned from the Master Community Gardener Program

By Shannon Spurlock, DUG Community Initiatives Coordinator

Denver Urban Gardens just completed the fourth year of the Master Community Gardener Program, an eleven-week program designed to further engage people in building community through supporting community gardens. Program participants, in exchange for partaking in the program, commit to a minimum of 30 volunteer/GiveBack hours. Each year, participants, through the varied ways in which they earn GiveBack hours, enrich and strengthen neighborhoods throughout the Metro Denver area. 

Therese Revitte and Sandy Peletier, two Master Community Gardeners from the 2010 Program, reflect on the multitude of ways in which the knowledge and experiences gained from the Master Community Gardener Program affected, and positively changed, the places in which they focused and earned their GiveBack hours. Denver Urban Gardens greatly looks forward to the many ways in which the 2012 Master Community Gardeners will affect the places in which they apply their knowledge and community building skills.

How Do We Grow Community in the Community Garden? Try Work Days (Really!)

By Sandy Peletier, DUG Master Community Gardener, and long-time gardener at DUG’s West Washington Park Community Garden

We enter the community garden for many reasons. High on the list is undoubtedly a vision of fresh green beans and award-winning tomatoes. In our eagerness to get digging and planting in our assigned plot we may overlook the fact that we have also signed on to a “community” garden. Growing community can be as elusive as growing the perfect tomato. So how do we grow “community”?

From my DUG Master Community Garden program, I learned valuable principles and guidelines to organize and grow communities. At the core is valuing the individual and recognizing that each gardener has something to contribute. The key is building on those strengths and assets. As a co-leader of West Wash Park Community Garden’s maintenance committee, I believe community work days are a great way to foster community spirit and cohesion when they focus on the individuals as much as the tasks. Work days create a communal opportunity to work side by side and get to know each other, which transforms us from being gardeners in a community to becoming a community of gardeners.

Here are some thoughts and ideas to bring people together at your next work day or on a special project.

• Gardeners working on a new compost system for the West Washington Park Community GardenStart with an organized work plan with clear priorities. Give people as much choice in work tasks as possible and latitude to do it their way. When given options and flexibility people will surprise and delight you with their skills, creativity, and diligence. We can count on one of our gardeners with a yearn to put his portable power washer to use to show up when a work day includes hosing down a dumpster pad, outdoor furniture, or patio pavers. What a great resource!

• Pair/team up people on tasks. Even if there’s more chit chatting than weed pulling, that’s OK. It fosters camaraderie.

• Encourage ownership of the commons by establishing an “Adopt-a-Patch” system. Assign interested individuals sections of the common garden areas to tend for the duration of the garden season, like a communal herb garden or those often neglected hell strips along fences and sidewalks. This fosters personal investment in, attention to, and stewardship of the greater community. Admittedly, establishing and managing such a system requires greater coordination to be successful but ultimately it’s satisfying to gardeners who like having sole responsibility for a specific area, and they appreciate having the flexibility to do the work when and how they want. 

• Turn a work day into a “work out.” We found no lack of volunteers for the hardier composting chores when some of our more “he-man” folks figured out what a great physical work out turning compost or chopping veggie waste is. An “al fresco” gym workout is better than lifting weights inside a fluorescent lit building any day. 

• Host a painting party. We turned a daunting to-do list of repair and painting projects into a done list by inviting those with interests and skills to help. One person with an electric sander and saw horses single-handedly prepped all five of our picnic tables and benches, and another gardener arrived equipped with an impressive array of carpentry tools and the know-how to use them. When word of the special projects got around, people joined in the fun of the progressive painting parties to paint the tables, benches and garden gate. The participants seemed to enjoy the camaraderie and sense of accomplishment as well as being able to fit work hours into their schedules. In no time WWPCG was freshened up for the new garden season.

• Although having opportunities for work sessions outside scheduled community work days is a great way to optimize overall participation and individual contribution, formal community work days remain an essential fulcrum in creating a strong culture of community.  

• After a work session don’t forget to reinforce the effort and results with a thank you posting on the bulletin board. We all need an attaboy. And consider the honor system to log work hours. Trusting the individual builds trust in the system.

Even if all the weeds don’t get picked or the painting isn’t professional quality or the garden waste isn’t chopped into precisely two-inch pieces, that’s OK too. You’re growing community. And there’s always another work day.

A Community Garden in the ‘Burbs

By Therese Revitte, DUG Master Community Gardener 

It seemed like such a simple and inspired idea … an unused and unkempt corner of our subdivision with plenty of full sun, a neighborhood in need of a central amenity to draw people together, a political and environmental climate ripe for local growing. And don’t be fooled – there are generations of people in the burbs who don’t know that vegetables don’t come from the grocery store. The benefits of building a community garden in our neighborhood seemed endless. As with all community gardens, the vision was to beautify an area, educate folks, and grow community.    

Happy gardeners, after a hard day’s workThe Arapahoe Estates Community Garden and Garden Club started with a proposal to the HOA Board in 2008. In a covenant-controlled community, you have to consult with the decision-makers at each step. I was given permission to determine neighborhood interest in a community garden– all 164 households. In fact, there were several interested households and many supportive comments. I was feelin’ the love! I started investigating funding options. Since we weren’t a charitable nonprofit, we were not eligible for grants and most donations. Funding would have to come from the HOA. 

That’s when concerns started being voiced. An HOA Board is tasked with spending the homeowners’ money wisely, and suddenly what seemed like a simple and inspired idea became much more complicated.

1. Was there enough money in reserves to build a functional garden that met aesthetic standards? 
2. Wouldn’t that money be better spent upgrading other areas of the subdivision?
3. Will people get bored with the community garden in a few years and leave the garden unused?
4. How would the Board justify spending all that money when only garden members would benefit from the garden? 

Neighbors spoke out both for and against the idea. The Board became divided. In the end, after a close Board vote, the garden was approved, established and built. 

The cost to start a community garden is significant. There has to be good faith between the Board and the garden members. Our HOA Board showed good faith in funding the construction of the garden. To reciprocate, the garden members did a large amount of the design and construction themselves, saving on labor costs – hard team-building work. They consulted with Board members to meet aesthetic standards. They paid for walkways, garden tools and the shed out of their own pockets.

A key discussion related to an HOA building a community garden is whether the garden will be considered an amenity for the whole subdivision. Will its existence benefit all homeowners, justifying the cost of building it? Or will it just be a neighborhood club, benefiting only the households who are garden members? To support the idea that our garden is an amenity to the neighborhood, a policy was made to link plots with the garden members’ addresses, giving garden membership real estate value. If a garden member sells his or her house, the new owners have first right of keeping or refusing the plot. Instead of tennis courts or a swimming pool, realtors put “Community Garden” as an amenity on their listings. Neighborhoods with an amenity have higher home values than neighborhoods without.

The question of how to be inclusive of all neighbors is still evolving. To make sure the garden isn’t an exclusive club, Garden membership is open to all neighbors. To date, there is no waiting list for plots. All neighbors are invited to attend children’s garden activities, social activities and educational events, regardless of membership. Plans are being proposed to make the area surrounding the garden into a park destination for all neighbors to enjoy. 

Ours is still a young, growing garden. My instincts told me that there would be a core group of people who would stick with it, while other households joined and un-joined. That has proven to be true so far, but we don’t take that core group for granted. We continue to strive to be dynamic, to improve growing conditions, making for a successful gardening experience. We offer a variety of garden experiences – personal plots, a children’s garden, a shared communal garden, on-going education. Each garden member brings his or her own talents to the garden, whether it be educating others, helping with construction, leading children’s garden activities, or taking food to the food bank. 

I recently made a presentation to the HOA Board about the good things we’re doing in our garden. I asked neighbors, members and non-members alike, to write down their thoughts about how the garden has benefited our neighborhood. The top two responses, voiced in heart-felt eloquent ways: The garden brings together our community and beautifies our neighborhood. And after all, that’s where the simple and inspired vision started. We’re on our way.

To learn more about DUG’s Master Community Gardener Program, click here. 

Click here to return to the Spring 2012 edition of The Underground News.

[shared via Google Reader from Slow Love Life]

My sons and I have an ongoing conversation about ideal houses. What they should look like, what they should contain. One son is enamored of wood-burning stoves and that is key to his idea of home; the other wants small, fitted places for sleeping and reading and meditating, suitable for one, but near the mothership—and he’s had this idea of home since he was a small child.

I am intrigued by sheds and shacks with specific, dedicated purposes. Jill Krementz took a photograph of E. B. White in his writing shack in Maine, once a fish shack; it is one of my all-time favorite portraits. I love everything about it. The way she framed him, from the side, on his hard wooden bench, at his typewriter, the barrel for crumpled sheets of paper, the ocean through the window, the window itself, and the shed wide open to the water. And White himself, one of my Writing Gods.

My niece Elodie (L.O.D.) is shaping up to be an interesting writer; she just graduated from Vassar. What a gorgeous place. I fell for this shed at the back of the house she (and 20 other students) are renting. She calls it her Writing Shed. I could instantly feel how safe she felt, during the hours she spent writing (longhand, first draft). Safe, secure, quiet, peaceful enough to begin to locate and refine her writing voice. She’s got everything she needs in here. This shed goes in my Inspiration File.  

The Sustainability Advantage: Short Costs Long Growth

Businesses are showing leadership and driving sustainability. The relationship between businesses and the consumer is changing, people increasingly expect responsible conduct that incorporates sustainability. Sustainability is no longer only a way to reduce risk and prepare for a more stringent regulatory environment.

via: www.greenconduct.com

Sharp’s Concentrator Solar Cell Sets 43.5% Conversion Efficiency Record!

Sharp just signaled a bright future for renewable energy as it achieved a new solar cell efficiency record of 43.5%, eclipsing its previous record of 36.9% set in November. Sharp shattered the efficiency record with its concentrator triple-junction compound solar cell,…

via: inhabitat.com

Occupy the Farm Goes to Court

By Jeff Conant, for Climate Connections Alameda County, CA, June 1, 2012 - Yesterday began what will likely be years of legal proceedings between the Regents of the University of California and the Gill Tract Farmers Collective - the band of radical commoners who entered, occupied, and farmed the UC-owned Gill Tract,…

via: climate-connections.org

Superman Does Good. You’re Doing Well

As many of you know I can be prone to gloomy moments. That might be putting it lightly. There are those rare days when I hardly leave bed. But I’m working on this. Over the past week or so I’ve come to some realizations, with the help of friends, that have been helping me avoid such gloomy moments.

via: ericsmarshall.wordpress.com

So you should all go check it out. 

Srsly.  

[shared via Google Reader from Grist]

When President Obama announced a new program during the recent G8 summit to help bolster food and agriculture in developing nations through corporate “pledges,” I was most struck by his choice of partners in the effort. A Reuters report on the announcement read:

The initiative includes a new partnership with agribusiness giants such as DuPont, Monsanto and Cargill, along with smaller companies, including almost 20 from Africa, which will commit some $3 billion for projects to help farmers in the developing world build local markets and improve productivity.

Those three companies are the good food movement’s equivalent of the law firm Dewey, Cheatem & Howe — not the folks it wants to see put in charge of anything, much less “feeding the world.” These companies believe that exporting western-style industrial agriculture to the developing world (Africa in particular) is key to ensuring enough food for a growing population. And they maintain this position despite the growing evidence that industrial agriculture can’t solve the problem.

As a recent report in the journal Nature on the best way forward for agriculture explained, current models suggest that industrial ag just won’t cut it:

… conventional approaches to intensive agriculture, especially the unbridled use of irrigation and fertilizers, have been major causes of environmental degradation. Closing yield gaps without environmental degradation will require new approaches, including reforming conventional agriculture and adopting lessons from organic systems and precision agriculture.

Unfortunately, this “unbridled use of irrigation and fertilizers” is the form of agriculture that Monsanto, DuPont, and Cargill know best.

So I was concerned when I ran across this new study, which found that to date, human-caused groundwater depletion is a greater contributor to sea-level rise than climate change. The U.K. Guardian explains:

Trillions of tonnes of water have been pumped up from deep underground reservoirs in every part of the world and then channeled into fields and pipes to keep communities fed and watered. The water then flows into the oceans, but far more quickly than the ancient aquifers are replenished by rains. The global tide would be rising even more quickly but for the fact that man-made reservoirs have, until now, held back the flow by storing huge amounts of water on land.

“The water being taken from deep wells is geologically old – there is no replenishment and so it is a one-way transfer into the ocean,” said sea level expert professor Robert Nicholls, at the University of Southampton. “In the long run, I would still be more concerned about the impact of climate change, but this work shows that even if we stabilize the climate, we might still get sea level rise due to how we use water.”

Chalk this up alongside dead zones, superweeds, superbugs, antibiotic resistance, and nitrogen pollution as yet another unintended consequence of industrial agriculture.

How does this water study relate to the G8 agriculture initiative? Well, drilling into deep and ancient aquifers using techniques borrowed from oil production is currently a favored technique for improving agricultural productivity in the developing world. And the new G8 program appears designed to do much more of it.

As the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy noted in a post on its blog, these “tube wells” have already been said to cause “an environmental disaster” in Asia. An Agence France-Presse report from several years back noted that:

In the case of India, smallholder farmers have driven 21 million tube wells into their fields and the number is increasing by a million wells per year.

“Nobody knows where the tube wells are or who owns them. There is no way anyone can control what happens to them,” Tushaar Shah, head of the International Water Management Institute’s groundwater station, based in Gujarat, said.

“When the balloon bursts, untold anarchy will be the lot of rural India.”

Half of the country’s traditional hand-dug wells have already run dry, as have millions of shallower tube wells, causing some despairing farmers to commit suicide, he said.

In China’s north plain, that country’s breadbasket, 30 cubic kilometers (1.059 trillion cubic feet) more water are being extracted each year by farmers than are being replaced by the rain, New Scientist said.

Groundwater is used to produce 40 percent of the country’s grain.

In June, the state paper China Daily admitted that the nation “may be plunged into a water crisis” by 2030 when its population is scheduled to peak at 1.6 billion.

It just seems that regardless of the evidence that practices like these cause destruction, the U.S. insists on continuing a form of ecological arbitrage which offers short-term gains in productivity that won’t be paid for until long after those who’ve enjoyed them are gone.

Ironically, one of the main motivations behind the G8 plan is that we, the richest nations in the history of the planet, are feeling — as the Reuters report declared in its headline — “cash-strapped” at the moment.

As I see it, the best way to feed billions of people is not through more industrial agriculture, but rather through the expanded application of agroecological techniques — meaning working with the land, rather than against it. If a crop requires drilling into ancient aquifers for irrigation, it’s probably not a crop that’s suited for the region in question. And of course, agroecology also calls for minimal inputs of fertilizer and pesticides and no GMOs. I’m not the only one who believes this; the U.N.’s “Save and grow” program for developing world farmers is itself based on agroecology.

All of which is to say that the quest for corporate sponsorship for agriculture in the developing world is misguided. Supporting sustainable efforts in developing nations isn’t about who can write the biggest check. It’s about a willingness to spend our money in different ways. But before that can happen, the G8 governments must accept that the risks from expanding the industrial approach to agriculture — such as the idea that irrigation can contribute to sea-level rise — are real and planetary in scale.