Why we like nature

Check out this slide show.  This is why we want to be green - the earth is *sweet* and we want it to stay that way.  You can also join the Nature Conservancy flickr group - the deadline for entries to their contest just passed, but you can still vote for the winners…

Eating things off the ground?!

Check out this amazing post from the blog Sustainable Systems.  It’s all about the edible plants you can find just growing wild in cities (these particular ones in San Francisco).  I love the idea of just being able to pick something off the median and munch it, but I bet it’s extra dirty.  Mmmmm… car exhaust.  Ha ha ha.  Regardless, knowing about this stuff does break down some of the barriers, at least in my mind, between “city” and “nature.”

(Side Note - I edited out some recipes - check out the original article to read the whole thing.)

Thursday, March 6, 2008
food for free.
Edible plants can be found growing in any environment, even in the city. Learning to identify and eat the wild edibles that grow in San Francisco has changed my relationship to the landscape. I walk to work scanning the cracks in the pavement to see if I can name the weeds there. Eating miner’s lettuce in the park, or bringing home wild radish flowers, I feel a specific connection to place. These are not plants that have been carefully cultivated and managed. These are plants that are often found at disturbed sites, in abandoned lots and highway medians, the life at the edge of cities. To discover food that is free has also allowed me to experience eating without consumerism and to imagine food outside of capitalism. The following edible plant profiles are from a zine that Source, a Bay Area collective that I am a part of, will soon be publishing. We’ve only been researching wild edibles that grow locally, but many of these can be found nationally. If you’d like a copy of Edible City, please feel free to email bayareasource at gmail with your name and address.

Plants found in parks and parking lots:

California Bay
California Bay leaves that are picked can be left to dry for a few days and later used whole to flavor soups and other recipes that call for traditional Bay Leaves. (But be sure to remove the leaves before eating,) The nuts can be a bit bitter, but they are often eaten roasted. To roast the nuts, remove the outer shells to bake at 350 degrees for a half hour. California Bay leaves can also act as a natural insect repellent. Place whole leaves in cupboards or around picnic tables to deter insects.

Chicory
Chicory is identifiable for its bright blue flowers, but it is most edible before flowering occurs. The leaves, when young, can be added to salads or sautéed as greens. The roots of chicory are also commonly used as a caffeine free coffee substitute. To make this chicory drink scrub the roots of the plant clean, then thinly slice them before leaving in the sun to dry. Once the slices are dry, roast the roots in the oven until they turn a light brown. The chicory is now ready to grind and brew.

Yellow or Curly Dock
Dock is commonly found growing in disturbed sites and in areas that receive a lot of water. Dock leaves are best picked young before the floral stalk forms and they can be used as a spinach substitute. The flavor is a bit similar to rhubarb. Read more »

Rooftop, Container, and Windowbox Gardening

Living in a city doesn’t mean you can’t grow some of your own food.  The Rooftop Garden Project gives step by step tips on how to do it.  They even sell “ready to grow” kits to make it easy for anyone.  It’s something worth looking into for each us of as individuals, but how awesome would it be if we had our own little Curious garden patch?  There is a free 80 page Guide to Setting Up Your Own Edible Rooftop Garden with detailed instructions - if there’s enough enthusiasm for the idea among the Curious crew, I think we should go for it!

US Opinion on Climate Change

This article, What Do Americans Think About Climate Change?, is taken from the Nature Conservancy website.

Americans are sharply divided in their beliefs about whether climate change is real, according to a new study commissioned by The Nature Conservancy and other leading conservation and climate action groups.

The study — the American Climate Values Survey (ACVS), conducted by the consulting group EcoAmerica — also found that only 18 percent of survey respondents strongly believe that climate change is real, human-caused and harmful. It also found that political party affiliation is the single largest indicator as to whether people see climate change as a threat.

Encouragingly, the survey also reveals Americans are very interested and supportive of the benefits of proposed climate change solutions.

So how should conservation organizations do a better job connecting the public with the dangers of climate change — and its potential solutions? Nature.org spoke with Lee Bodner, EcoAmerica’s executive director, to get some ideas. Read more »

Eco solution to the US financial crisis?

I had actually been thinking something similar to what Richard Register suggests below. If our economy is weak, we need to create jobs - why not create green ones, which would also address another major problem we’re facing - climate change. Kill two birds with one stone. That’s something I wouldn’t mind spending my tax money on.

DON’T BAIL OUT, BUILD OUT OF OUR PRESENT ECONOMIC DEBACLE
by Richard Register

Once upon a time there was an economic disaster that laid low the United States of America and spread hardships from sea to shining sea and even out across the oceans blue. Then came a war of unprecedented proportions. But we beat back the Great Depression and won the Second World War. It’s more than a little relevant at this point to ask, “How’d we do that?”

Far from the federal government’s admonition to spend vaguely toward prosperity, delivered in the early days of sliding toward our current meltdown with delivery of our juicy little “economic stimulus payments,” which we’re the first of this year’s bail outs and which cost the United States around $150 billion dollars, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt built us out of the Depression and won the War by saying, “Don’t spend - save. Invest in the future of this country and let’s built it up as if we believed in its future.”

The “it” that got built started out with dams, bridges, post offices, soil reclamation and reforestation projects. The government was paying people, but they actually did something. Then, with Nazi Germany on the warpath and Imperial Japan too, the “it” turned into tanks, guns, bombs and airplanes. But build as if our survival depended on it we did.

Today we wake up to discover we’ve been building suburban sprawl, the most inefficient form of habitat we could ever have imagined, a form so bad it renders car-based cities the largest contributor to climate change and species extinction extant. There’s where the bizarrely expensive houses miles from anything else, with the even more bizarre mortgage terms, began and spread. There’s where the mess was first and worst, compounded by the raising cost of gasoline, asphalt, car depreciation and everything else automotive. Take a map of the Bay Area or anywhere else and you will see the per-person demand for energy and contribution to climate change goes up as population density and “mixed-uses” goes down. Surprise! We are facing another World War, the War of the current built environment against the World itself.

So what to build this time around? Instead of dams, guns and bombs our economic and ecological, national and planet survival depends on building the ecologically tuned, higher density, mixed-use city with its subsystems of transit and bicycle transportation and solar and wind energy. Bail out is not the right term for infusing federal money into building a better world and I doubt Roosevelt used the term, though extreme conservatives of his time probably though of it as a bail out of the worker. Today’s bail out is proposed for the people who at best could go on to loan money into action by financing… something - but what? The last big thing on their track record was exactly what imploded causing the current disaster: car-dependent sprawl, plus a certain measure of their own contagious greed.

Liberals say bail out the small guy (and don’t mention the same old sprawling mess) by trying to shore up mortgages to energy hog buildings and commutes. The general notion that the federal government should actually do something here is completely appropriate, but what?

In early 1942 Roosevelt told the automobile manufacturers it was going to be illegal to make any more cars until this war gets won. They didn’t believe it at first, but they got paid, too. And that’s what they did: joined everyone building us out of the Depression and War. For a year and a half in the middle of the war - amazing to our ears today - not a car was produced. And we won. We need a clear strategy like the New Deal building up to win the Second World War. I wouldn’t advise banning cars today, but I would advise building the city that simply doesn’t need them. In other words, how to get out of our economic mess? Build out, don’t Bail out. Ecologically tuned cities are the answer.

Richard Register is President of Ecocity Builders, Inc., of Oakland, and author of Ecocities - Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature, New Society Publishers.

Tap vs. bottled water in Florida

Bottled water firm steamed about Miami-Dade water ads
Radio commercials that touted Miami-Dade tap water have landed the county in legal hot water with Nestle.
BY CURTIS MORGAN for miamiherald.com
posted on 10.12.08

In the radio ad, a talking faucet extols Miami-Dade’s tap water as cheaper, purer and safer than bottled water.

It may have sounded innocuous to most listeners, but the 30-second spot left the nation’s largest purveyor of bottled water boiling mad.

Nestle Waters North America, which makes nearly $4 billion a year selling Zephyrhills and other brands, is threatening to sue if the county doesn’t kill commercials the company brands as false advertising.

”It’s an attack on the integrity of the company,” said Nestle spokesman Jim McClellan. “It’s an attack on the product we produce — and it’s blatantly wrong.”

With the ads ending a five-week run last month and no plans to revive it, the county considers the legal issues moot. But John Renfrow, director of the Water and Sewer Department, defended the county’s right to tout its tap water. ”Basically, the message is that our water is fine,” he said. “It’s wonderful. It’s delicious. This is just one of many different spots we’ve done.”

Environmentalists blasted the threat against the state’s largest utility — believed to be a first — as a warning shot from an industry worried about slow sales after years of gushing growth. Read more »

Air Storage is Explored for Energy

From The New York Times

By KEN BELSON
Published: August 26, 2008

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg dreamed out loud last week about a New York skyline filled with wind turbines, one of the most serious issues raised by the naysayers was that the wind does not always blow when you need it.

But a New Jersey company plans to announce on Tuesday that it is working on a solution to this perennial problem with wind power: using wind turbines to produce compressed air that can be stored underground or in tanks and released later to power generators during peak hours.

The company, Public Service Enterprise Group Global LLC, a subsidiary of P.S.E.G. Energy Holdings, is forming a joint venture with Michael Nakhamkin, a leader in the development of energy storage technology. The new company, Energy Storage and Power, will promote the use of compressed air storage technology to utilities and other power producers. (P.S.E.G. Global is the sister company of Public Service Electric and Gas Company, New Jersey’s largest power distributor, which has 2.2 million customers.)

The technology has been around for decades, though the only major plant in the United States opened in Alabama in 1991. Another plant was built in Germany in the 1970s. But compressed air storage is getting a fresh look because so many windmills have been built across the country in recent years, and energy producers are increasingly looking for ways to avoid building power plants that rely on expensive oil and natural gas.

Dr. Nakhamkin, who worked on the plant in Alabama, has developed new technology that reduces the startup time for generators powered by compressed air and cuts the amount of emissions they produce. The new facilities would also use more standard components, which would make the plants cheaper to build, depending on how much mining is required to create an underground reservoir.

“This is a game-changing technology,” said Stephen C. Byrd, the president of P.S.E.G. Energy Holdings, which will invest $20 million over three years. “There is a desire for energy independence, and this will reduce the need for oil and natural gas.” Read more »

Eco Friendly Fish Farms

Fish are supposed to be very healthy for people to eat - the downside is that our oceans are overfished, seafood is often contaminated with mercury and other toxins, and farmed fish can pollute our water. Here’s one sweet way to tackle the problem, taken from pruned.blogspot.com:

(All screen captures are taken from videos provided by MIT Sea Grant.)

Unlike other open-ocean fish farming cages that are tethered to the sea floor, the Aquapod® is unmoored, able to maneuver and stabilize itself beneath the waves not with the help of boats but with its own built-in thrusters.

Designed by a team led by Cliff Goudey, the director of the MIT Sea Grant’s Offshore Aquaculture Engineering Center, a prototype was constructed for a technical feasibility test this summer in the waters off of Puerto Rico. Read more »

World without us

This website has tons of great pictures of an abandoned railway station in Abkhazia (a former Russian territory mentioned a lot in the context of the recent Georgia-Russia war).  It makes you think about what the planet would look like if we ended up killing ourselves through some kind of human-caused, Planet of the Apes-like, environmental meltdown.  But on a cheerier note, it also makes you wonder to what degree we could integrate technology/working/living/travel spaces with nature.  How beautiful could our cities and transportation lines be if they could coexist with and in nature rather than be starkly separated, City vs. Wilderness.

Will Allen’s Urban Farm

Former professional basketball player and MacArthur Genius grant winner Will Allen’s 2 acre farm, Growing Power, produces enough food to feed 2000 people each week. And it’s located in the middle of Milwaukee. Local residents get fresh, healthy, fairly priced food right in their neighborhood.

His greenhouse is heated by compost, and he is farming fish using a system where plants filter and clean the tank water and cycle it back in. As if all that isn’t inspiring enough, he also wants to see 50 story skyscraper farms take off… so do I! Check out this link for a great video.