Find toxic chemicals near you

This is the scariest thing pretty much ever. Type your zip code into this EPA database and see the locations of toxic facilities near you. Warning - it only displays up to 500 at one time. Check out this screenshot of what’s surrounding Curious.

http://www.epa.gov/epahome/commsearch.htm

Cold in your apartment this winter?

Check out this animation on what to do about it.

Green Thing Presents Body-Shaped Insulation from Green Thing on Vimeo.

Cohousing project in Brooklyn

Check out this NY Times article about a new cohousing project in Brooklyn

November 30, 2008
A Village Down the Block
By VIVIAN S. TOY

SOME New Yorkers never get to know their neighbors.

They nod hello, but rarely speak, and they certainly don’t break bread with them. Even names may remain a mystery, unless an errant letter finds its way into the wrong mailbox.

This is precisely the New York that a group of Brooklyn residents hopes to escape.

They plan to do so by pooling their resources to build a project that will be not just an apartment building, but a community that more cynical New Yorkers may consider unachievably utopian.

They envision an arrangement called “cohousing,” a place where neighbors sit down to share meals several times a week, where children roam freely from home to home, and where grown-ups can hang out in a communal living room. They plan, in short, to create a village within a single development, and their chosen site is in the middle of a tree-lined brownstone block in Fort Greene.

The group, which has been incorporated as Brooklyn Cohousing L.L.C., is in contract to buy an unfinished project known as Carlton Mews, whose developers had planned 40 high-end condominiums. The developers drew up plans for apartments surrounding a common courtyard, with the units to be built in an long-abandoned Episcopal church, its former rectory and a new building with a facade that mimics the stately town houses on the block.

Brooklyn Cohousing has bought the rights to the site, the plans and all the city approvals that the developers spent two years amassing, including a go-ahead from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The group hasn’t settled on a project name yet, but it plans to build more modest apartments than the original developers intended and to fill them with families whose lives revolve around the courtyard and 6,000 square feet of common space where residents can cook together, play together, do woodworking or take an art class together.

And they plan to do it all through consensus, with some 40 households jointly deciding things like how big their shared dining room should be and what kind of finishes to put in the private kitchens in their apartments. The goal is to create a place that has a thriving community life, but where everyone can choose to be as private or social as he or she desires.

It would be one of New York City’s first cohousing projects, although there are examples in Ithaca and Saugerties. There are about 110 such projects in the United States and Canada, most in suburban or rural settings. A handful of urban ones exist in Boston, Seattle and Oakland, Calif.

The recent economic downturn may actually have created an opportunity for this type of project.

A developer who can sell an entire project to a single entity runs a lower risk than one who has to sell individual units. Banks may also appreciate that while a developer may have trouble selling unbuilt condos, the cohousing group expects to sell almost all of the project before construction begins.

“In many ways, this will just be an apartment building,” said Alex Marshall, a fellow at the Regional Plan Association who as a founding member began researching cohousing five years ago. “But what will make it different is the intention — that all the members have chosen to live here together in this way.”

Fort Greene’s cohousing apartments, to range from studios to four-bedrooms, will sell for about the market rate. But they will have less square footage than most similar New York apartments. Kitchens and living rooms will be smaller because residents can use the common spaces for entertaining. There will also be no need for spare bedrooms because members will be able to use guest rooms for visiting in-laws and friends.

The Brooklyn group so far has 14 member households, which each have committed $20,000 to $40,000, and in some cases much more, to help pay for consultants and to finance the down payment for the site. It also has about 25 associates, or households that have paid $500 and agreed to attend weekly meetings. Mr. Marshall said the hope was to get enough full members to complete the purchase and get a construction loan to start building next spring so that families can move in by early 2010.

The group’s Web site warns that “the project involves a high degree of risk and is not recommended for persons who do not have a substantial net worth or who cannot afford to lose any membership fees that may be paid.” And before becoming a full member, an associate must meet with the group’s “clearness committee,” which thoroughly explains the project.

“You’re not buying an apartment,” Mr. Marshall said. “You’re becoming a legal member of a community and sharing in the costs and risks of building it.”

Associates can spend as little as two hours a week at general meetings, but full members, like Mr. Marshall and his wife, Kristi Barlow, a documentary film editor, often spend more than 20 hours a week preparing for and attending various committee meetings.

Ms. Barlow said that when their son Max, 4, was born, “it became pretty clear that living as a nuclear family on our own in New York City was not going to be ideal.” Shortly after moving to Prospect Heights, they posted fliers for a meet-your-neighbors event.

“Except for the one neighbor that we had already gotten to know, nobody came,” Ms. Barlow said. “Not all buildings are like that, but that told us very clearly that you can’t always create a community where you are.”

When Mr. Marshall started researching cohousing, he learned that it began in Denmark in its current form, arriving in the United States in the late 1980s.

The Brooklyn group became a legal corporation with four founding families last January and two months later hired Chris ScottHanson, a consultant who has worked on about 40 cohousing projects across the country. He has schooled the members on the consensus process, steered them through site selection and helped negotiate the deal with Carlton Mews; he will also act as a project manager through construction.

Mr. ScottHanson said that the Carlton Mews site was ideal for cohousing. “On a scale of 1 to 10 for cohousing models, it’s an 11.5,” he said, citing “a courtyard in the middle,” “adaptive reuse of a church, renovation of an old town house and new construction” and its site, where “you can look down the street from the roof and see the Empire State Building.”

He said that since the group settled on Carlton Mews, he has been approached by four other Brooklyn developers looking to sell their projects. “There are developers telling me they cannot get construction funding because they don’t have buyers they can point at and show the banks,” he said.

Last spring, as the credit crisis started translating into fewer construction loans, Doug Mcdonald, a developer of Carlton Mews, sought out the group after hearing about it from a friend. “What they’re doing fits in with what we designed,” he said. “We were clever enough to put our lifeboats together and make the deal work for both sides.”

Neither he nor Mr. ScottHanson would discuss what the group is paying for the project, but the amount is probably significantly more than the $10.5 million that the developers of Carlton Mews paid for the site, since the group is also buying the development plans and the work the developers had put in to secure the building permits.

The group hopes to gather people from diverse backgrounds, age groups and socioeconomic levels. Most of the members are white; there are two Asian-Americans and one African-American.

Carl Robichaud, a program officer at the Carnegie Corporation of New York who lives with his wife, Elsie Kagan, an artist, in a house in South Park Slope that they recently renovated, said he was hooked from his first meeting last spring. “What struck me was that the people seemed really grounded and sensible,” he said. “It wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky group of hippie idealists — not that there’s anything wrong with that. But there was a real entrepreneurial spirit that captured me.”

He and Ms. Kagan are expecting a child, and he said he liked the idea of living in a place where people feel connected to one another and where children have many adult mentors in their lives. He said he figured creating a community in his current neighborhood would take 10 years, “and we feel we need to kick-start it — we want that now.”

Marion Yuen, a business strategist and one of the founding members, said that having served as president of a small co-op in Park Slope, she saw the limitations in a building where “you might have friendly neighbors, but people’s inclination to participate and be collaborative varies.” With cohousing, she said, everyone will “want to deliberately and consciously play with everyone else and play nice.”

But how can a group of strangers brought together by the prospect of living in harmony be sure that they will all like one another?

Lissa Wolfe, who works at a sailing school, owns a house in Red Hook and became a full member five months ago, said that the group had essentially been self-selecting. The consensus process and the development process can be so rigorous, she said, that people figure out pretty quickly if they want to stick around to see how it all turns out.

There is at least one other household, though, that Ms. Wolfe will know well. Her parents, Sue and Joel Wolfe, decided to join the group after attending several meetings “just to be supportive.” Sue Wolfe, a retired Bloomingdale’s executive, said that the project appealed to her immediately, but that her husband, a retired chef, was originally reluctant to leave the Boerum Hill house where they have lived since 1975. “But then he fell in love, too,” she said.

Weekly general meetings start off with the “opening go-round,” where everyone gathers in a circle and says something personal. At a recent meeting, that included the informative: “I’ve been traveling and it’s good to be back”; the emotive: “I’m doing good tonight”; and the slightly offbeat: “I just saw ‘High School Musical 3’ with my daughter and her friends.”

But meeting agendas allow only 10 minutes for this, and the group quickly gets down to business, with everyone wearing a name tag and toting a ring with six colored cards. The card system is the tool used to reach consensus.

It can be daunting for a first-timer. When a facilitator calls for consensus, members hold up cards to signify their positions on an issue. Green means the holder agrees with the decision; blue means he or she is neutral; yellow, is unsure or unclear; orange, has serious reservations but will not block consensus; and red, will block consensus. The group recently added a white card to signify “I’m not up to speed on this issue because I didn’t do my homework.”

Mr. Robichaud said that “after a meeting or two you get the hang of the different colors.”

What becomes clear after a few meetings is that nothing gets decided quickly. “When you live by consensus, it shifts how you function with people,” Mr. Marshall said. “You really have to take your time and listen to people.”

No one wants to be the odd person out, he noted, so when someone takes a stand, he or she usually feels very strongly about an issue. “And sometimes the odd person out turns out to be right,” he said.

Discussions “can get very emotional and people have cried and yelled,” Ms. Yuen said. The facilitator — there are several — tries to break the issue down and help the group resolve the disagreement. “It’s about strangers living together and learning intimacy,” she said.

But given how hard it is for a married couple to work through all the decisions that must be made to build a home, designing a building to please 40 households, each with the power to stop the project in its tracks, may seem herculean.

Ken Levenson, the architect who designed Carlton Mews and who has been hired to redesign the interior space, said that he was apprehensive about the consensus process. “But it’s actually turned out to be less time-consuming than working with developers,” he said. “It’s counterintuitive, but when a decision is made here, it’s really made. They can only speak to me as a group, but when you work with developers, any one of the partners can call you every day with another idea.”

The size of the great room was one of the most contentious issues so far. Most members wanted a room that could comfortably seat the entire community for dinner. Ms. Barlow, fearing that other common amenities would be sacrificed, pushed for a smaller room.

Mr. Levenson said that after a fair amount of back and forth, the group reached a compromise. A common living room was eliminated, and the 1,600-square-foot great room will now serve as a dining and living room. (There will also be a separate adults-only lounge and two children’s playrooms.)

“It was the right thing for the group,” Ms. Barlow said. “I didn’t feel defeated, because through the process I saw that I was really the only one that wanted the smaller space, and in retrospect I think the community was smarter than me.”

When it comes to the last-minute decisions that invariably arise during construction as contractors discover that a particular type of kitchen cabinet or countertop is no longer available, the group will leave it to the professionals.

“We have decided as a group to not be involved during construction,” Ms. Barlow said. “We’ll do the conceptual design work and give the architectural team direction on wood floors and color palettes we want and then just let go and let them execute it.”

The alternative, she said, could be a costly and painful process.

Edible City trailer

Edible City Trailer 1 from East Bay Pictures on Vimeo.

Chemical induced feminization - officially shrinking taints everywhere

Check out this article from The Independent about how all the endocrine-disrupting chemicals we are using are feminizing animals (including humans) everywhere.

It’s official: Men really are the weaker sex

Evolution is being distorted by pollution, which damages genitals and the ability to father offspring, says new study. Geoffrey Lean reports

Sunday, 7 December 2008

The male gender is in danger, with incalculable consequences for both humans and wildlife, startling scientific research from around the world reveals.

The research – to be detailed tomorrow in the most comprehensive report yet published – shows that a host of common chemicals is feminising males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.

Backed by some of the world’s leading scientists, who say that it “waves a red flag” for humanity and shows that evolution itself is being disrupted, the report comes out at a particularly sensitive time for ministers. On Wednesday, Britain will lead opposition to proposed new European controls on pesticides, many of which have been found to have “gender-bending” effects.

It also follows hard on the heels of new American research which shows that baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminised genitals.

“This research shows that the basic male tool kit is under threat,” says Gwynne Lyons, a former government adviser on the health effects of chemicals, who wrote the report.

Wildlife and people have been exposed to more than 100,000 new chemicals in recent years, and the European Commission has admitted that 99 per cent of them are not adequately regulated. There is not even proper safety information on 85 per cent of them.

Many have been identified as “endocrine disrupters” – or gender-benders – because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications; flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and many pesticides.
Read more »

Air contamination in Greenpoint

Check out this New York Times article about possible air contamination in home in Brooklyn.

December 8, 2008
A Problem Rises to the Surface in Greenpoint
By MIREYA NAVARRO

For decades, people in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, have lived with the possible health hazards from oil spills in their industrial waterfront. Up to 30 million gallons of petroleum — almost three times the amount dumped off the Alaskan coast by the Exxon Valdez in 1989 — made their way into Newtown Creek and surrounding neighborhoods from dozens of refineries over more than a century.

Now residents have a new anxiety: Toxic gases may be rising into their homes from below, the legacy of dry-cleaning plants, foundries and other manufacturers that once operated in this hub, which has long been home to immigrants and, more recently, artists and young professionals.

Such vapor intrusion — chemicals from contaminated soil and groundwater that become airborne, entering buildings through pores and cracks — has become a growing public health concern around the country in recent years. Contaminants that spread from industrial activity, or that were mistakenly believed to have been contained or eliminated in environmental cleanups, have been discovered wafting into basements. Since 2005, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has been testing around the state to gauge the extent of the problem.

But while fixing the problem is relatively easy, agency officials said, getting some residents to cooperate is not.

In Greenpoint, as elsewhere, many homeowners — worried about a blow to their property values or even being forced from their homes — have ignored letters asking for access to their buildings, or have refused to answer the door for investigators.

“I don’t want them to come in and say, ‘We found this thing and now we have to condemn,’ ” said one homeowner on Beadel Street who said she refused to let the investigators into her home. She agreed to talk to a reporter only if she was not identified because she said she was not sure how her remarks would be used. “What’s going to happen to me and my 20-year investment?”

In the section of Greenpoint that borders Williamsburg, south of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, 58 homes were chosen for inspection last February and March, but investigators from the conservation department and the State Department of Health have gained access to only 12. Still, the findings of such a small sample were revealing: Air in two of the homes was contaminated with chemicals used to dry-clean fabrics and degrease metal parts.

In another eight homes, the investigators found the same chemicals under the foundation; while they had not contaminated indoor air, they said, they could.
Read more »

Planting in NYC

Growing a veggie garden in NYC just got easier. The org Just Food offers The City Farms Toolkit project - an extensive guide to planting in urban New York.

Information was gathered from various sources throughout New York City, State and beyond to create this comprehensive guide to urban agriculture in NYC. The City Farms Toolkit is comprised of over 70 tipsheets touching on everything from planting calendars to soil care to season extension. This toolkit also contains a resources directory linking community gardeners to over 100 relevant agencies and organizations. Although this toolkit was developed specifically for city farmers in New York, most elements are useful to hobby gardeners, urban farmers and organic growers everywhere.

The Just Food website offers a lot of other tips and resources too, and it definitely worth checking out.

Wind Power Produces 123% of Residential Energy Demand in Rock Port, Missouri

by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 04.23.08 for Treehugger:

That’s not a typo in the headline. The meters are running backwards and they’re exporting the 23% extra.

Rock Port, Missouri, is a small city of 1,300 people, and they just made history by being the first city in the US to be 100% powered by the wind, also making them #1 in the US for percentage of renewable energy. The Loess Hills Wind Farm, built by the Wind Capital Group, employing 500 workers from 20 states for about a year, is expected to produce about 16 million kilowatt hours annually, while Rock Port only uses 13 million. The excess wind power will be sold to other communities in the area.

Tom Carnahan, president of Wind Capital Group, said:

By generating enough clean, renewable electricity to meet all of Rock Port’s energy needs while also generating additional revenue for their tax base, the Loess Hills facility is a shining example of the benefits of wind energy development.

The small wind farm is composed of four Suzlon S-64 turbines, with 90-foot blades, positioned atop 250-foot-tall towers.

To celebrate the historic moment, citizens of Rock Port were invited to a “Green Switch” celebration on April 18th (we couldn’t be there unfortunately, so we don’t know how it went or if it was any fun) to mark the advent of residential wind power in their lives.

Congrats, Rock Port. Rock on!

::Rock Port, Mo., first in country to run 100% on wind power, ::Rock Port’s wind turbines power up to power town, ::Wind-a-go-go, ::Rock Port, MO, Becomes First Energy Independent Town in USA

See also: ::Enercon E-126: The World’s Largest Wind Turbine (for now), ::Affordable Home Wind Power: Mother Earth News, June/July, ::”Stormblade:” The First Truly Quiet Residential Wind Power Turbine

EPA taking greenhouse gas emissions seriously? :)

New EPA Ruling Represents a Shift in Direction from the Solar One website:

In a surprise move that has potentially seismic ramifications for the energy industry, the EPA issued a ruling last Friday that will essentially halt the development of any new coal-based power plants in the United States. The ruling was issued by the agency’s appeals panel as they denied a permit to Deseret Power, an energy conglomerate looking to build a 110 MW coal-burning power plant on the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation in Utah. As a result, more than one hundred other plants in various stages of development and construction now face an uncertain future.

Claiming that they would no longer grant permits for projects that do not adequately consider the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, the appeals board overturned a permit recently granted by the agency’s Denver office and cited a 2007 Supreme Court decision giving the EPA federal authority to regulate CO2 emissions. The decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, ruled 5-4 in favor of 12 state plaintiffs that the agency had shirked its responsibilities under the Clean Air Act and was widely perceived as a critique of the current administration’s environmental policies.

Environmentalists have hailed the new move as a harbinger of a green-friendly administration-in-waiting, though many are surprised that it has come under the aegis of a lame duck and environmentally obstinate commander-in-chief. Ultimately, whether this decision signals a belated acknowledgement of accepted scientific fact or a raise-of-the-white-flag by defeated leadership is less significant than the implication that, however we choose to meet our future energy needs, clean and renewable sources should finally get their chance.

Sources: PSD Appeal No. 07-03, Environmental Appeals Board, United States Environmental Protection Agency;“EPA ruling over climate jeopardizes coal plants”, Reuters; “EPA Blocks Coal Plant, Could Change Power Landscape”, The Huffington Post (Nov. 14, 2008);“EPA Coal Decision Levels Playing Field for Wind, Solar”, Wired Science; “EPA Coal Decision Could Pave Way for Renewable Energy”, EcoGeek; “EPA ruling halts all new coal-fired power plants”, Scientific American; “Massachusetts, et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency, et al.”, Supreme Court of the United States, #05-1120; “Supreme Court: Heat-Trapping Carbon Dioxide is Pollution”, National Resources Defense Council (press release); “Justices say EPA Has Power to Act on Harmful Gases”, The New York Times (April 3, 2007).

The Science Barge - more on urban food production

From the builder’s website:

Built in 2007 for parent company New York Sun Works [by BrightFarm Systems], the Science Barge is a prototype sustainable urban farm. Constructed on a 4,305 square foot (400 sq meter), steel deck barge and moored for two years in midtown Manhattan, the Science Barge is the only fully functioning public demonstration of renewable energy supporting sustainable food production.

The purpose of the facility is to demonstrate a selection of technologies that, when brought together, can enable commercial yields of premium grade vegetables to be grown in the middle of a large urban area. Vegetables from the Science Barge are grown within a stone’s throw of the point of consumption, and with a fraction of the environmental impact of conventional agriculture. The facility grows tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, bell peppers, and high value herbs, as well as many varieties of lettuce, with zero net carbon emissions, zero chemical pesticides, and zero runoff.

The principal feature of the Science Barge is a 1,291 square foot (120 sq meter) greenhouse using state-of-the-art recirculating hydroponic farming techniques. The greenhouse electrical systems are powered by solar, wind, and biodiesel. A rainwater catchment system provides all the water needed to cultivate the plants.

The Science Barge also acts as a powerful environmental education facility for students of all ages. Lessons for younger students deal with core science topics as well environmental sustainability and food nutrition. Older students can learn about renewable energy systems and see ecological sustainability as the driving force behind an integrated design approach.

The Science Barge operated along the Manhattan waterfront during the summers of 2007 and 2008. It is now moored at Yonkers, in Westchester County, New York and acts as a permanent environmental education facility for the City of Yonkers and the surrounding area.