The Village - Sustainable Community

Check out The Village.  A bunch of Irish environmentalists are relocating to Cloughjordan Ecovillage, Ireland.  They are setting up green businesses, their houses have plots for growing their own food, things are bike-able, they have progressive waste treatment systems.  They are relocalizing their lives and livelihoods as much as possible and are also developing sustainable social interactions - by building community.  I am really excited for them - I hope this project is a huge success.

Edible City trailer

Edible City Trailer 1 from East Bay Pictures on Vimeo.

Renewable Energy in Times Square

Check out this New York Times articles about solar- and wind-powered billboards in Times Square:

November 15, 2008

In Times Square, a Company’s Name in (Wind- and Solar-Powered) Lights

By Glenn Collins

The first eco-friendly billboard is coming to Times Square, entirely powered by the sun and the wind — but there is one small catch.

When there’s no sun, and no wind? The $3 million billboard goes dark: there is no backup generator.

“We think if that happens, it’s just fine,” said Ron Potesky, a senior marketing vice president for Ricoh Americas Corporation, the office equipment and document-storage supplier that owns the sign.

The billboard — traditionally called a “spectacular” on the Great White Way — weighs in at 35,000 pounds. It will be 55 feet off the ground at 3 Times Square, wrapping around the northwest corner of Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street.

Fitted with 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels, the sign will be “a first for Times Square,” said Barry E. Winston, a Times Square billboard consultant not involved in the Ricoh project, who has been a sign expert for more than 50 years.

Wind turbines for the vast sign, which is 126 feet wide and 47 feet high, have arrived in a warehouse in Deer Park, N.Y., where preliminary testing is being done. Construction will begin this month, for a lighting ceremony on Dec. 4.

Ricoh would not say how much it was paying for its three-year lease, but based on recent deals, the lease would most likely cost in the low six figures, as much as $200,000 a month, according to sign rental experts who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are contractually forbidden to make public statements.

Such a cost would not be unusual for a sign across the avenue from 1 Times Square, where the ball drops on New Year’s Eve.

By generating its own electricity — enough to light six homes for a year — the sign could save as much as $12,000 to $15,000 per month, according to Ricoh, which estimated that the sign would prevent 18 tons of carbon from being spewed into the air yearly.

The “passive” sign is not studded with light-emitting diodes like so many others in Times Square, but will be lighted by 16 300-watt floodlights. It will feature custom-printed opaque vinyl sheeting bearing the red-and-white Ricoh logo. The sign will be green, nevertheless, a message “to customers, other companies and the world that resources and energy can be used creatively,” Mr. Potesky said. “The point is that there are ways of being environmentally friendly to the planet, even on a billboard.”

Unlike the tall propellers in a typical wind farm, the cylindrical Ricoh drum turbines have no sharp blades. They will provide 90 percent of the sign’s power; the rest will come from the solar panels on the sign, feeding electricity to eight collection batteries up in the sign. The drums are so perfectly balanced, Ricoh says, that their rotors could be turned by the wind from a single household electric fan.

Mr. Potesky said the turbines would most likely generate enough power to keep the sign lighted even after four days without wind or sun. But the company is prepared for the sign to go dark. Mr. Potesky said the only other such sign in the world is one Ricoh put up in 2003 in Osaka, Japan, “using somewhat less advanced technology,” he said, referring to its 26 small propellers and 39 solar panels.

“On dark and rainy days, that sign went dark during the night,” he said.

Passers-by will be able to see the 26 blades spinning in each of the sign’s 16 turbine drums, piled in four 45-foot-high vertical stacks. When operating at their average speed of 10 miles an hour, they put out 22 kilowatts.

Stalklike propeller turbines require unidirectional, or “clean,” wind to function. But the revolving drums on the Ricoh sign can use turbulent, multidirectional winds common to Midtown, said Mary S. Watkins, chief executive of PacWind Inc. in Torrance, Calif., which makes the custom turbine arrays.

PacWind studied meteorological records and did a wind analysis, she said, determining that Times Square has 10-mile-an-hour winds, on average, ranging from no wind to gusts of 85 m.p.h. The turbines provide usable power from winds as weak as 5 m.p.h. and rotate safely in winds up to 100 m.p.h., she said, because the aluminum blades are aerodynamically designed to regulate themselves, slowing automatically in high winds.

The company has designed wind turbines for applications ranging from the sublime to the seemingly ridiculous — including a turbine created for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to capture 400-mile-an-hour winds for a lander on Mars, and a turbine that powers the 20,000-square-foot garage of Jay Leno in Los Angeles.

Ms. Watkins said the Times Square turbines were designed to keep ice from forming on the blades in winter. Birds have not proved to be a problem as the company has installed 50 of its drum turbines across the country, she said, “because they see the turbines not as spinning blades, but as a solid object.”

Cuba’s “Green Revolution”

When Russia withdrew its support from Cuba at the end of the Cold War, the Cubans needed to rethink the way they did agriculture - and fast. You can now find organic (they don’t have access petroleum intensive fertilizers and pesticides) food-growing gardens throughout the capital city. Is this what the future holds for cities all over the world?

New Gardens in NYC

From the NY Times:

November 6, 2008
Healthy Spaces, for People and the Earth
By ANNE RAVER

TWO gardens completed in the last month by the New York Restoration Project — one in Queens, by Walter Hood, a California landscape architect; the other in Harlem, by Sean Conway, a Rhode Island garden designer — demonstrate how sustainable technologies like rainwater collection and solar and wind power can be incorporated into landscapes that are varied enough to fill many needs.

The actress and singer Bette Midler, who founded the Restoration Project, a private nonprofit organization, in 1995, said that she has been courting imaginative designers to enlarge the scope of community gardens so that “everyone who has a stake in the garden is able to use it the way they want to: some want to grow fruits and vegetables, others want a quiet place, some want to play ball. So all these things have to be taken into consideration.”
Read more »

Community for hip young “I Grown My Own Food”ers

HOMEGROWN.org has, among many other things, info on container gardening in the city and recipes for using crazy locally-grown veggies from the farmers’ market or CSA.  There’s a community events calendar, lots of forums for discussion, videos, and a lot of other resources worth checking out as well.  Here’s a great one: Local Harvest.  Type in your zip code and they tell you where to find locally grown food!

If the layout strikes you as a little desperately hip, I think it’s supposed to be the “young person’s” version of Farm Aid, the family farmer’s organization of which Willie Nelson is the President.  A great cause!

Green in NYC

I hear from time to time that Bloomberg has green plans for the city, but I don’t know exactly what that means or what initiatives are under way.  It came as a pleasant surprise when bike lanes started appearing all over the place.  It turns out it takes 2 seconds to find out what the city is working on - check out the plaNYC website!  Some things to keep an eye on are the citywide emissions inventory, offshore windfarms, and the stormwater management plan (availabe to view this month!).  They have pretty frequent updates on progress and events, plus tips on how to green your home and other resources.

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 »

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.

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.