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Thanks,

The Green Queen Bee, Thor, and Mike

By Michael Brady, Contributing Writer

Soon after being passed to the Senate on May 21, 2009, the American Clean Energy and Security Act took back seat with health care debates assuming center stage. New energy and climate legislation in the U.S. would set a good tone for the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference at Copenhagen in December, making it more likely that there will be agreement on international emission standards.

Democrats will need 60 votes in the Senate to approve the legislation. With that said, proponents of the energy and climate bill need to help secure these votes by pressing the Senate.

Repower America: Help send 100,000 letters to the Senate.Repower America has set a goal to send 100,000 letters expressing support for the bill to the Senate. They are 30,000 letters shy from reaching their goal. Take two minutes to fill-in a couple of boxes and hit the submit button to send the letter and help get the votes.

Hunter College and a host of other universities are sponsors of the Black Rock Forest Consortium. I unfortunately have never made it up there but many of our students and plenty of others from the NY/NJ/CT metropolitan area have used the space as a learning laboratory to understand the ecosystems of the forested area. It is a 4000 acre area, equipped with classrooms, scientific instrumentation, housing, green buildings, and of course, a forest. Sponsoring organizations range from K-12 to leading research institutions, so the science education and learning ranges from basic to...things I can't even imagine.

One of my favorite programs at Black Rock is the School in the Forest Project that offers curicula and other educational resources to underserved students in New York City Public Schools. Currently, PS 220, in Mott Haven and PS/IS 311, located in Inwood, are involved in the program. Want to help grow this project? Don't have plans for Columbus Day weekend? Love your bike? If you answered yes to any or all of these, than check out the Forest Ride, a fundraiser for the environmental education, research, and conservation programs of Black Rock Forest. Participants have the option of doing the full 3 day ride or a scaled back version of just 1 day. Perks include hikes, organic meals, scenic rides, full support staff, and a finale at an organic vineyard. I'm not quite sure I am in shape for a full 3 days, but am thinking seriously about this one day affair...Viva la Black Rock!

The good people over at Streetsblog posted a nice piece yesterday on a new poll which suggests that the public favors congestion tolling as a means to pay for new transportation infrastructure.  The article yeilds plenty of useful insights, but I am left wondering about who exactly was polled in this study.  As a reader commented, it's pretty clear that the majority of respondents are not public transit riders.  It is certainly signficant that 33% were unwilling to pay anything and that an additional 30% favor raising public transit fares.  Sure, the study might help to jumpstart a broader conversation about tolling, but it seems to indicate that we've still got a lot of work to do if we want to convince the general public that this is the best direction to head in. 

The puzzle of how to pay for new federal investments in transportation is the single greatest stumbling block facing members of Congress -- should a gas tax increase be combined with a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tax? How about a national infrastructure bank that leverages private capital?

A poll released today by the engineering firm HNTB suggests that higher gas taxes could continue to face political headwinds from both sides of the aisle, even after the recession begins to ease.

A 10-cent gas tax increase that would be imposed only after two straight quarters of economic growth faced opposition from 64 percent of respondents, and just 16 percent said gas taxes should be raised to pay for "roads and bridges."

But the poll found strikingly strong support for tolling, particularly congestion tolling through HOT (high-occupancy toll) lanes. One-third of respondents said HOT lanes should be used for future transportation revenue, with 35 percent supporting the use of public tolling and 20 percent backing private tolls.

Read more here.

It has been quite a few weeks since I have had the opportunity to share in the production of the Sustainable Cities Blog. I have been in hives of the southern hemisphere, doing research and finishing up the last six credits of my Masters degree. So, you might notice a higher than usual number of posts on Rio de Janeiro in the next few weeks, but that was home for the summer. Not to mention, that place is brimming with environmental issues...and solutions of course. Photo Courtesy of windowfarms.org                                                               But today, a short piece on a neat project I got a close look at this weekend. Eybeam | Art and Technology Center in Chelsea has their very own Window Farm for the time being. Part art, part research and development, 100% excellent, this project seeks to provide people with the tools they need to bring technology into their own homes, to grow some veggies. It is a closed, hydroponic system that drips gravity fed water (that first gets pumped to the top) into old plastic bottles. As you can see, lights adorn the installation, since most of us do not live on the top floor of buildings with massive southern exposure. But if you do, contact the window farmers at: britta [at] windowfarms [dot] org so you can get one going!

An Envirolet Composting Toilet, not to be confused with a cast iron stove.

A few days ago, Slate ran an amusing piece on the sustainability issues surrounding "toilet behavior in the Western world."  The folks over here at CISC like this article because while it takes full advantage of the comedic value of the subject matter, it also conveys the very real importance of reducing consumption in the bathroom.  For example, our readers probably know that cutting down on time in the shower is one way to live more sustainably, but were you aware that toilet flushes account for even more daily water consumption?

The humble commode is a thirsty appliance. In a 1999 study of 1,188 American homes, toilet flushes accounted for 27 percent of an individual's daily indoor water consumption—more than washing machines (22 percent) or showers (17 percent). Your personal toll will depend on what kind of toilet you have. If it was purchased after January 1994, federal law requires that it use 1.6 gallons or fewer per flush; otherwise, it might drain 3.5 to 7 gallons with every pull of the lever. The average American flushes his home toilet five times a day, sending 8 gallons to 35 gallons of water down the tubes.  Read more...

Chaos at rush-hour... downtown Providence, Rhode Island as the storm surge of the 1938 Hurricane submerges downtown (RI Historical Society).Since we are in the midst of hurricane season and Hurricane Bill got our attention, I thought it would be a good time to discuss urban sustainability challenges with respect to natural hazards.

This entry is inspired by an iRevolution blog entitled Disaster for Techies, which does an excellent job teasing out subtle attributes of a disaster by separating the concept from its cousin—the natural hazard.

“There is a subtle but fundamental difference between disasters (processes) and hazards (events); a distinction that Jean-Jacques Rousseau first articulated in 1755 when Portugal was shaken by an earthquake. In a letter to Voltaire one year later, Rousseau notes that, “nature had not built [process] the houses which collapsed and suggested that Lisbon’s high population density [process] contributed to the toll (1)”

A short summary of definitions: A disaster is measured by the extent to which society is impacted by a hazard event (or indirectly by a changed environment), which depends on the vulnerability and resilience of a population, and supporting systems. Vulnerability describes how exposed social and natural systems are to hazards while resilience is a measure of how well systems can absorb hazard impacts and rebound.

The above quote points out that there is really no such thing as a natural disaster, so to speak about disasters in terms of phases, e.g., pre-and post-disaster phases with respect to a natural hazard event can be deceiving. The extent to which a hazard can potentially cause a disaster is governed by a complex product of past social, economic, and political processes that has ordered current social and physical infrastructure regimes, and consequently, global, regional, and local vulnerability distributions. When referring to a disaster only in relation to a specific hazard event, it becomes all too easy to focus on the event and the condition of a place at the time and not emphasize the processes that allowed the event to result in a disaster. That is, the tendency to drown-out the causes of vulnerability by focusing on the strength of a given storm (or any other natural hazard) or the geography of an impacted place (as a static phenomenon), etc. Since disasters are ongoing processes that do not depend on the actual occurrence of a hazard event, describing the phases of a situation as post- or pre-disaster obscures the social processes that are the underlying causes of disasters. To drive this point home—as a society rebuilds during a “post-disaster phase,” another disaster may be being constructed (in the processes), resulting in another pre-disaster condition.

Focusing on a specific hazard event and the static geographical situation as the causes of a disaster obscures complex issues that are deep-seated in past social processes.

To properly assess a disaster, we need to look at the processes that have resulted in a geographical situation and assess it in light of best estimates of hazard risk. For example, the industrial revolution brought people to the coastal area of the Gulf of Mexico to take advantage of an advantageous location to bring oil into the United States. The oil industry, in turn, attracted workers, increasing the population along the coast as people flocked to earn a living. (Of course there are many other processes that have caused the the population in the Gulf of Mexico—this is just an example.)

The Gulf of Mexico is subject to hurricanes and land subsidence, which makes populations in this region vulnerable. The processes above increase vulnerability as population grows and economic activity increases rates of land subsidence (fluid extraction—water/oil; build environment—buildings, homes, bridges, and levees that prevent sediment replenishment from the Mississippi River that would offset land subsidence rates), as relative sea rise further exposes the region to natural hazard risk.

When using the word “disaster,” these are the kinds of processes that we are referring to. Of course the risk of a hazard event is part of the assessment of vulnerability, which describes the potential for a disaster, but a specific hazard event itself is not a disaster.

City designs that do not view disasters as ongoing processes will not address to true underlying causes, making inhabitants vulnerable to natural hazards.

Have you made it out to Governors Island yet this summer?  If not, this weekend may very well be the perfect time for you to hop on the ferry. (We shouldn't even be feeling the effects of Bill until the next morning!)

As part of our summer speaker series, we've got a great speaker coming from NYC's very own Recycle-A-Bicycle to talk about the upsides of biking in the big apple.  After the presentation, there will be a maintenance workshop so bring your own bike and take the opportunity to enjoy the island's car-free paths.  There's only a few more weeks of this left!

Ken Salazar, Courtesy of EarthFirst.com (not Earth First!)

Expansion of renewable energies should appreciably improve the health status of the 700,000 US workers employed in the energy sector, according to a commentary by Medical College of Wisconsin researchers, in Milwaukee. Their review is published in the August 19, 2009, issue of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Read the ScienceDaily report here

Courtesy of Ian Austen of the New York TimesLate last week, the NY Times (via Green Inc.) reported that Montreal's bike-sharing system is getting picked up by Boston and London. The folks over here at CISC think this is fantastic news and extend congratulations to both of these fine cities. With that said, we have to ask, "what about us, New York!?" Can we push for a sharing program that reaches all five Burroughs? Wouldn't this fit well with our more general livable streets movement?

It is not clear at this point if the roll-out in Boston — where local officials are mounting a push for more bike lanes as well — will be on the same scale as Montreal’s system, with hundreds of parking stations and thousands of bicycles. (An alternative model would be SmartBike D.C. in Washington, which uses a different docking technology and has only has 10 stations.)

Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council confirmed that it has selected Bixi to put in place a bike-sharing program. But Amanda Linehan, a spokeswoman for the council, said that Boston and other municipalities must now negotiate contracts for the service.

Read full text here.