Category: Sustainability

  • Snow!

      As a city-dwelling dog owner, the use of salt to deice sidewalks upsets me. Mostly because it hurts the paws of my four-legged best friend. But it is also hard on the environment. Salt damages plants (street trees, etc…) and makes its way into our waterways. There was a great deal of concern about…

  • My Climate Resilient Hood

    This is not about buildings on stilts, or inflatable plugs for subways, or barriers to keep the Atlantic at bay. Nor is it a plea for replacing your second car with a boat. It’s just about my humble little neighborhood, Jackson Heights, Queens, which fared quite well during Sandy. We didn’t lose power, thanks to…

  • Reimagining Vacant Space: Justin Moore receives ioby’s 2012 award

    ioby’s 2012 Heroes in Our Backyards: Reimagining Vacant Space from ioby on Vimeo. Justin Moore was awarded ioby’s 2012 the Heroes In Our Backyards award.  He was chosen for his work on behalf of a neighborhood gardening project Urban Patch in his home town, the Mapleton-Fall Creek neighborhood of Indianapolis.  Every year, ioby awards project leaders that exemplify the ioby spirit of community activism.  In…

  • Green Metropolis by David Owen

    http://www.davidowen.net/ Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability.  That one sentence says it all. In 2004, David Owen wrote an article for The New Yorker called “Green Manhattan”.  His 2009 book, The Green Metropolis expands on that idea and shows how cities like New York with high population densities…

  • What the Federal Government is doing about Climate Change (surprise, it’s not nothing!)

    On the current national political scene, climate change is either a punchline or a footnote. However, behind the rhetoric over the economic impact of curbing greenhouse gas emissions and hidden by the debate over the causes and implications of this year’s record temperatures, climate change adaptation planning is actually happening, even at the federal level.…

  • Milk and the Buell Hypothesis

    Close your eyes. Actually, don’t close your eyes – you won’t be able to read this highly insightful and intellectually stimulating blog post. Imagine closing your eyes. Imagine me saying “MILK”. Imagine imagining what associations this creates in your imagination. Chances are you see cookies (yum!), Santa Claus and cookies (even yummier), rolling hills, flower-dotted…