And I’ve dropped off the face of the Earth…

. . . but that doesn’t mean I’m not still racking up a list of sites and posts. (It just means more are old news now.) For now, I’ve cleared out some of my tabs by adding a Sustainable Agriculture page and listing more blogs in the blogroll in the sidebar.

One of my favorite ways to waste time lately is search through green blogs. I especially love reading blogs from people converting their existing property into a more sustainable garden, or more. Unfortunately that’s usually a full-time job in and of itself, and the blogs might not get updated too regularly. Here’s a few I’ve recently found and enjoy reading:

• Planting Milkwood: A young couple in Australia with PDCs (Permaculture Design Certificates) are converting some unused pastureland into their own personal permaculture paradise. With a background in digital media and technology, their site is beautiful and easily navigable; plus they have a plethora of amazing pictures and how-to videos on their property Milkwood.
• I’ve been following Rob over at One Straw for a while now. He’s interested in sub-acre agriculture and is slowly hashing out a plan for a 1/10 acre lot that could be tessellated ad infinitum to fill larger properties too. The fun bit is that he started out with no practical knowledge about farming — he’s converting his suburban backyard in Wisconsin into a productive garden as practice with dreams of one day buying a larger property. He’s also got lots of fun side projects on the side (and all that while keeping a more-than-full-time job and a family).
• Farmgirl Fare is chock full of cute pictures and great recipes. Yum.
  

So much for that.

So much for posting every day. Added a few stormwater management links to Ideas and Resources (TX).

The Story of Stuff

The Story of Stuff has been one of those cool things that everyone knows about on the internet for quite some time now, so I’m a little late jumping on the bandwagon. But as they say, better late than never.

Under the link above you’ll find a 20 minute video made by Annie Leonard about “stuff”: where raw materials come from, how stuff is manufactured and produced, and where it goes, plus more about the people who work at various places in this system, and the role of government and corporations. Basically, it’s an overview of our capitalist consumerist economy today. With only 20 minutes, it’s pretty simplistic, but Annie is a very good speaker (with entertaining pictures too) and hits on a lot of really good points in a manner that’s accessible to all. It will really get you thinking.

The great part of the site comes after the video, when you browse around all the sources and links they’ve compiled together, plus citations for the statistics mentioned in the video. There’s even a blog. A lot of the links are to coalitions for different movements; hopefully some of the 2 million viewers of the Story of Stuff are joining in to find local opportunities for more sustainable consumption.

Daily postings.

New design template. I’d like something with three columns and adjustable width, but sadly my widgets don’t seem to be transferring over very well. Someday.

Now that I’m done with spring break travels and have barricaded myself indoors due to gloomy weather I’m going to try to post at least once a day. I have so many ideas and links I’ve been saving in a list that I still need to sort out for myself that it’s starting to look impossible to get through them all. Hopefully this will start cutting down the list.

Adding a new “video” category. I know I don’t have many posts right now, but several link to YouTube videos, and several more posts that are still being composed in my head will too.

Critical Mass

Last Friday found me visiting a friend in York, England with surprisingly good weather, so naturally we grabbed the bikes and zipped down to the York Minster to join the Critical Mass gathering there.

Critical Mass (useful Wikipedia link) has all the qualities I like about Food not Bombs. It’s a spontaneous gathering of cyclists, usually on the last Friday of each month, who bike together on the streets for a while, sharing laughs and companionship, before going home. That’s it. It’s leaderless, with groups forming mainly by word of mouth, and everyone deciding together which route to take. It’s decentralized, so there’s absolutely no connection between groups in separate cities, despite the identical name. And it’s non-violent direct action, usually touted as a “political protest”, though even that description is somewhat open-ended. Some people come to protest the importance of cars and oil in today’s city, some for more general environmental reasons, some for health reasons, some to remind drivers that bikers share the roads too, or to push for bike-friendly laws or routes in the area, or just because a group ride is a fun thing to do. You tend to get quite an eclectic group of people, all there for different personal reasons, but sharing in the common goal of a group bike ride to advance The Cause, whatever that meant for each rider. All of which is awesome.

York is a pretty bike-friendly city, with numerous bike lanes* and generally friendly drivers who are used to crawling behind rickety old men on bikes instead of trying to force their way past them. That being said, it’s also a pretty small city, so the twenty or so riders we had was a pretty good show by all accounts. We ended up chatting with a couple who work in Holland most of the time, some students, a self-titled activist (who had a cart riding off the back wheel of his bike with some handy bungee cords and other essentials), two teenagers riding trick bikes, and a guy in semi-rasta wear who provided us with excellent music from a boombox he’d attached to the rack above his back tire. Bikes ranged from our old rusted freecycled ones, to big heavy Dutch bikes made for comfy city riding, to mountain bikes, to the afore-mentioned trick bikes. One lady opted to wear a sign that said “CAR(e) FREE”, and a couple of people had flags on their bikes that said “I [bike] YRK”. All in all, good company and a fun ride.

The streets are small enough that nearly all of them were just one lane in each direction with no median. Consequently we usually took up the whole lane and drivers behind us would have to stay in low gear behind us or wait for an opening to pass us in the opposite going lane. A few honked and we’d cheerfully wave back and ring our bells. (But all the police officers we passed, both in cars and on bikes, smiled at us and waved.) At one point I said outloud that I felt a little sorry for the drivers… maybe we ought to stay to the side of the road. (What can I say, I’m a big softie.)

“Kinda defeats the point, doesn’t it?” said my neighbor, referring to The Cause.

I guess. I know we certainly weren’t being overly rude by wanting to stay all together. After all, the law says bikes are subject to the same laws as cars, so it’s not like we could have all jumped up on the sidewalk. And we definitely lived up to the unofficial Critical Mass slogan of “We aren’t blocking traffic. We are traffic.” All twenty of us would signal turns all together. We’d wait patiently at stoplights. We wore reflective vests, helmets, and had bikes equipped with lights and reflectors, and handmade flags. (All of these things have been criticisms directed at other Critical Masses). To get across busy intersections with no lights, some of the veteran riders would ride out into the oncomming lanes of traffic to “cork” cars and let us pass safely and together. We were friendly and waved to everyone we passed including the kid who pulled down his pants for us.

I and my friend had so much fun that we rode back home discussing ways we could help start a Critical Mass ride where we’re from back in the States. Apparently there are none, or there were in the past but interest died out. Hopefully next year you’ll be hearing about some new Critical Mass rides in Texas. I can only hope they’ll turn out to be as polite as the York Critical Mass we took part of. Thanks, York!

*Cool bike lane fact: at every red light a bike lane is painted by the curb on the road starting about 10 meters before the intersection (if there isn’t one already) that then expands outward across the first lane just before the intersection. Cars must stop before this section, so that you’ll find the cars stopped at stoplights, the bikers ahead of those, and the pedestrian walkways ahead of those before you actually get into the intersection. This ensures that when lights turn green, the bikers get to go first without being pushed to the side of the road by eager cars. Love it.

Stupid bike lanes.

I recently posted some resources about possibilities for bike lanes in Dallas, TX. Ironically, one NYTimes blog’s post yesterday is titled “How Stupid Is Your Bike Lane?”

Some of the stories seem patently stupid. Why on earth would you paint a bike lane superimposed on a (not widened) car lane? Because the cars can drive through the bikers, I suppose. Or stripe a bike lane that crosses several lanes of traffic? Is it just me, or does that make no sense? Then there are the problems that non-bikers don’t seem to realize, like getting pushed off the road by busses and cars (not to mention having the joy of riding through the curbside potholes and muck anyhow) and getting slammed by opening doors when bike lanes run next to parallel parked cars.

Mark O. in the second comment on the post says it best: “The problem is that bike lanes, at least in the United States, are planned and laid out by people who don’t bicycle through the streets and who have no clue and don’t really care about the challenges that cyclists face.” Sure, cities look greener, but that’s time and money and manpower wasted if the bike lanes turn out to be unusable. Why aren’t the planners getting in touch with local bike groups to get their (expert) opinions and input?

Disappearing species…

means disappearing diversity means less chance for adaption, survival, and evolution of the remaining species. But let’s leave the doomsday talk for later and instead talk about the birds and the bees.

This NYTimes article last year (among dozens of similar news stories published elsewhere) caused quite a stir.

More than a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost — tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping.

Not only is it still completely unexplained, but it’s worrying — bees are one of (or possibly the) world’s greatest pollinators, increasing production many times over. (Mindfully.org has archived one report’s look at migratory beekeepers in America and especially they’re relation to almond growers in California.)

A more recent Times article reports the death of millions of bats, quoting that “on average 90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter”, a disaster for agriculture if die-offs of this size occur elsewhere. Meanwhile, Dot Earth reminds us of a quiet wave of mysteriously dying frogs a while back and explores the possibility that the deaths are caused by climate change. A quick Google for threatened and extinct species will show you that everyone from the Audobon Society to third-world farmers have noticed declines in many species. Kinda scary, especially when you notice that some scientists have been claiming for years that we are nearing or in the middle of a mass extinction.

But what’s really causing it? Short answer: we don’t know.
Speculations have run the gamut from cell phone towers to genetically modified crops to parasites to the vaguely-named Colony Collapse Disorder (the equivalent is White Nose Syndrome for the bats) to global warming to encroachment of foreign species to pesticides and more, but the fact of the matter is that we simply don’t have enough information about these species when they’re healthy, let alone information about the long-term effects of pesticides, greenhouse gasses, etc. The bees, bats, and frogs have all shown signs of fungi, but in most cases it’s assumed that the infection is secondary in nature; something weakened these creatures immune system enough that something else could move in. GMO’s? A DailyKos post (the comments have a boon of information) suggests GMO’s are a likely cause for colony deaths, though the article they mention actually suggests otherwise. Bees are dying in Germany in comparable proportions to America, though they have far fewer GMO’s (0.6% of corn planted there is genetically modified). So it must be something more widespread. Climate change? A possibility for the polar bear and hippo, but how true is that in the temperate climates of western America?

Clearly a complicated question, and only the more worrisome since we have practically no answers. The press has been remarkably mild too: The Frankfurter Schools provides some links to stories on more rapidly disappearing species and points out that it’s harder than ever to get a species put on the endangered lists.

More info: general information on species extinction (pdf)

Safe urban bike commuting?

I was recently travelling in Bristol, England with a friend, where we took advantageous of the beautiful bike paths in the city and surrounding land. Turns out Bristol is home to SusTrans, a registered charity that wants to make sustainable, healthy transportation a reality. While here in America we’re still debating the merits of biodiesel over electric, SusTrans operates on the belief that sustainable transportation has been around for years already: bicycling.

They have several projects going, the most visible of which is the National Cycle Network, containing over 10,000 miles of path quite literally connecting the nation (pdf) and providing safe corridors through the city on “a mixture of traffic-calmed streets, quiet roads and traffic-free routes”. The traffic-free routes are often along unused railway tracks, which are away from city traffic, usually with low-grade or zero slope so that they’re easily accessible by many people, and easily convertable into a paved path.

In Dallas, TX the popular Katy trail for bikers and pedestrians was also converted from an abandoned track. Three and a half miles of the former Missourri-Kansas-Texas (MKT or “Katy” for short), once an eye-sore in a beautiful Dallas neighborhood, is now a 12-foot-wide path featuring beautiful landscaping and native flora that draws people from across the city. Friends of Katy Trail tells the history and explains the future plan: a 17-mile path that will connect two major recreation centers in Dallas, White Rock Lake and the Trinity River. With such support from both the non-profit organization and the community at large, I’m sure similar projects would be able to find funding, even from the Texas Department of Transportation.

Streetsblog highlights Boston’s solution to the problem of introducing bike paths: Google. Nicole Freedman and crew created a Google map that allows users to trace their favorite routes, giving her a clue where bike routes are most desired.

Dallas in recent years has shown an excellent capability to survey citizens, plan major undertakings, and involve the community in their implementation, especially in grand projects like forwardDallas!, the Trinity River Project, and DART’s 25-year plan). All three of these projects would interact with a project to create protected bike paths in Dallas. Under the Transportation Module, one of the goals of forwardDallas! is “GOAL 4.2 PROMOTE A VARIETY OF TRANSPORTATION OPTIONS: The City should promote a variety of safe, efficient and sustainable multi-modal transportation options to meet a diverse range of needs in Dallas.” The plan calls for the following policies, among others:

• Policy 4.2.1 Support expansion of Dallas’ public transit system.
• Policy 4.2.2 Promote a network of on-street and offstreet walking and biking paths.

More specific than the over-arching grand plans of forwardDallas!, the Trinity River Project will incorporate several recreational bike paths. And DART, the local public transit provider, is considering many ways of encouraging biking, including easy bike access and storage at stations, new rules concerning bikes on public transit, and (pending funding) a fleet overhaul to equip all the busses with external bike racks. An organization with the goal of promoting bike paths in Dallas would need to work with these projects and build on their existing research.

A few extra ideas:
–Dallas has an online interactive bike trail map (last updated 2005). Why aren’t these used more often? To take into account: advertising/informing the public, destinations (do they travel to bikable shopping centers, etc?), where they’re located (major streets? do sidewalks exist?)
–The map includes Veloweb candidate and recommended trails. Apparently the NCTCOG is planning a “Regional Veloweb” that will consist of 644 miles of off-street trails. Main page info, including a Mobility 2030 map. Contains research on existing, funded, and suggested trails in the metroplex, as well as funding opportunities, rail access, and more.
–Has Veloweb looked into abandoned tracks that could be converted?
–Could an interactive map like the Google map for Boston be used? It could either map out routes people actually use, or destinations they would like to get to (work, supermarket, nearby park, etc.)
–DART is considering having (in some areas) separate bus lanes. If these are for busses only, could they be a combined bike/bus lane? Will there be dedicated bus lanes that are off-street, and could the Veloweb use these?
–Besides off-street paths, where can we put in striped lanes on existing streets, and where can we build extended sidewalks (one half for bikers, one half for pedestrians)?
–In Yorkshire at every stop light there’s a short bike lane striped onto the pavement before the curb which then expands out in front of the cars in the curbside lane, effectively allowing bikers to be the first to cross the intersection when the light turns green. This would also provide a buffer between cars and crosswalks.

Something to think on.

Rays of Hope

Rays of Hope in Austin, Texas is a group that combines a push for affordable housing with one for renewable clean energy. Their site explains: “We work with other notable local organizations to provide and install solar photovoltaic systems on houses being built or retrofitted for low- to moderate-income homeowners”. These project houses provide a setting for installation workshops, where the new homeowners, do-it-yourselfers, and anyone else curious can learn about renewable energy and how to install photovoltaic systems. The money raised from the workshops pays for the systems, making the net cost of initial installation zero for the new homeowners.

Rising oil prices — and consequently, rising utility bills and numbers of families below the poverty level — are a major impetus for Rays of Hope. Nowadays, more people live on a small budget, where energy bills and other utilities compete directly with other human needs. Their promotional flyer quotes some shocking statistics: out of the 4.9 million low-income households assisted by the National Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) in 2005, 24% went without food for at least one day in the previous five years due to the high energy bills. 25% could not make their rent or mortgage payment, and a whopping 57% of non-elderly owners went without medical or dental care.

There’s no reason more houses shouldn’t be more energy independent. Texas provides property tax exemptions for many sustainable energy installations, though there is no program to fund projects like these on an individual basis, so the cost of installation is quite high and will only be paid off if the house is lived in for many years afterward, sometimes up to a quarter century. (More information on Rays of Hope resources page.) Rays of Hope effectively makes the cost of installation for low-income homeowners zero, while educating the homeowners and community about the benefits of solar energy, and providing hands-on workshops. The photovoltaic cells convert sunlight directly into electricity, significantly reducing utility bills. They don’t store the energy, nor do they provide energy at night, so they aren’t meant to replace local grid-energy, but to reduce it. In sunny Texas, it can be a worthwhile addition: Rays of Hope estimates that on average in Austin, a 3kW cell can reduce a household’s grid dependency by more than 42%. To push sustainable building methods, they only install on newly-built or retro-fitted homes that meet the Austin Housing Finance Corporation’s requirements for S.M.A.R.T housing, which will be sold to lower-income families. They also work with already-existing local organizations, such as Habitat for Humanity, which builds quality housing for low-income families, in order to augment the effect they already have on the community. Added bonus: they’re a women-led initiative.

Sounds like a pretty useful solution to help the fight for solar energy, sustainable housing, and affordable housing all together. Now why haven’t I heard of something like this in other parts of Texas?

I’ve put a bit about them up on the new page, Sustainability Policies and Resources in Texas, which is a complete mess (and empty) right now, but is serving as a place to throw links I come across explaining the policies and guidelines for sustainable building in Texas. More to come. (School break = time for posts).

Solar energy gaining popularity in the west.

“[T]he world appears to be on the verge of a boom in a little-known but promising type of solar power,” predicts the New York Times, talking about huge plants using solar thermal power.

It is not the kind that features shiny panels bolted to the roofs of houses. This type involves covering acres of desert with mirrors that focus intense sunlight on a fluid, heating it enough to make steam. The steam turns a turbine and generates electricity.

It’s also much more efficient than the “shiny panels”, and newer technologies can even store the heat for extended use after nightfall. Several companies, anticipating a solar energy boom, are building new factories and plants to provide more clean energy. Most of these are being built in California which has passed mandates for renewable energy — they hope to have 20% of their energy come from renewable sources by 2010.

The deserts of California, Arizona, and Nevada are of course some of the sunniest places in the States, making them ideal for large solar plants like these.

(click the map or go here to see a bigger version)

The map is from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory which has a lot of in-depth reports and research on many types of Renewable Energy. The American Solar Energy Society offers a lot of information too, including a handy FAQ for those of us who don’t know the first thing about solar energy.

I tried to learn a little more about the possibilities for Texas and came up with http://www.infinitepower.org/. The website explains that “[i]n the mid-1990′s, the State Energy Conservation Office (SECO), contracted for a study to evaluate Texas’s renewable energy resource base, including solar, wind, biomass, water, geothermal and building climatology,” and the site is the culmination of that research. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits in there, for instance, that 4.3% of Texas’s land contains the potential to power the entire state through wind energy. Now, I’m sure it would be impractical (and expensive) to suddenly erect a bunch of windfarms in the Panhandle, but it’s nice to know that wind energy, however variable it may be, is a viable and clean source of energy for Texas, and even more so in other parts of the U.S. About solar energy, they conclude:

Solar radiation is available throughout the state in sufficient quantity to power distributed solar systems such as solar water heaters and off-grid photovoltaic panels. On the other hand, large solar power plants will almost certainly be most cost-effective when sited in areas of West Texas that receive very high levels of direct solar radiation. Solar developments of both types can become major contributors to satisfying the future energy needs of Texas.

The NYTimes article also points out some of the downsides of solar energy, including the impact large plants will have on the desert environment. (One plant already has to keep a tortoise wrangler to keep the poor things from getting lost and fried.) More immediately, solar energy still isn’t economically feasible without government’s help. Most of the impetus for the recent investments is due to high prices of oil of late, and though the technology and efficiency is always improving, solar energy only stands a chance when the price of natural gas and other fossil fuels is high — or when governments manipulate the market by giving subsidies to solar plants or taxing fossil fuels.

The power they produce is still relatively expensive. Industry experts say the plant here produces power at a cost per kilowatt- hour of 15 to 20 cents. With a little more experience and some economies of scale, that could fall to about 10 cents, according to a recent report by Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass. Newly built coal-fired plants are expected to produce power at about 7 cents per kilowatt-hour or more if carbon is taxed.

The solar plants receive a federal tax subsidy, like other types of renewable energy, which makes the economics work for builders but also feeds skepticism about the technology’s long-term potential. “Unless there’s a subsidy involved, it doesn’t seem like a very attractive technology,” said Revis James, a renewables expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility industry consortium.

I must say I’m a little suprised at that. Even if American policy makers and scientists still seem willing to squabble about whether or not human fossil fuel usage causes global warming, surely if we projected how much fossil fuel will be available in the near future, how accessible it will be, what the rising prices will likely be, etc, the price of building sustainable renewable-energy plants would pay out… There must be studies on this out there. I’m not saying we should suddenly switch the grid over to solar. (If you asked me, in fact, I’d favor a more decentralized energy plan, drawing from many different sources.) But assuming my guesses are correct, the cost analysis alone, plus the benefit of being seen as one of the pioneers into green energy, makes me think that fairly reliable alternative energy sources, like solar energy, would be a lot more attractive to energy companies.