In 2050→

Martin Rees, writing for the New Statesman:

Jody Amiet/AFP/Getty

“I quote Wells because he reflects the mix of optimism and anxiety – and of speculation and science – which I’ll try to offer in this lecture. Were he writing today, he would have been elated by our expanded vision of life and the cosmos – but he’d have been even more anxious about the perils we might face. The stakes are indeed getting higher: new science offers huge opportunities but its consequences could jeopardise our survival. Many are concerned that it is ‘running away’ so fast that neither politicians nor the lay public can assimilate or cope with it...

My theme was this. Earth is 45 million centuries old. But this century is the first when one species – ours – can determine the biosphere’s fate. I didn’t think we’d wipe ourselves out. But I did think we’d be lucky to avoid devastating setbacks. That’s because of unsustainable anthropogenic stresses to ecosystems, because there are more of us (world population is higher) and we’re all more demanding of resources. And – most important of all – because we’re empowered by new technology, which exposes us to novel vulnerabilities.

And we’ve had one lucky escape already.”

Reckless are we. Matters are may get worse.

Bass Fishing Cheaters→

David Hill, writing for Grantland:

JOHN TOMAC

“Here’s how most bass fishing tournaments work: Contestants (either as individuals or in teams of two) set out on a lake at the same time to fish wherever they want for a certain period of time. At the end of the time limit, everyone rides back in and weighs the fish they caught. There’s usually a limit on how many fish you can weigh in. If you catch your limit and then catch an even bigger fish, you can let one go and replace it with the bigger fish. Whoever checks in with the biggest weight of their total haul of fish wins the prize. Sometimes there’s an additional prize for the lunker, the biggest single fish caught that day...

How much money would need to be on the line for someone to cheat, I wonder. Cleary casts his line out, spins around in his tall chair at the front of the boat, and smiles like he has a whopper of a tale to tell.”

Beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression, power and attention; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight or a competition. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did all fishing contestants.

One of the World's Greenest Urban Place→

Matt Hickman, writing for Mother Nature Network:

Living Building Challenge

“So what exactly are the standout sustainability features at the pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly McGilvra Place Park? And how did they help transform a lonely traffic median in the middle of Seattle into the world’s first Living Park?

In addition to preserving 11 century-old London plane trees that were already at the site, replacing water-intensive turf with native vegetation, increasing accessibility and bringing in the aforementioned ping-pong tables, it’s fascinating to learn how the park’s new features meet the incredibly stringent Living Building Challenge requirements.”

Mind what you have seen. Save you it can.

Great Cities Have Strong Parks→

From Next City:

“Ask Fort Worth Mayor Betsey Price about parks, and she’ll tell it to you straight: “Great cities all have strong parks. If you look at some of our European model cities, it you look at some of our Asian cities, they all have strong parks,” she says. “In the end, for cities to be very vibrant and very strong, citizens have to be engaged. They have to know each other. They have to know a little bit about their city. They have to know their elected officials. There’s no better place to do that than get people out in a green space, on a trail, along the river, wherever it might be.””

To answer development with just more development, the Jedi way this is not. In our failure to design community, a danger there is, of losing who we are.

Sense of Place: Map Making→

Elizabeth Preston, writing for CityLab:

Elizabeth Preston

“At best, my mental map of my new home is a few loose archipelagos of landmarks in a sea of question marks. Researchers of cognitive maps would say that mine isn’t very sophisticated. Gary Burnett, who studies interfaces between humans and in-car computers at the University of Nottingham, wrote in 2005 that landmarks are just the first step of building a map in your mind. Routes are the next level of understanding, and above that is “survey” knowledge—a map-like comprehension of the whole area.”

Looking? Found someone you have, eh? 

Lake Champlain: Phosphorus Diet→

John Herrick, reporting for VTDigger:

Malcolm K.

“Vermont’s plan to improve Lake Champlain’s water quality does not go far enough to comply with federal regulations, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA released phosphorus pollution reduction targets for Lake Champlain at a meeting in Middlebury on Monday. It also ran a model of the phosphorus reduction plan Vermont submitted in May to determine whether it would meet federal standards.

Stephen Perkins, director of ecosystem protection for the EPA’s Boston office, pointed to an up-sloping trend line showing the amount of phosphorus in several segments of Lake Champlain.

“The phosphorus levels are too high in many portions of the lake,” he told the crowd of farmers, water quality advocates and state officials. “It’s going to take an awful lot of work to take those red trend lines and get them to bend down in a different direction.””

The phosphorus clouds everything. Quantified must your diet be before reaching it you can.

In 1968 Vermont Banned Billboards. Here’s Why→

Twisted Sifter:

Don Landwehrle

RonBlekicki

“In 1968 the state of Vermont passed a landmark anti-billboard law and the landscape has been billboard-free ever since. The law was the result of the extraordinary efforts of one man, Ted Riehle (1924 – 2007), who was determined to preserve the natural beauty of Vermont.”

He was strong enough to defeat it. Like the commercialization before it, be destroyed, it must.

How Will the Suburbs Redevelop?→

Nathaniel M. Hood, writing for Streets.mn:

“There is a small war going on in America’s second-ring suburbs.

As many places cautiously emerge out of the housing recession, the uptick in new development has been at odds with concerned citizens, elected officials, developers and long-range community plans. Aging suburbia is going through an identity crisis. The only word that comes to mind: bipolar.

To best describe what is going on countrywide, I’m going to use an example in my backyard: the Minneapolis suburb of Minnetonka (not the lake). It’s a well-to-do middle-class community that has expensive, moderate, and cheap suburban living. As far as suburbs go, it has a surprising range of housing price points.”

Much to learn we still have… This is just the beginning! We need to reinvent downtown development. Odd that old people are holding back good redevelopment.

Zombie Suburbs→

Alana Semuels, reporting for the Altantic:

Alana Semeuls

“There are hundreds of zombie subdivisions like this one scattered across the country. They’re one of the most visible reminders of the housing boom and bust, planned and paved in the heady days where it seemed that everybody wanted a home in the suburbs, and could afford it, too. But when the economy tanked, many of the developers behind these subdivisions went belly-up, and construction stopped. In some cases, a few people have moved into homes in these half-built subdivisions, requiring services to be delivered there. In others, the land is empty, except for roads, sidewalks, and the few street signs that haven’t been stolen yet. In some counties in the West, anywhere from 15 to 33 percent of all subdivision lots are vacant, according to the Sonoran Institute.

”Since the post-2007 real estate bust, which hit many parts of the region severely, eroding subdivision roads now slice through farmland and open space, and ‘spec’ houses stand alone amid many rural and suburban landscapes,” author Jim Holway wrote in a report by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy about zombie subdivisions. “Without correction, they will continue to weaken fiscal health, property values and quality of life in affected communities.””

Reckless we are in development of land. Matters are worse. Bankrupt we are.

Bigger than Keystone XL: Enbridge Sandpiper→

 Ron Meador, writing for MinnPost:

“Enbridge will proceed to carry, on average, 880,000 barrels of heavy crude oil per day — and potentially higher volumes of lighter grades — from the tar-sands mines of Alberta to the docks and pipeline interconnections at Superior, Wisconsin.

That’s actually a bit more than the design capacity of 830,000 barrels per day for Keystone XL, which would carry oil from the Alberta tar sands and the Bakken oil patch in North Dakota to refineries mostly in the Gulf Coast region.”

Dave Shaffer, Star Tribune, Enbridge Files to Replace Problem Pipeline in Minnesota:

“Enbridge decided to replace Line 3 rather than repair the 34-inch-diameter pipe because that would require digging in about 900 places where tests revealed problems. The pipeline suffers from corrosion because the protective tape on the steel has not held up, Little said.

The project is expected to face opposition from environmental groups, including climate activists who are fighting pipelines like TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL in western states as a way to slow development of Alberta’s tar sands.

“It traverses some of the most important lake country, aquifers and water resources in Minnesota,” said Richard Smith, president of the Friends of the Headwaters, an environmental group based in Park Rapids that wants the Sandpiper and Line 3 to avoid the headwaters of the Mississippi River. “That is why we have advocated a different route.””

Adding capacity. Walking away from the existing Line 3. Matters are worse.

Procrastination on Global Warming Means Coasts Will Continue Flooding→

Simon Buckle, writing for IFLScience:

Pete Markham, CC BY-SA

“In terms of the physical science, there are perhaps three key headline messages: human influence on the climate system is clear; warming of the climate system is unequivocal; limiting the risks from climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of GHG emissions.

Mitigating our use of fossil fuels lies right at the heart of an effective response to climate change. While a 2°C target remains technically feasible, achieving it will be extremely challenging. The IPCC’s mitigation report compared hundreds of energy modelling scenarios that strongly suggest that to achieve a 2°C target, global GHG emissions would need to be around 40-70% lower than 2010 levels by 2050 and near zero by 2100.”

Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)
AR5 provides a clear and up to date view of the current state of scientific knowledge relevant to climate change. It consists of three Working Group (WG) reports and a Synthesis Report (SYR). 

Many aspects of climate change and associated impacts will continue for centuries, even if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are stopped. The risks of abrupt or irreversible changes increase as the magnitude of the warming increases.

If into the reasons for our procrastination you go, only pain will you find. Greed, denial, and delusion. Your science, save you it will not in a world of corruption and immediate profit.

Why Minneapolis Has Beautiful Bike Freeways→

Heather Smith, writing for Grist:

Heather Smith

“I had been biking around Minneapolis for several days before I realized what was missing. It was a pleasant city, even though I was lost a lot, because most of the bike routes have very tiny signs that are hard to read, if they have signs at all. At night the bike paths were so dark that I worried I might not see an obstacle in the road, even with my headlight on, and I got even more lost, until I just gave up and biked very slowly with my phone in one hand, watching the blue dot that was myself on the map to make sure that I didn’t drift off the path, fall off my bike, and get eaten by bears. Not that there are any bears in Minneapolis.

But none of that mattered, really. Here was the thing that was missing for the first time since I became a bicycle commuter: fear.”

Hmm. In the end, people against bikes and public transit are those who follow the dark side.

Power Line Rights of Way: Opportunities for Cost Savings and Habitat→

Richard Conniff, writing for Yale360 Environment:

dalioPhoto, Flickr

“The open, scrubby habitat under some transmission lines is already the best place to hunt for wild bees, says Sam Droege of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland, and that potential habitat will inevitably become more important as the United States becomes more urbanized. He thinks utility rights-of-way — currently adding up in the U.S. to about nine million acres for power transmission lines, and another 12 million for pipelines — could eventually serve as a network of conservation reserves roughly one third the area of the national park system.

Remarkably, some power companies agree. Three utilities — New York Power Authority, Arizona Public Service, and Vermont Electric Power Company — have already completed a certification program from the Right of Way Stewardship Council, a new group established to set standards for right-of-way management, with the aim of encouraging low-growth vegetation and thus, incidentally, promoting native wildlife. Three more utilities, all from Western states, are currently seeking certification.”

Many of our solutions depend on changing our point of view.

Nature Makes Better Students→

Dave Levitan, Conservation This Week:

“It shouldn’t be surprising anymore that green spaces make us happier, healthier, and just generally better, but every time a hard finding on the topic pops up it seems incredible once again. Just being near nature is enough to bump up kids’ grades—though we’ll need more data to back this up, it probably can’t hurt to head out and look at some trees any chance you and your kids can get.”

We must unlearn what we have learned. Nature makes us great, factory schools not.

Sauk River Chain of Lakes Face Pollution →

Kirsti Marohn, reporting for the St. Cloud Times:

Kimm Anderson, St. Cloud Times

“An active watershed district and lake association have taken ambitious steps to curb pollution entering the lakes. By most accounts, the lakes’ clarity has vastly improved and fish are more abundant. “The condition of the chain was dramatically worse water quality than it currently is,” said Greg Van Eeckhout, environmental specialist with the MPCA.

But the chain still faces many challenges. It’s fed by the Sauk River, which drains a huge area of largely agricultural land. Most of the chain’s lakes are considered impaired because of high nutrient levels. Algae blooms still make the water murky at times. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is proposing new standards for the lake that would aim to reduce those nutrient levels and improve the clarity of the water. But one environmental group says the standards are too lenient.

As the debate over the Sauk Chain’s future heats up, nearly everyone seems to agree that much progress has been made in the past few decades.”

If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are … a different game you should play. Change standards without changing system, skeptical we are.

Public Transit Support High, Use Not So Much→

Eric Jaffe, writing for CityLab:

Chris; Flickr

“Enthusiasm for public transportation far, far outweighs the actual use of it. Last week, for instance, the American Public Transportation Association reported that 74 percent of people support more mass transit spending. But only 5 percent of commuters travel by mass transit. This support, in other words, is largely for others.

What’s more striking about the support-usage gap is that it doesn’t just exist on paper. In addition to saying they support transit funding, Americans back up that support with their own pocketbooks. Time and again at the polls, people are willing to raise local taxes to maintain or expand the transit service that so few of them actually use. According to the Center for Transportation Excellence, there were 62 transportation measures on ballots across the country in 2012—many with a considerable transit component—and nearly 80 percent of them succeeded.”

Through the Force, things you will see. Other places. Other forms of transportation. The future…the past. Old streetcars long gone.

Poverty Moving to the Suburbs→

Reihan Salam, writing for Slate:

Jim Rees, Flickr

“You might be wondering why poor families are moving to the suburbs in large numbers—the number of suburban poor grew more than twice as quickly as the number of urban poor between 2000 and 2011—if they are such hard places for poor people to get ahead. Part of it is that as middle- and high-income households moved to the suburbs, the low-wage workers who look after their children had little choice but to follow. Then there is the fact that as America’s most productive cities experience a revival, gentrification is displacing low-income families to outlying neighborhoods and towns.

Before we can understand what makes some suburbs so miserable, we first have to understand what makes others succeed. The most successful suburban neighborhoods fall into two categories. First, there are the dense and walkable ones that, like the most successful urban neighborhoods, have town centers that give local residents easy access to retail and employment opportunities. These neighborhoods generally include a mix of single-family homes and apartment buildings, which allows for different kinds of families and adults at different stages of life to share in the same local amenities. The problem with these urban suburbs, as Christopher Leinberger recounts in his 2009 book The Option of Urbanism, is that there are so few of them, and this scarcity fuels the same kind of gentrification that is driving poor people out of successful cities.”

Density matters, ... Look at the suburbs. Judge them by walkability, do you? Save them you can't. 

Questions About the Water Supply Plan→

Brendon Slotterback, writing for Streets.mn:

MPR

“White Bear Lake is looking less like a lake all the time. The Met Council has released a report with a few solutions to this issue, all which involve relying more on surface water (rivers) and less on groundwater. The proposed solutions range in price from $155 million to over $600 million. The options are myriad, but all involve long pipes to existing or new water treatment plants that use water from the Mississippi River. Options for areas served vary, but the study area includes communities totaling 157,823 people in 2010 (208,580 projected in 2040).

However, the report seems insufficient to me. It lacks answers to lots of important questions that members of the Metropolitan Council (and residents of the region) should be asking. Here are a few I came up with as I was reading:”

Brendon has 6 questions then asks one more:

“Where is the conservation alternative? The cost and feasibility of reducing water use are not analyzed as part of the report. Building nothing and simply asking/incentivizing/requiring people to use less may be the cheapest option. ”

— http://netdensity.net/2014/07/28/3312/

Conservation matters, ... Look at the waste on lawns. Judge conservation on no change in potable water use, do you?

Great Lakes at a Crossroads→

Dan Egan, reporting for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 

“Despite their vastness, for thousands of years the inland seas above Niagara Falls were as isolated from the outside world as a Northwoods Wisconsin pond. That all changed in 1959. The U.S. and Canadian governments obliterated the lake’s natural barrier to invasive fish, plants, viruses and mollusks with the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of channels, locks and dams that opened the door for ocean freighters to sail up the once-wild St. Lawrence River, around Niagara Falls and into the heart of the continent.

Small boats had access to the lakes since the 1800s thanks to relatively tiny man-made navigation channels stretching in from the East Coast and a canal at Chicago that artificially linked Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River basin.

But the consequences of opening a nautical freeway into the Great Lakes for globe-roaming freighters proved disastrous — at least 56 non-native organisms have since been discovered in the lakes, and the majority arrived as stowaways in freighter ballast tanks.”

New species additions are a natural part of ecosystem life. Rejoice for those around you and admire the beauty of all organisms. Mourn a changed ecosystem do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealously.

A City in Denmark with Low Waste→

William F. Hewitt, writing for ENIA:

Symbiosis Center

““In 2006, 85 percent of our production was coming from, you can call it ‘black’ fossil fuels, the rest from green sources,” says Niels Christian Kjær, a top executive at DONG Energy and past president of the Kalundborg Symbiosis. “By 2040, we will switch that number: 85 percent will be green energy.”

With support from the central and municipal governments and the European Union, along with the companies, Kalundborg has attracted the attention of business people and investors, policy makers and students from all over the world who come to learn how they can create their own industrial symbiosis. In 2014 alone, it’s had visitors from Turkey, Thailand, Finland, Sweden, Kenya and Denmark, representing a farmers’ association, a development agency, an industrial think tank, an environmental institute, a waste management company, and several universities and high schools.

“What is excellent about Kalundborg is that the town hall has full focus in this,” says Kjær. “They want to be the leading town, number one in innovation. They want to have people come from all over the world to learn and say, ‘Wow.’””

To be Sustainable is to face the truth, and choose. Capture energy, or light. Be a recycler, or eliminate waste.