Higher Density Needs Mixed Use→

Bill Lindeke, writing for Streets.mn:

“I was surprised when I got to my buddy’s place because, though it was in the middle of nowhere, my friend’s house wasn’t a house per se. Rather, he’d bought an attached townhome that was part of a long row of similar complexes in a brand new greenfield development, complete with sidewalks and quasi-porches and a pleasant almost grid-like street network.

Looking out at the sidewalks, I turned and asked my friend, “So where’s do you walk to?”

He looked at me blankly. “Um. People walk their dogs?”

The useless sidewalks in my friend’s strange middle-of-nowhere quasi-urban neighborhood got me thinking, so I started looking around for places where you have relatively urban densities, but no urban diversity. There are lots of these places, and not just in the suburbs. It doesn’t make any sense, but there you have it. Let’s meet some of them!”

We must unlearn what we have learned with our failed suburban experiment.

Skyrocketing Gun Sales Have Helped Conserve Butterflies→

Christie Aschwanden, reporting for FiveThirtyEight:

TexasEagle / Flickr.com

“The Nature Conservancy has a project in the works near Saratoga, New York, that will preserve an area that’s already home to these lupines and butterflies, and much of the program’s funding comes from the sales of guns and ammunition. For that, Karner conservationists can thank the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act.

Passed by Congress in 1937 and commonly referred to as the Pittman-Robertson Act, it sets an excise tax of 10 to 11 percent on the sale of guns and ammunition, paid by manufacturers at the wholesale level. Prior to the law’s passage, guns and ammunition were already subject to taxes, but the Act ensured that the money was set aside to protect game species and their habitats. The law has helped bring deer and elk back from the brink in areas in the East, but it’s also given refuge to many non-game species, like the Karner blue butterfly. At another project in New York, Pittman-Robertson money is helping to protect 5,000 acres of grouse, turkey and deer habitat, and all the snowy owls and other birds of prey that come with it. Troy Weldy, senior conservation manager at the Nature Conservancy’s New York chapter, said the project “could create a premier birding destination.”

Environmentalists who don’t hunt might not think they have much in common with the guy tromping off into the woods with a gun. Yet hunters and anglers have a long history of land stewardship, said John Gale, national sportsmen campaigns manager at the National Wildlife Federation. At the time the Pittman-Robertson Act was passed, widespread hunting had cleared deer and other big game from large areas along the Eastern Seaboard. Realizing that the sustainability of their pastime was at risk, hunters banded together to urge legislative action. “Hunters are the original conservationists — we’ve been carrying wildlife and fish on our back for a long time,” Gale said.”

Hmm. In the end, hunters are those who saved shards of nature.

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.

Prevent, Not Simply Treat, Lake Michigan Pollution→

Rahm Emanuel and Mark Tercek, writing in the Chicago Sun Times:

James Marvin Phelps

“The world’s cities spend roughly $90 billion per year on infrastructure to move and treat water. This price tag is increasing as urban populations grow, infrastructure ages, and our changing climate continues to turn once-reliable rainfall into periods of more severe drought and floods.

We spend billions to clean water, but do comparatively little to prevent it from getting polluted in the first place.

Delivering clean and reliable water may be the single largest challenge that our growing cities face. The good news: we have a significant opportunity right now to turn this trend around. Investing in nature can reduce the amount of nutrient and sediment pollution in our natural water sources, before costly chemical treatment is required.”

This will be a very important test for politicians.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) Are High Risk→

Mark Buchanan, reporting for Bloomberg:

OLIVIER MORIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

“Like many people, I’ve long wondered about the safety of genetically modified organisms. They’ve become so ubiquitous that they account for about 80 percent of the corn grown in the U.S., yet we know almost nothing about what damage might ensue if the transplanted genes spread through global ecosystems.

How can so many smart people, including many scientists, be so sure that there’s nothing to worry about? Judging from a new paper by several researchers from New York University, including “The Black Swan” author Nassim Taleb, they can’t and shouldn’t.

The researchers focus on the risk of extremely unlikely but potentially devastating events. They argue that there’s no easy way to decide whether such risks are worth taking — it all depends on the nature of the worst-case scenario. Their approach helps explain why some technologies, such as nuclear energy, should give no cause for alarm, while innovations such as GMOs merit extreme caution.”

The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)

Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view. Where low probability, high consequence, and systemic risk are, the precautionary principle must be applied. Impossible to see the future is. Risk is a function of both probability and consequence. Discount potential consequences will help you not.

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.

A City is an Ecosystem→

Courtney Humphries, reporting for the Boston Globe:

“Cities may strike us as the opposite of “the environment”: As we pave streets and erect buildings, nature comes to feel like the thing you find somewhere else. But scientists working in the growing field of urban ecology argue that we’re missing something. A city’s soil collects pollutants, but it also supports a vast system of microscopic life. Water courses beneath roads and buildings, often in long-buried streams and constructed pipes. And city ecosystems aren’t static; they change over time as populations grow, infrastructure ages, and different political structures and social values shape them.

Seen this way, the city is a distinct form of “environment,” and an important one. Truly understanding how it works—and how it affects the millions of people who may live and work there—will mean studying the whole city as a living system, both its organisms and its pipes, roads, and landfills. As cities grow, maintaining clean air and water in a place like Boston may depend on how well urban areas support trees, plants, and microbes.”

Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view. Truly wonderful the ecology of a city is.”

The Status of the Rural Creative Class →

Richard Florida, reporting for CityLab:

USDA

“Two kinds of rural counties are experiencing growth, according to Wojan’s analysis. The first are nonmetro creative class counties close to major metros. The second are rural creative class counties that are home to colleges and universities, which are themselves knowledge economy hubs. This proximity effect is likely to become more important, as larger metros and knowledge economy hubs play an increasingly important role in driving economic growth across the nation. What may be happening: The Internet is enabling creative-class workers to stretch the boundaries of their commuting sheds and locate on the rural periphery of major metros, far enough to work from countrified and comfortable home offices, but close enough to come in for meetings.”

Through the Force, things you will see. Other places. The future…the past. Old friends long gone.

Green Algae Virus Reduces Human Cognitive Function→

Madeline Grant, writing for Newsweek:

Simon Andrews

“ATCV-1 typically infects a species of green algae found in lakes and rivers, and has not previously been known to infect humans. However, when Yolken’s team screened a group of 92 healthy volunteers who were taking part in a study on cognitive function, the virus was found to be present in 43.5% of them.

According to the study, those infected with the virus performed around 10% worse on tests analysing visual processing speeds. In one test, infected volunteers were slower to draw a line connecting a sequence of numbers randomly distributed on a page than their uninfected counterparts.”

The study, published by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America: “Chlorovirus ATCV-1 is part of the human oropharyngeal virome and is associated with changes in cognitive functions in humans and mice.”

When you feel the force of a Green Algae virus, careful you must be.

Ten Things You Need to Know About the Latest IPCC Climate Report→

John Light, writing for Grist:

“Here, with some charts, are 10 key things to take away — many of them familiar from the IPCC installments that have come out over the past 13 months.”

Always two there are, no more, no less. An informed person and an uninformed skeptic.

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.

Rewilding: Feral→

Brandom Keim reviews George Monbiot’s Feral, for Conservation Magazine:

“Monbiot’s rewilding encompasses these, but with differences. He emphasizes the richness of ecological interactions, the flow of energy and nutrients across time and form, and also—crucially—the essence of wildness itself. “Rewilding, to me, is about resisting the urge to control nature and allowing it to find its own way,” Monbiot writes. “The ecosystems that result are best described not as wilderness, but self-willed.”

Add a few species, pull down the fences, step back: this is not a fussy sort of conservation, then, bearing lists of favored species and blacklists of invasives, struggling to produce a historical snapshot. The past is inspiration, not blueprint. Neither is it a domineering conservation, managing nature to meet our demands. Services might result, but they’re not the point. The ethos is not of human primacy, but a muscular, can-do humility. Things will fix themselves if we let them.”

Looking? Found nature you have, eh? It needs not us.