Category Archives: Environment

scattered thoughts on moderation and restoring sanity.

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I had every intention of going to DC for the Rally to Restore Sanity. The spectacle and clarion call, the gathering of moderates was seductive. However, in typical moderate fashion, I didn’t figure out a plan to get there. By the time I realized I should have booked a bus ticket on MegaBus or Bolt, they were already sold out.

So instead, I spent my Saturday restoring sanity on the home front. I cleaned my bedroom. I cleaned the bathroom. I vacuumed. I groomed my cat. I folded laundry. I organized the stack of ungraded papers for my review. I took a walk around the neighborhood. I bought a latte. I did most of this in relative silence. I refrained from checking my twitterfeed for updates of value and snark regarding the day’s events. I peaked once. Kid Rock performed? (Dude, like seriously?)

There were shows I’m missing. A happy hour I would’ve liked to have gone to. At the very least, I would’ve loved to rub elbows with the young progressives and shared in their sideways glance, witty banter and commentary about a comedian who’s righteous indignation against the tide of batshit crazy in our political discourse has manifested itself in a not so cleverly disguised get out the vote rally on the Washington Mall. Instead, I’m here in Brooklyn. Unable to check into foursquare to unlock uber swarm badges to acknowledge that I exist among the crowd of young(ish) moderate voices in American politics. I’m fine with this. Continue reading →

Bartleby.

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I read Bartleby, the Scrivener in the eleventh grade. It was required reading for IB English I at my high school.

For the uninitiated, Bartleby was a scrivener, a writer, if you will, who worked for a real estate lawyer. Our modern tongues would define his position as ‘administrative assistant’, or ‘paralegal.’ And while the narrator of the story itself suggests that Bartleby offered no indication of any emotion to his circumstance, I’d submit that underneath the veil of ambivalence, Bartleby hated his job. Bartleby was bored out of his mind. Bartleby only offers a very controlled and passive response to all the directives issued by the boss, ‘I prefer not to.’ We watch this détente between boss and employee unfold over a period of time, and the slow degeneration of Bartleby, the office relocates and Bartleby, the everyman working in the offices of a boom economy, condemned to banal tasks of recording mortgages, deeds for would-be moguls, all the while passively resisting any work that demanded more of his mental mind.  The story concludes with the discovery that Bartleby lived in the old offices and died bereft.

Yeah. Continue reading →

green the cities, create the jobs, save the planet…

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Or something like that. I think about sustainability a lot. In a previous life, I worked on the development of new construction residential buildings, and very slowly, applied green building practices and materials to those buildings.

I’ve also been thinking about the intersection of green job creation and sustainability in cities. Very quietly, I follow stories about urban gardening/agriculture movements. In 2007, President Clinton was the keynote speaker for an awards dinner at ACORN (yeah, I know… whatever) that I attended and flagged two major issues that we’ve now seen come to pass: job crisis and credit burden. To a crowd of affordable housing professionals, the 42nd President of the United States teased out practical solutions to these problems.  In 2007, 38% of US greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings. As some of us who were awares that the housing bubble would inevitably pop and create a crisis in jobs, Clinton talked to this small crowd about the link between green jobs and affordable housing, specifically pointing to jobs modernizing the existing housing stock with by making them more energy efficient beasts (high-efficiency boilers, energy efficient lighting and appliances, smart building technologies, green roof replacement, etc.) Even then, you could tell that some of these ideas came from folks like Van Jones and Majora Carter, because they’ve already witnessed how these incremental changes created benefits to individual and community.

I could geek out even further on this; water waste in multi family buildings has a solution too. For every flush, 5 gallons of potable water is wasted. The first luxury rental building in NYC to get a gold LEED certification, uses a gray water reclamation system, a very expensive system in its upfront costs. However, if it is an idea we mandate, then we’d be able to eliminate millions of gallons potable water waste.

I might be a little OCD in my interest in sustainability. But it’s nice to know I have noble company.

From GOOD:

“I made this trip,” explained Matt Victoriano, a Marine who served in Iraq, “because it became painfully aware to me that our current energy policy is a direct threat to our national security and the troops.” Marine General Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, takes it a step further: “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll.” In other words, to best support our troops, support a clean energy future.”

And this post from TAPPED:

Often these are people returning from prison, people who have lived in generational poverty, or returning combat veterans – some fit all three of these demographics. Each group commonly suffers from, among other things, a deep sense of social isolation that inhibits their participation in the marketplace, increases their social services footprint, and negatively affects the health and educational outcomes of both themselves and the people around them. Typically, these places are the environmental sacrifice zones that make our dirty-energy economy possible.

They have been creating expensive and ever-widening cost vectors for decades – if one looks at how many people are coming out of our prisons, going into poverty, and coming back from multiple deployments for wars with no end in sight. We need to turn those cost vectors around as soon as possible using the tools we can control on regional and community levels.

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Horticultural infrastructure work is highly therapeutic for certain psychological barriers to full participation in society. It’s more cost-effective than pharmaceutical methods too, so this can contribute to public heath savings.

Projects like these, on a massive scale throughout our cities, shorelines, and over-stressed water management systems, can turn some of our most expensive citizens into some of our most productive in three important ways.

Do you see that?  The connection in building a sustainable future could also mean jobs for veterans and under/unemployed in communities of color.

And then there’s my favorite word again: infrastructure.

Go-Go Gadget Train!

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Yay!

I’ve wanted this for a very, very, very long time.

A modern and fast moving inter-rail system in the US? Cutting my travel time between New York and Chicago, or Milwaukee to just a few hours? Perhaps reducing my out of pocket travel costs and carbon emissions associated with car or airplane travel? Relieve congestion in the air and on the ground? This will make my grandmother love a little more. Many of my planner geek friends and I have long lamented the fact of how easy it is to travel through Europe because of high speed train service, than it is in the US. Our reliance on cars has been prohibitive for a high-speed rail system to develop.

The Europification of the United States of America. I think we’re finally growing up, defining a society that can live sustainably. My carbon footprint is starting to look a lot cuter.

How To Build A Better Robot, Part I

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I’ve been thinking a lot about infrastructure lately.

I hear the word thrown around a lot, but I’m not sure if it’s resonating with everyone. If some of you are faithful viewers of the Rachel Maddow show, you hear her geek out about it. I must admit, I do too. I was glad that I was not alone in the obsession about it. My former coworkers in the construction industry found my obsession odd too. It’s not like I had ever got my hands dirty in any actual trade to care about joists, masonry, weepholes or footings, the shaping of the physical universe. To them, I was administrator, bean counter, be it a “marketing person.” I dealt in a universe of fluff, and they did the real heavy lifting. No pun intended. But as the weeks wore on and the job reached its logical conclusion and the work slowed down, I thought about all of us in how we’d fit into the next job. Would there be a next job? The market conditions and tea leaves last fall suggested an end.

Ah, Endings. They make you think. When the site supervisor and I sat down for our weekly chat to cover the work that’s been done on the project, I had this odd moment of lucidity. “Do you think that the American population realizes that we’re going to have retrain the entire labor force to be able to meet the challenges of the 21st century?” I asked. He gave me a quizzical look, but then he understood and said, “I don’t think they have a clue.” I used our building as an example, a residential building with green building systems atypical in the existing housing stock in the New York Area. New York City has a plan campaign to decrease its carbon emissions and footprint (33% of greenhouse gas emissions comes from buildings). They soak up power, water, and air, then send out some very bad juju out into climate. Not to mention construction materials themselves that contaminate ground and water due to its inability to breakdown into a simple or complex sugar or something. You get the point.

The challenge I found in this experience is that while some of us are becoming better educated about how materials we use to shape our world have in fact harmed us, we are still challenged to invest time and resources to do more to minimize these impacts. With the growth of green building as a movement and reality in some places, the maintenance begins with the workforce population understanding the fundamentals of how to maintain the thing we’ve created to coexist with our ecosystem. If the porters and superintendents don’t understand how to run a high efficiency boiler or an air purification system and fix it breaks down, what good have really done to better our city? If plumbers don’t learn how to install a blackwater reclamation system for a building so that it reduces water waste when we flush toilets, then how are we contributing to preserving our most critical resource? How does reducing water waste support our reservoirs? Potable water wasted for toilet water doesn’t do the world any good.

The ending of the boom in the housing industry presents us with a beginning. An opportunity, even. Building McMansions and condos across the lower 48 seemed like a grand idea at the time because it created wealth and jobs to mitigate the bust of 2000-2001 from the internet boom, but it also paved the way for the excesses that led to our current downturn. And all the homes that we were building didn’t necessarily factor in sustainability. Fiscally or ecologically. How could it? The labor force was not schooled in the ways of mitigating impacts on the environment.

So this brings me to my current thinking about infrastructure. Infrastructure is more than the physical universe of roads, bridges, schools, power grids, levees, dams, reservoirs, trains, subways. Think of them as veins and vessels within the body. The body cannot live without the mind. Teachers, firefighters, police officers, servicemen and women flow through that universe. So do you and I. And all of us need to be a bit more educated about how we all are connected in this life. How do we individually complement the stimulus package that was just signed? Infrastructure, beyond the jobs and economic stability it can create, includes you, me and a dose of intellectual curiosity.

America is a young nation with old systems in play. All that American ingenuity we’ve been taught about has laid fallow for too long. It’s time to build a better robot.

Are you ready?

Say Word!

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It’s like he’s speaking sweet policy and political nothings in my ear.

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I love these words: infrastructure, power grid, comprehensive energy policy. This was some serious tough talk from the leader of the free world. Refreshingly so and honest. The macro issues are clear, the stimulus isn’t necessarily a magic wand, but does set us on the path to enter the 21st century. It’s clear to me that the President understands that America needs to do some self care to compete and in doing so, looking inward, we can reflect and engage our outer realities with responsibility to the world.