NYT Piece on Greening Suburbs

The New York Times had an excellent piece on the challenges involved in greening suburbs. See it here. Discusses the relationship between density and auto use to a community's carbon footprint. Great reporting. Average single-family home in the U.S. nearly doubled in size from 1970 to 2005, to nearly 2,500 square feet. I didn't know there was a 70-ft turbine in Lisle!

Sorry Mayor - Preservation = Green

This was my response to the Tribune's series on how City Hall lets much critical development/preservation decision-making take place at the ward level (see the series at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-code-overviewjan27,0,6181305.story). They didn't run it, so I'm posting it here!

"It was disheartening to read Mayor Daley’s assertion that architectural preservation is handled best at the most local level or becomes a perceived City Hall power grab. There is a third choice – actually creating a much-needed city-wide master plan for preserving our great architectural legacy. There are three critical reasons the Mayor should seriously reconsider this position immediately:

1. Preservation fosters community identity. Research shows that people feel a stronger connection to their community when the historic fabric is respected and preserved. They find more comfort in the area and become more civically engaged.

2. Preservation leads to investment. Research also shows that where architectural preservation is valued, investment follows. From restaurants to renovations, tourism to the film industry dollars tend to follow.

3. Preservation is Green. Sustainability is all about valuing existing assets.
Destroying our architectural legacy – whether the neighborhood icon buildings (movie theatres, stores, churches) or worker cottages – flies in the face of the Mayor’s wonderful ambition to make Chicago a truly green city. In addition, demolition debris makes up one of the largest categories of urban waste.

These questions are simply too important to be decided by a process so vulnerable to influences that do not take into account the city’s best interests. City Hall completed an ambitious Chicago Historic Resources Survey in 1995 that painstakingly evaluated all buildings constructed prior to 1940. To date this resource has essentially led only to minor delays in demolition. It’s time to use this valuable grid to help lay the foundation for a city-wide plan for preserving our neighborhood fabric.
After all, the city's job is not just to attract investors to Chicago - but to guide their dollars to projects that have a lasting, positive impact on our neighborhoods."

Teen Writers Take on Green Topics

The city-wide paper LA Youth took on a variety of green topics in their Sept. 2007 issue. Stories are on our role in global warming, ways to live a greener life, etc. The paper, now in its 20th year, is circulated to more than 400,000 readers throughout the city of Los Angeles. See the issue here.

CMAP's Summit on Climate Change

Last month CMAP, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, held a summit on innovation and integration. Various regional partners - from CNT's Peter Haas to Sadhu Johnston of the City to Adele Simmons of Metropolis 2020 presented on anticipated effects of climate change on the Chicago area as well as reactions. See the summit agenda - as well as most presentations -
here.

Story on all the little + the big things we can do

Chicago's RedEye had a nice story that lays out the little - as well as the big - things that we can all do to help reduce our carbon footprint. It's amazing how quickly green issues have risen in prominence in the public's eye, yet constant reminders of the ways that our own actions are relevant, like this piece, are very important. Reporter Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, who has covered environmental issues for some time, explores home energy, flying, driving, eating meat, recycling, etc. "If everyone in Chicago [used reusable bags], it would eliminate 601 million bags and save 4,508 tons of waste from going to a landfill." And how about the newspaper industry itself? Interestingly, the 1,500 daily newspapers in the U.S. use about 9.2 million tons of paper - consuming more than the book, magazine and catalog sectors combined. Yet it turns out they're the most recycled paper product around - and newsprint itself contains an average of 32 percent recycled fiber. (Still, it's a great incentive for going digital!) Anyway, enterprising reporting!

Chicago Tribune Interviews Weisman

Today's Trib has an interview with author Alan Weisman. An excerpt from the story:
Among those interesting facts:

- Humans use more than a third of the world's land surface for food production.

- In the ocean, north of Hawaii, there is a 1,000-mile-wide area containing 3 million tons of trash -- bottle caps, fish netting, six-pack rings, limp balloons, plastic bags and other detritus of human civilization -- that oceanographers have dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

- Over the past half-century, humans have produced 1 billion tons of plastic.

Virtually all of that plastic remains somewhere on the planet, and, even if humans disappeared tomorrow, it would stick around for a long, long time.

How long?

"No one knows," writes Weisman, "because no plastic has died a natural death yet. It took today's microbes ... a long time after plants appeared to learn to eat lignin and cellulose. More recently, they've even learned to eat oil. None can digest plastic yet, because 50 years is too short a time for evolution to develop the necessary biochemistry."

Provocative stuff, right?