Snow-capped hills

We’ve uploaded a new flickr photo set of the Freshkills Park site in the glorious aftermath of the weekend’s snowstorm.  In most parts of New York City, snowfall is beautiful for the first hour and then gets plowed and turns gray and hangs around for two months, but, for the most part, it stays pretty pristine here on top of the mounds.  Images like this make us itch for the chance to open up the park for snowshoeing, cross-country skiing and sledding.  All in due time.

Carbon capture in US forests

A new study by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is underway to assess the role US forests and soils can play in limiting emissions through carbon capture. The first phase of the study found that forests in the lower 48 states currently store about 90 billion metric tons of carbon and continue to capture about 30% of the country’s fossil fuel emissions each year. The study also posits that if properly managed, our forested public land has the potential to capture an additional three to seven billion metric tons of carbon.  Citing the study, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has called for further research into how carbon sequestration works and how land-management can be improved.

New York City’s MillionTreesNYC project is a step toward increasing the City’s current capacity for carbon sequestration through increased forestation throughout the city, including plantings at the Freshkills Park site.  The City’s trees currently store 1.35 million metric tons of carbon at a rate of 42,000 metric tons of carbon each year.

(via The New York Times)

Chris Jordan’s images of excess

Photographer Chris Jordan makes staggering representations of human waste, consumerism and cultural practices, focusing on the immense environmental impact of collective consumption.  Jordan illustrates daunting statistics–4 million plastic cups used each day on airline flights alone, 166,000 overnight packages shipped by air in the U.S. every hour–that transform abstract data into palpable visual language.  From a distance, his large-scale images resemble pointillism, but zoomed in, they are composed of individual cups, bottles or prison uniforms.  This is pretty powerful stuff–it can be hard to get a grip on the scale of these numbers in abstraction, as we’ve learned talking about the 150 million tons of waste buried at Fresh Kills.  Visualization helps.

Jordan has published a book of his photos, Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait and recently completed Midway: Message from the Gyre, a series of stills taken of albatross carcasses in the North Pacific, where colorful bits of plastic have been mistaken for food by the birds.

Gather ye seeds while ye may

As part of the Bureau of Land Management’s Seeds of Success project, The Dixon National Tallgrass Prairie Seed Bank at the Chicago Botanic Garden is preserving the seeds of thousands of prairie species–1,500 by 2010 and 3,000 by 2020–that are native to the Midwest, as far west as the Rockies.  The seeds will be preserved for future use and used in research for assisted migration, a controversial technique to relocate species in anticipation of global changes in climate and habitat.  In addition to collecting a diversity of species, mapping GPS coordinates and documenting soil composition, part of this research includes predicting relocation habitats, a process that has begun in seven climate-change gardens where species from four hardiness zones (zones 4,5,6, and 7) have been planted this fall.  A story in The New York Times about the project interviews Kayri Havens, the Chicago Botanic Garden’s director of plant science and conservation:

“If plants grown from seed collected in Zone 4, 5 or 6 can’t withstand Texas conditions,” Dr. Havens said, “that’s a good sign they’re going to become extinct here, if there’s no way for them to migrate on their own or human-assisted.”

Scientists hope that assisted migration research will aid future restoration projects.  The mother project, Seeds of Success, has so far collected over a fifth of its hoped-for 14,000 native U.S. species, sending a collection of each species to the Millennium Seed Bank Project of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in Britain, which contains the largest seed collection in the world, housed in frozen underground vaults, with the goal of collecting 25% of the world’s flora by 2020.

(via The New York Times)

Revisiting the disposable coffee cup

58 billion non-recyclable coffee cups are used and thrown away each year.  BetaCup aims to fund a design contest geared toward reducing or eliminating that waste.  Ideas and donations for sustainable alternatives are accepted.

Agnes Denes retrospective

The artist, standing within "Wheatfield--A Confrontation," at the Battery Park Landfill, 1982.

Philosophy in the Land II, an exhibition featuring photography, drawings and prints by artist Agnes Denes spanning the last 50 years, is on view at the Leslie Tonkonow Gallery in Manhattan until January 16th.  Denes is a pioneer of the environmental art movment whose ecological and philosophical interests surfaced in her 1968 piece Rice/Tree/Burial, which has been described as “the first site-specific piece anywhere with ecological concerns.” Also included in the exhibition are photos of her iconic Wheatfield–A Confrontation, a field of wheat planted and harvested by the artist in 1982 on the site of the Battery Park Landfill, now Battery Park City in lower Manhattan.  Commissioned by Public Art Fund, Denes created Wheatfield over a period of four months and described the piece as “a work that addresses human values and misplaced priorities.”  The exhibition also includes many of the artist’s drawings and prints exploring visual ideas across a range of disciplines, including mathematics, philosophy and science.

Brownfield remediation workshop this Thursday

The NYC Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation (MOER)  is sponsoring a free workshop this Thursday on “Green Remediation and Sustainability.”  The workshop is the third in a series of events aimed at encouraging brownfield redevelopment and will include an introduction to MOER’s Local Brownfield Clean-up Program, quantitative tools for measuring sustainability at brownfield sites and presentations on remediation projects at both the local and national level.  Other program themes are “Energy Use Optimization,” “Waste and Fill Management,” “Concrete Recycling,” and “Sustainable Soil Preparation at Brownfields.”  Register online for the workshop by 5pm today; view the agenda here.

Thursday, December 17th
9:00 am – 1:30 pm, registration begins at 8:30 am
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave (at 35th Street), Concourse Level
Registration and Lunch are FREE

Matching recyclables producers and collectors

e-cycler connects people who want to collect recyclables for cash with people who need recyclables picked up, often in areas that lack municipal curbside recycling service.  Providers of recyclables can request a 40% cut of the collector’s profit or can allow collectors to receive the full rebate at recycling centers (though e-cycler takes a small cut, regardless).  The service allows users who have or anticipate generation of recyclable material to search by state for collectors of that material; it also allows collectors to search by state or pick-up radius.

(via Treehugger)

Canadian landfill to be world’s largest pollinator park

Honeybee (Apis mellifera), photo by macropoulos via flickr

City planners in Guelph, Ontario have approved a master plan to transform a 200-acre decommissioned landfill into the world’s largest pollinator park.  The former Eastview Road Landfill, which operated as a municipal dump from 1961 to 2003, has been capped and outfitted with a methane capturing system that converts landfill gas into usable energy.  Filled land, which constitutes about half the site, will host some recreational amenities but primarily shrub and meadow plantings that provide habitat for pollinator species such as bees, butterflies, bats and birds.  These species are surprisingly vital to food production: pollination research suggests that three out of four flowering plants require animal pollinators in order to produce seed and fruit.

Pollinator populations have been in decline in recent years.  Honeybees, in particular, have experienced what beekeepers call “colony collapse disorder“; other causes for decline include pesticide misuse, light and air pollution, hive destruction and farming practices that destroy habitat.

In conjunction with non-profit group Pollination Guelph, the city is developing a plant palette with a wide enough range of blooming seasons to accommodate both early and late pollinators.  Other park amenities include toboggan runs, a trail network, demonstration gardens, basketball and volleyball courts, soccer and football fields, a natural ice rink and a playground.

Eli Cohen on sustainability and phytoremediation

Eli Cohen gave a terrific talk Monday night on his work, as director of Ayala Water and Ecology, using plants to remove pollutants and contaminants from water, soil and air.  We’re grateful to the huge crowd that poured into the Arsenal gallery for the event, to Laura Starr and Yamit Perez for putting us in touch with Eli and, of course, to Eli himself for sharing his work and his thoughts.

One of his bigger themes, telegraphed by the title of the talk, “Sustainability in Practice,” was his strong belief that “Natural Biological Systems”– systems constructed of plants, soil, rocks and other natural materials and supported by forces like gravity and sunlight–are not only just as effective as more expensive, technological solutions to environmental remediation, but also, literally, much more sustainable.  He walked through a number of Ayala’s Natural Biological Systems, which filtered and cleaned runoff and sewage from a variety of sites including private residences, a dairy farm, a landfill, a cosmetics plant and an entire city (Hyderabad, India).  His full slideshow is available as a PDF (6MB).

You can stream the entire audio of the talk, below, as you page through the slides.  You can also download that audio directly as an MP3 (71 minutes, 66MB).