Greenpeace radiation team experts Teule and Westwood check crops for contamination at a garden in Fukushima City.

The problem for Fukushima’s fishermen and farmers – and indeed, for many more people both inside and outside Japan – is that little is known what these contamination levels mean for food safety.

By Krista Mahr
Time Magazine blog
Apr 22, 2011

Excerpts:

By a road leading out of Iwaki, two elderly women sit on the ground in a verdant vegetable garden, eating dried fruit and enjoying one of the first warm days of spring. Behind them, a row of cherry trees is in bloom; in front of them, well-groomed rows of leafy napa cabbage and daikon soak up the sun. “We’re throwing everything away. We don’t even eat it ourselves.” says one of the women, a farmer wearing a green bonnet who declines to give her name but gamely admits she clocks in somewhere over 70.

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The plan calls for sustainable agriculture on vacant lots.

Their green masterplan could serve as a model for generating place-specific, sustainable infrastructure citywide

The Architects Newspaper
04.21.2011

Excerpts:

Residents and shoppers in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood may some day be able to walk under the Brown Line L tracks along a planted path connecting the area’s two commercial corridors. This proposed “Low-line” is one of the highlights of the Lake View master plan by Moss Design and Place Consulting, commissioned by the neighborhood’s chamber of commerce.

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