Category — Environment

Interview with Mr. Clark Henry, an urban planner who serves in the City of Portland Brownfield Program

The Well Run Dry Blog
January 16, 2010

Excerpt:

This post is a continuation of a theme I first began exploring in two previous posts, “The Chicken That Laid Leaden Eggs, and Other Horror Stories,” and “Brownfield Remediation For Urban Homesteaders.” What I discussed in those earlier posts was the problem of soil pollution in urban environments, and the impact of that pollution on efforts to practice safe and sustainable urban farming and urban food gardening.

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Produced by: International Water Management Institute
Year: 2005. Language: English with French subtitles

In sub-saharan Africa, where sanitation infrastructure does not keep pace with city growth, the use of polluted water for urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) is a common reality. While UPA puts consumers at risk; it also plays an important role in food supply and job creation. The question is how to preserve the benefits while minimizing the risks?

This short video clip gives voice to the people most closely involved, to articulate their own solutions to the challenges they face. This video was produced by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and it’s partners to aid in knowledge sharing.

Dirt! The Movie introduces viewers to dirt’s fascinating history. Four billion years of evolution have created the dirt that recycles our water, gives us food, provides us shelter, and that can be used as a source of medicine, beauty and culture.

Dirt! The Movie proves that times are changing. Brown is the new green. More than 25 renowned global visionaries in countries around the world are discovering new ways of thinking as they come together to repair this natural resource with practical, viable solutions. These participants include Paul Stamets: Mycologist; Andy Lipkis: President, Founder of TreePeople; Vandana Shiva: Physicist, Environmental Activist; Wes Jackson: President, The Land Institute; Majora Carter: Founder, Sustainable South Bronx; Alice Waters: Founder, The Edible Schoolyard; and John Todd: Biologist, Ecological Designer.

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High in iron and a mainstay in Southeast Asian cuisine in stir fries, Kokong or Vietnamese water spinach is traditionally grown along the edges of rice paddies. Gardeners in New Orleans East grow it along the canals near Michoud.

Battling the Chef Menteur Landfill

By Kari Lydersen
Colorlines
December 9, 2009

Tung Duc Tran’s backyard is a lush tangle of life. On a steamy New Orleans summer day, Tran, 80, leaves the cool of his small home to stroll under the trellises hung with bitter melons and fuzzy squash shading an assortment of carefully tended crops. The garden consumes the modest yard sloping down to the Maxent Lagoon, a canal whose waters are nearly obscured by an explosion of aquatic vegetation laced with a few old tires and other trash.

Like many elderly Vietnamese American people in the close-knit Versailles neighborhood on New Orleans’ east side, Tran grows his own vegetables to eat and share with friends and neighbors. But in recent years he has felt less confident consuming his produce, because he fears contamination from the lagoon that often spills over onto his land, and in the soil itself, which was swamped by the toxic floodwaters of Katrina four years ago.

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Larger image here.

Zany Vision or Critical Solution?
Urban Greenhouses Aim to Help Cities Combat Climate Change

By Jess Smee
Spiegel Online
Dec 4, 2009

With its massive glass dome, the Plantagon Greenhouse wouldn’t look out of place in a sci-fi movie. And if all goes smoothly, one may soon crop up in a city near you. In these days of global warming, its creators argue, it’s not a question of if it will become reality but, rather, when.

Nestled among the skyscrapers is a gigantic glass sphere housing a mysterious spiral pathway. At first glance, the structure may look like an alien spaceship or a modernist architectural fantasy. But, in fact, it is an unusual response to climate change and the challenges of urbanization.

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Link to larger map here.

High School Students To Spearhead Organic Farm
Students Will Tend To Garden Near Arlington High School

The Indy Channel
November 4, 2009

INDIANAPOLIS — Community, education and healthier food choices are at the center of a new urban garden planned for Indianapolis’ northeast side.

The Devington Green Acres Farm will occupy a 3.5-acre plot just east of Devington Shopping Center and Arlington High School, and will be the city’s largest sustainable urban organic farm, organizers said.

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Because of the toxins in her urban soil, Susan Carpenter had to build raised beds to contain her plantings. (Los Angeles Times photo by Ken Hively.)

In Los Angeles, an urban gardener with dreams of farming in the city found that her soil was too polluted with lead and zinc to grow vegetables in the ground. But she didn’t let that stop her.

By Susan Carpenter
Los Angeles Times Writer
November 18, 2009

LOS ANGELES
There are certain phrases I never expected to utter in my lifetime. Things like, “Excuse me if I don’t shake your hand. Mine’s covered in horse urine.” Or, to my son, “When you’re finished with dinner, clear your plate and feed the scraps to the worms.”

Yet those are exactly the sorts of things I’ve found myself saying in the months I’ve been an urban farmer.

A year ago, I didn’t have a vegetable garden. I had a couple of lemon trees, but I’d given up on potted plants, having killed every rooted thing I’d attempted to nurture on my back deck. I didn’t just have a black thumb. I had a black hand.

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Reuters Video. Organic farms transform Nairobi slum. (Short advertisement at the start.)

Kibera (Nubian: Forest or Jungle) is a neighbourhood and province division of Nairobi, Kenya. It is the largest of Nairobi’s slums, and the second largest urban slum in Africa, with an estimated population of between 600,000 and 1.2 million inhabitants.

Kiberas Youth Reform Organic Farm – Nairobi, Kenya

By Public Radio Exchange
“The Kibera Youth Reform Organic Farm began on a 3 meter deep garbage dump in Africa’s largest slum. The transformation started in April 2008 and took three and a half months, prooving anything is possible. Claire Niala asked Su Kahumbu, Director of Green Dreams (the first locally certified organic farm in Kenya) to assist the Kibera Youth Reform Group comprising 70 young men and women who had decided to change their ways of crime. They wished to transform a garbage site into a farm, growing crops for their own consumption as well as for sale if possible.

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Radical Green Building Takes a Giant Leap Forward as The International Living Building Institute’s New Standard Addresses Social Justice, Urban Agriculture and Community Scale Impacts

“The program introduces a new focus on urban agriculture, requiring a minimum amount of site square footage be dedicated to food production except in the densest urban environments – the more suburban a site is, the more food production is required.

“All projects must integrate opportunities for agriculture appropriate to the scale and density of the project using its Floor Area Ratio (F.A.R.) as the basis for calculation.”

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Author Steven McFadden Releases “An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century”

Lincoln, NE – “Food and farms are involved in a blitzkrieg of changes,” writes veteran journalist Steven McFadden in The Call of the Land, published this month by NorLightsPress. The book joins a growing chorus voicing a new vision for food and agriculture. Picking up where Food Inc., the recent documentary on industrial agriculture, leaves off, the volume presents dozens of creative responses to the crisis.

Dubbed “An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century,” the sourcebook documents a range of positive pathways to food security, economic stability, environmental health, and cultural renewal. To McFadden and others, the call of the land now is an SOS. The responses—from individuals, communities, cities, and institutions—are both imaginative and practical.

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Urban agriculture in Cuba.

By Neeraja Havaligi
Doctoral Candidate (in natural resource management focusing on agrobiodiveristy conservation and climate change.)
AkamaiUniversity
diversityoflife@gmail.com
Paper for the KLIMA 2009 conference in Berlin

Abstract

Urban Agriculture has a definite role in food security in the cities. This paper will explore the extent to which urban agriculture contributes to food security in the cities with examples from different parts of the world. The paper will explore the potential of urban agriculture in biodiversity conservation in urban and periurban areas, its role in reducing the C foot print of agriculture, urban food needs and generation of organic waste. The potential for urban agriculture in securing C credits for the cities will also be explored here.

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Berlin. An oasis in the middle of the city: All over the country — whether on the outskirts of cities or in otherwise hard-to-use spaces, such as next to train tracks — you will find little garden plots, known as Schrebergarten, which can be rented from cities for a few hundred euros per year. By Verlag W. Wächter / Brigitte Einführ

Urban Farming Under Threat
Popular Mini-Gardens in Berlin May Soon Be Paved Over

By Christian Schwägerl
Spiegel Online
Oct 15, 2009

Tiny urban gardens are everywhere in Berlin and they have been for decades. But now, the city government is threatening to level many of them to make way for new construction. A battle is looming.

Berlin prides itself on being in the vanguard of a number of trends — and it might have found itself another one. In this case, it’s what climate experts and city planners call “urban farming.” Many see the drive to produce foodstuffs within cities — rather than carting them in from far away — as the farming of the future.

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Dan Palmer, the permablitz visionary.
Photo: Shaney Balcombe

Permablitz: new word, noun

1. An event in which volunteers use permaculture principles to transform a suburban garden into a place that produces its own food. A combination of the words permaculture – a design system for sustainable living and land use – and Backyard Blitz a television program in which backyards receive a makeover.

The rules of a permablitz are simple: if you want a permablitz crew to turn up to your place, you have to help out on at least two other working weekends before they will do so. In addition, Palmer defines a permablitz as a day in which “two or more people come together to:

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Renderings by James Halverson of Vancouver based Lux Visual Effects Inc.

The Waterpod

From Time Out New York article
June 4, 2009

“Built atop a refabricated 99′ x 31′ construction barge, the Waterpod is about as DIY as it gets: Living units have been constructed from found or donated materials. Most of the food will be produced onboard; the garden will grow beets, potatoes, corn, raspberry bushes and a variety of greens, and eggs will be available from the six birds in the chicken coop, which also provide fertilizer. All water is acquired through a rainwater-catch system, and bathroom facilities include a dry-compost toilet and a solar-heated shower.

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See this video in High Definition. Click here.

We talk ‘worms’ every day of the week at City Farmer at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden – “Where can I buys worms?” “How can I get rid of fruit flies?” “Where can I get a worm bin?” “How much food waste can I add to my worm bin?” and so on.

Lauren answers some of those question in the above six minute video, shot in high definition at the Garden. All the basics are outlined, so if you’ve ever considered composting with worms, watch this video.

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“Communities nationwide use brownfields funding to assess and clean sites for a variety of uses, including community gardens and farmers markets. Brownfields are properties that are vacant or abandoned due to concerns about real or perceived contamination on the property. Using funds from EPA, states, tribes and other sources, communities can assess sites and clean brownfields, creating safe spaces where people can grow their own food, or buy locally-grown food. The cleanup and redevelopment process helps to ensure safe and healthy garden and market areas.”

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Earth Day
April 22, 2009

Garry Sowerby, who is in the “Guinness Book of World Records” for the record time of driving around the world, visited us at the Vancouver Compost Garden this Earth Day morning, as part of his cross-country trip to introduce the country to Honda’s ‘greenest’ car, the Insight.

Gary says, “We are doing an environmental program called Insight into Canada that hinges on a month-long environmental journey across Canada starting on April 21 in Victoria. The drive will be implemented in a new Honda Insight Hybrid and will see 25 teams of journalists hand the car off over 25 legs on the trek.”

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Photo: La Finquita community garden.

Urban agriculture has proven to be an effective way to promote community development because it is a way for the residents of downtown Holyoke to maintain a connection to their culture while putting down roots in their new home. Most of our members grew up on the farms of rural Puerto Rico and many first came to the Northeast as migrant farm workers.

Though they may live in the city now, they are farmers at heart. They have lifetimes of experience in agriculture and it is part of their heritage. Projects based on agriculture, such as markets and community gardens, build on the skills and knowledge that participants already have, and are proud to have the opportunity to use to improve their community and to teach to a younger generation.

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By Michael Pilarski
Founder and Director of Friends of the Trees Society
January 1, 2009
13,700 word paper.

This article explores the role of home gardens in world food production. The thesis of the article is that home gardens have the potential to become the dominant food supply for humanity. A case is made that home gardens could grow 50% of humanity’s food supply on less then 10% of the world’s arable farmland. Home gardens are one of the most reliable, efficient and democratic ways of producing food ever invented. Agriculture has repeatedly degraded its natural resource base and collapsed many societies in the past. Modern, industrial agriculture is not suited to these changing times and is liable to increasing breakdown within the next decade.

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The RUAF’s Urban Agriculture Magazine 20 is out. “Water for Urban Agriculture”

• Sustainable Use of Water in Urban Agriculture
• Using Treated Domestic Wastewater for Urban Agriculture and Green Areas; The case of Lima
• The Use of Reservoirs to Improve the Quality of Urban Irrigation Water
• Adapting to Water Scarcity: Improving water sources and use in urban agriculture in Beijing
• Improving Decision-making on Interventions in the Urban Water Systems of Accra

Read the complete issue online here.