Category — Environment

The student garden at Harvard University, along bustling Mount Auburn Street, often draws second glances from passersby. Photo by John Tlumacki/ Globe Staff

At Bay State colleges, student gardens provide food for mind, body

By Tracy Jan
Boston Globe
September 7, 2010

Excerpt:

CAMBRIDGE — Tomatoes, Swiss chard, jalapeños, and other vegetables are sprouting on college campuses across the state — ready for harvesting this fall as part of a new student movement to promote sustainable agriculture and healthy eating.

On the Harvard University campus, the grassy plot dotted with raised wooden planters draws second glances from passersby, who seem surprised to discover the bounty along bustling Mount Auburn Street. Beanstalks climb 6 feet high. Bees buzz around thick patches of mint and chive. A sweet scent lingers near the basil (Thai and Italian). Some pedestrians stop to offer gardening advice.

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Brandy Humes now enjoys a lush garden full of tomatoes, watermelon, peppers and raspberries, but it took replacing all the soil on her property to make her feel comfortable about growing food. Photo by Richard Lautens, Toronto Star.

Lead poisoning in children can cause neurological damage

By Theresa Boyle
Toronto Star
September 3, 2010

Excerpt:

“My neighbourhood has a long history of contamination,” Armstrong says of the south Junction Triangle, once a highly industrialized area. “We have a 2½-year-old and a 6-year-old and we don’t want them eating anything that is questionable.”

It is for residents like Armstrong that the city is developing a soil-contaminant protocol. To be released next year, the protocol will help urban gardeners determine if their soil is contaminant-free. If it’s not, the protocol will explain how they can still grow edible fruits and vegetable on their property. This might involve doing raised-bed gardening or having their soil remediated.

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Breakdown of energy consumption in the U.S. food system, courtesy of the University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems.

From the Liberal Curmudgeon Blog

By Stephen Budiansky
in the New York Times
August 19, 2010
Author, historian, and journalist Stephen Budiansky has written 14 books of history, biography, and science, including the forthcoming “Perilous Fight”.

Excerpt:

Leesburg, Va.
It’s 42 steps from my back door to the garden that keeps my family supplied nine months of the year with a modest cornucopia of lettuce, beets, spinach, beans, tomatoes, basil, corn, squash, brussels sprouts, the occasional celeriac and, once when I was feeling particularly energetic, a couple of small but undeniable artichokes. You’ll get no argument from me about the pleasures and advantages to the palate and the spirit of eating what’s local, fresh and in season.

But the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas.

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The view of the neighborhood from Novella Carpenter’s “Ghost Farm.” Credit: Jeremy Adam Smith

The Weeds of Ecotopia

By Jeremy Adam Smith
shareable.net
July 20, 2010

Excerpt:

Jeremy Adam Smith: Do you see Ecotopia as a vision that you’re working towards on your farm?

Novella Carpenter: No. The thing is, I’m not part of that. Because that was like my parents’ deal. They were utopians. They were gonna go and live back to the land and all this stuff and I think that’s kind of bullshit. My tendency is to react against that, is to not ever think there’s going to be Utopia. It’s sort of a pessimistic optimism, is what I call it. So, you’re like, “I want to do this thing but everything’s fucked up.” I mean, it’s like that’s what is awesome about Ecotopia, is that everything isn’t fucked up.

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Illustration by Michael Scott, James Owens. Complete image is here.

There are at least 250 farms or gardens in Cleveland alone (covering a total of 65 acres)

By Michael Scott
The Plain Dealer
July 18, 2010

Excerpt:

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Toxic lead might still be the dirty little secret beneath Cleveland’s growing patchwork of urban farms and community vegetable plots– but it doesn’t have to ruin the garden party.

Even moderately lead-contaminated soil, of course, is still considered dangerous if untested or untreated at high concentrations — and city garden spots are among the most likely to have those dangerously high levels.

But lead contamination is also fast becoming an easily cleared hurdle for the new, aggressive agricultural pioneers pushing for more city farms and gardens. That goes for the rest of us simple backyard tomato, bean and zucchini growers, too, if we follow a few basic guidelines to keep toxic lead at bay.

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Boatanic – all green hands on deck!

By Damian O’Sullivan
Rotterdam (NL) 2010

The Boatanic (boat + botanic) is a novel concept that combines existing know-how to create an unprecedented solution for growing food within the inner city. Its aim is to reduce the environmental impact of our food which, today, still has to travel large distances before it hits our plates.

The concept is to simply convert discarded tourist boats into floating greenhouses as these are ideally suited due to their large glass windows. The idea dawned on Damian O’Sullivan as he was walking around Amsterdam and realised that the typical tourist boat actually resembled a greenhouse. ‘What if you replaced tourists with thyme or tomatoes?’ he asked himself – the Boatanic was born!

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Green Billy Penn, © by Kenneth Thomas 2009

Urban Agriculture in Philadelphia: Lessons for Citizenship and Ecological Democracy

Katharine Travaline, M.S. and Christian Hunold, Ph.D. Drexel University Philadelphia, PA
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the WPSA ANNUAL MEETING “Ideas, Interests and Institutions”, Hyatt Regency Vancouver, BC Canada, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Mar 19, 2009

Abstract:

The conventional agri-food system has become increasingly concentrated and centralized, leaving little room for public participation in its decision-making processes. Urban governance today also tends to offer little space for city residents to be involved in their agri-food system for reasons including historical trends that have defined food as a rural issue; urban land-use economics that leave little room for food production in cities; and the failure of municipalities to sufficiently include the public in decision-making processes.

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Nicholas Cortez, urban farmer

“Our most famous Nuestro Barrio resident, Nicholas Cortez has made the news again. Showcased are several projects at his home including a greywater project done by students in this Spring’s Water Harvesting Certification class, a site design by Jaime Mazzeo, gardens by Tami Stass and community support from Wendy Reese who has seen her Master’s Degree turn into a neighborhood revitalization project.”

Nuestro Barrio is located southeast of downtown Phoenix. It encompasses Cuatro Milpas and Ann Ott neighborhoods as well as a portion of the former Golden Gate Barrio. Within Nuestro Barrio, 321 households remain with 102 privately owned vacant lots.

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Zoë Wonfor is among those helping at Sylvester Manor, a farm on Shelter Island. Photo by Gordon M. Grant for The New York Times

Farms welcome volunteers

By Kathryn Shattuck
New York Times
May 28, 2010

Excerpt:

It was prime growing weather on Shelter Island, N.Y., as a breeze blew in from Dering Harbor, and Bennett Konesni was tending to his field of dreams: three neatly planted acres of bok choy, cauliflower, kale, Asian mustard greens, spinach, garlic, lettuce, onions, potatoes and leeks, with room for the peppers, eggplants and 15 varieties of tomatoes soon to be transplanted. Coming to a plot of leafy snap peas, inspiration struck. Suddenly he erupted in a full-throttle rendition of “Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley Grow”: “Do you, or I, or anyone know/How oats, peas, beans and barley grow?”

Was anyone listening to his impromptu serenade? Who cared?

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Network Mykorrhiza

The network Mykorrhiza (eng mycorrhiza) was started by a group of people who believe that Sweden is in need of a movement using practical methods to act for change through self sufficiency. We started this movement with a focus on local food production to work with issues such as the environment, health and global solidarity.

We aim to be a network focused on solutions rather than problems, and to be relevant to people both in the countryside and in cities. Change can be made in a variety of ways. It is all about finding your own ways to a more sustainable life, that lighten the burden on the environment and contribute to a more healthy lifestyle for us as human beings.

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Video by Al Jazeera.

French farmers turn Champs-Elysees into huge farm

BBC News
23 May 2010

One of Paris’s main thoroughfares, the Champs-Elysees, has been covered in earth and turned into a huge green space in an event staged by young French farmers.

They want to highlight their financial problems, caused by falling prices for agricultural produce.

Plants, trees and flowers were brought in by lorry overnight to transform the avenue into a long green strip.

More than a million people are expected to visit over the next two days.

The event, which cost 4.2m euros (£3.6m; $5.3m) to stage, has been organised by the French Young Farmers (Jeunes Agriculteurs) union over the holiday weekend in France.

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Olive trees, flowers, vegetables and cows … The Champs Elysees turns green this weekend

By Carole Bilien and Marina Torre
Liberation.fr
May 20, 2010

Excerpt: article in French.
Translation service here.

Plus de d’un million de personnes sont attendues les 23 et 24 mai sur les Champs-Elysées qui se mettent au vert pour présenter la production agricole, l’élevage et la forêt française.

Baptisé «Nature Capitale», cet événement, dont l’accès sera gratuit, se tient alors que le secteur est confronté à une crise profonde et que se discute actuellement une nouvelle loi sur l’agriculture.

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The Greenaid dispensary

Made from a mixture of clay, compost, and seeds, “seedbombs” are becoming an increasingly popular means combating the many forgotten grey spaces we encounter everyday-from sidewalk cracks to vacant lots and parking medians. They can be thrown anonymously into these derelict urban sites to temporarily reclaim and transform them into places worth looking at and caring for.

The Greenaid dispensary simply makes these guerrilla gardening efforts more accessible to all by appropriating the existing distribution system of the quarter-operated gumball machine. With a simple edict, “Change for Change”, the Greenaid initiative encourages urban dwellers of any age to become casual activists by taking part in the incremental beautification of their environment using only the loose coins in their pocket.

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Prinzessinnengärten (Princess gardens)

Nomadisch Grün (Nomadic Green) launched Prinzessinnengärten (Princess gardens) as a pilot project in the summer of 2009 at Moritzplatz in Berlin Kreuzberg, a site which had been a wasteland for over half a century. Along with friends, fans, activists and neighbours, the group cleared away rubbish, built transportable organic vegetable plots and reaped the first fruits of their labour.

Imagine a future where every available space in big cities is used to let new green spaces bloom. Green spaces that local residents create themselves and use to produce fresh and healthy food. The result would be increased biological diversity, less CO2 and a better microclimate. The spaces would promote a sense of community and the exchange of a wide variety of competencies and forms of knowledge, and would help people lead more sustainable lives. They would be a kind of miniature utopia, a place where a new style of urban living can emerge, where people can work together, relax, communicate and enjoy locally produced vegetables.

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K-State’s National ‘Brownfields’ Research Funded by EPA

By Staff of Kansas City infoZine
April 29, 2010

Excerpt:

Manhattan, KS – infoZine – Spring is in the air and urban gardens are sprouting up all over the country.

“Increasingly, urban agriculture is being done on a community basis, rather than an individual basis,” said Kansas State University assistant professor of agronomy, Ganga Hettiarachchi. “There are now more than 18,000 community gardens in the U.S. and Canada,” she said, citing American Community Gardening Association data.

Some of those gardens are on once-vacant lots and land where buildings once sat. Such locations are convenient for city-dwellers and make productive use of land that otherwise might be weedy, trash-strewn lots. There is a potential downside, however.

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Sara St. Vincent and Ander Gates work on their garden at their East Vancouver home. City initiatives have urged homeowners to avoid pesticides, leave their grass clippings on the lawn and plant vegetables and flowers. Photo by Brett Beadle for the Globe and Mail

Vancouver lawn-loving homeowner says neighbours’ ambitious vegetable plot is an eyesore eating away at his bungalow’s property value

Jane Armstrong
Globe and Mail
Apr. 28, 2010

Excerpt:

When Sara St. Vincent looks at the tangle of yellow kale flowers swaying in her front yard, she sees a nutritious vegetable, soon to be part of her dinner plate. What her neighbour, Ken Dyck, sees are unsightly weeds, eating away at his property values.

A messy urban conflict has erupted on a quiet east Vancouver street, pitting a lawn-loving homeowner against a group of young counterculture renters who’ve turned their front and backyards into vegetable crops.

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Teruo Miyagawa’s bulbs.

Growing out of incandescent light bulbs

Teruo Miyagawa
At Tokai University
Faculty of Challenge Center

Teruo made these himself in response to Toshiba halting production of the incandescent bulb after 120 years. His concern is the number of these bulbs that will end up in the garbage.

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Farming Is Cultural As Well As Agricultural

From Gene Logsdon Blog
The Contrary Farmer
April 20, 2010

Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio. Gene is the author of numerous books and magazine articles on farm-related issues, and believes sustainable pastoral farming is the solution for a stressed agricultural system.

Excerpts:

I think urban farming is one of the most hopeful developments to come down the street in a long time. First of all, it encourages the practical economic advantages and benefits of raising and consuming food locally. But its importance goes beyond that for me. I am sometimes asked why I spend my time writing about farming and gardening when, it is suggested, there are more important topics to which to apply my talents. That, in one sentence, indicates one of the most troublesome cultural problems that modern society faces today: the notion that food-getting is not an important enough subject to merit the close attention of all of us.

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Forthcoming June 2010

Regionalverband Ruhr
1. Edition 2010, approx. 112 Pages
150 color Illustrations, Hard cover
German, English
The volume editor, the Regionalverband Ruhr (RVR; Ruhr Regional Association), is an alliance of the communes of the Ruhr region.

Agricultural areas in industrial and urban regions will in the future no longer be seen merely as functional space but rather as “islands of the beautiful and the useful.” In the extremely densely built Ruhr region, two projects explore the space between postindustrial forest landscape and useful agricultural landscape: the Industrial Forest of Rhine-Elbe and the Ornamental Farm of Mechtenberg.

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Phoenix Permaculture board member and eco-entrepreneur Diann Peart. Photo by Chris Cameron.

The Andrew Long Show

Episode 6 [47:05m]
April 10th, 2010

The Andrew Long Show is dedicated to bringing the best and most interesting Arizonans up to the microphone to tell their stories. The show is recorded weekly and is hosted by local journalist, Andrew Long. Andrew is a senior news artist for the Arizona Republic and an adjunct professor for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University. The show is recorded at the Cronkite School.

Diann Peart is a member of the Phoenix Permaculture Guild Board. Diann lives in a flood-irrigated old neighborhood in Tempe and is actively converting her large yard into a teaching and demonstration garden for the East Valley. Diann hosted and produced The Urban Gardener for Chandler Educational TV.

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