Spruced

Check out the lovely little spirals on this Colorado Blue Spruce flower…

from flickr/starwillowstudio 

Urban Permaculture Part 1: Waste = Food

While I might not be doing a whole lot of posting these days, Andrew Faust is keeping himself busy on the blogosphere. The following is the first piece in a series, cross-posted on Green Brooklyn, on how permaculture principles can apply to urban settings, specifically in NYC.

- Adam 

Permaculture works with whole systems integrated ecological design goals. We create designs based on our understandings of how the earth works and what human beings truly need for a high quality of life. As a person practicing and teaching permaculture design in New York City, I describe the goal of permaculture as: to create ecologically intelligent designs for human settlements.

In part we accomplish this by creating more regionally self-sufficient, local economies. I call it retrofitting the infrastructure. Instead of centralized mass production, the commodification of basic necessities and the long distance transportation of goods and energy services, we want to shorten the distance of transmission of all goods and services, this improves quality, efficiency and creates truer food security. In permaculture design we seek to close the loop on linear energy and nutrient flows.

In this series we will look at what these design goals offer in the way of insights and opportunities to improve the quality of life for the citizens of Brooklyn and New York City overall. Some of the key urban permaculture issues we will explore through this series:

• Bringing ecological design to New York cities infrastructure
• Water issues, air quality, soil contamination
• Boosting our vitality and health
• Creating healthy architecture
• Greening urban environments
• Bringing food production, trees and biodiversity back into urban landscapes

In whole systems design analysis everything is interconnected and pollution is a result of an unused excess. We want high urban density areas like New York City and Brooklyn to begin to generate and properly digest some of its vast quantity of imported and exported nutrients. By adopting this goal we will address a range of interconnected realities which I shall outline herein.

Some facts and figures to get us rolling:

• New York City population: 8,250,567 as of 2006
• New York City imports 20,000 tons of food a day
• New York City exports 13,000 tons of trash a day
• 40% of New York’s trash is organic matter
• 600 diesel fume spewing tractor trailers a day haul this trash in a nine mile long convoy to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan and Idaho
• The average NYC household throws out 2 pounds of organic “waste” a day = 1 million tons a year
• There are 12,000 vacant lots in New York City which are publicly owned

So let’s connect the dots. The way to improve this highly energy intensive and pollution producing linear flow is to begin composting this organic matter, turning this “waste” into a resource. We need to have accessible and well maintained ways to compost properly throughout New York City and Brooklyn. We need to begin composting on a citywide — as well as individual household — level. Start small and remember one person beginning to compost makes a big difference.

On the 12,000 publicly owned vacant lots we can compost this organic material and start community gardens, biodiversity reserves, tree farms, orchards and small inner city farms.

One of our ideas in Permaculture is that within the problem lies the solution. These are a couple of clear examples of how this works.

In Brooklyn there are many brownfields and other contaminated old industrial sites.

One of the most successful ways to bring back a contaminated site is to begin to introduce living soil (i.e. compost), a diverse vegetative community and mushrooms and fungi. The microbes and enzymes in living soil breakdown a wide range of harmful synthetic chemicals and certain plant species are known to sequester heavy metals, enabling the gathering and reclamation of these metals.

In our upcoming postings on Urban Permaculture we will look at the dynamic processes by which nature provides us with healthy air, water and food. We will look into the many ways to bring these essential ecological elements back into our urban landscapes.

This Urban Permaculture series addresses a range of ecological issues in New York City and Brooklyn and presents permaculture design solutions to these city-wide problems. For more information about Andrew Faust and his Permaculture Design in NYC class, please go to The Center for Bioregional Living at www.homebiome.com.

WGY Enters Hibernation

By Adam Brock

I love blogging. Since I started WGY last January, its been instrumental in helping me clarify my thoughts on the regeneration and get them out to a broad (and growing) audience. But part of that same process has been the dawning realization that, like most of us in the overdeveloped world, I spend far too much time indoors, tethered to electronix. Writing a sustainability blog is one of the most justifiable reasons for being plugged in that I can think of - but at the moment, I’m obligated to spend my daily allotment of computer time on my academic and activist commitments.

And so I’m making the difficult decision to set my blogging duties aside for the time being, in order to concentrate on my last semester of college (and live the Forest Green lifestyle that so many of us now strive for). I’m sure I’ll post sporadically in the next few months, but not as much as you might be used to.

If all goes as planned, I’ll be back in May with a fresh perspective and a whole lot more mental space. In the meantime, you can get your green read on by checking out any of the wonderful sites on the blogroll, or browsing through some of WGY’s greatest hits, listed below.

Three Shades of Green - my framework for answering the difficult question: what, exactly are we trying to sustain?

Bioplastics Rundown - a summary of the different kinds of bioplastic on the market, and the benefits and drawbacks of each.

The Obligatory WGY Earth Day Top Ten - 10 not-so-inconsequential things we can do to green up our act.

Arcologies from the Bottom Up - are Paolo Soleri’s self-sufficient megacities the habitat of the regeneration?

Has Sustainability Sold Out? - on the perils of green consumerism.

Broken Robots: Technology Reconsidered - why we need to take a critical look at the technologies that sustain our industrial lifestyle - and not just cutting-edge ones, either.

How Local? - is trying to eat only out of your own yard heroic, or just a gimmick?

Burning Bright: The Black Rock City Experiment - the story behind the innovative city planning features of Burning Man.

The Real Food Summit: A Campus Movement Takes Shape - how on earth will we make college dining halls sustainable?

Cracks in the Foundation: Green Business Encounters its Paradoxes - the pushback on corporate greening begins.

Tax or Trade? The Debate Heats Up - a panel of lawyers and policy wonks takes on the confounding issue of carbon legislation.

Grounded - why I don’t fly.

Why Cityfarming? Because It’s Fair - the intersection of urban agriculture and social justice.

Anthropogenic Biomes

By Adam Brock

In a time when the vast majority of the world’s land area is transformed by the human touch, the classic ecological concept of the biome is somewhat misleading. A couple of professors at the University of Maryland and McGill University in Montreal have made things a little clearer by developing a world map of “anthromes“, showing the Earth’s surface as represented by a couple dozen categories of human land use. It’s worth exploring for a few minutes - I was amazed, for example, at how much of the American west is rangeland, and how uniquely dense India’s settlement pattern is.

via Worldchanging

No Impact Man, Shellenberger and Nordhaus at NYU’s Focus the Nation

By Adam Brock

If you haven’t checked No Impact Man’s blog recently, here’s the final installment of a fascinating back and forth between Colin and Michael Shellenberger, of the Breakthrough Institute - a think tank that’s devoted to reframing the environmental debate around optimistic values.

Incidentally, Shellenberger and his Breakthrough partner Ted Nordhaus will be the keynote speakers at NYU’s Focus the Nation event tomorrow, which we’ve decided to theme around “local solutions to the climate crisis”. To provide an opportunity for them to continue the NIM conversation face-to-face, I invited Colin to be a part of the response panel, an offer which he kindly accepted.

It should be a pretty interesting back and forth - not only will Colin be responding to Mike and Ted’s presentation, but so will Marty Hoffert, NYU’s own climate scientist superstar. If you’re around the Washington Square area and can make it, I would highly recommend stopping by.

NYU Focus the Nation: Local Solutions to the Climate Crisis

Eisner and Lubin Auditorium, NYU Kimmel Center

60 Washington Square South

Shellenberger and Nordhaus are on at 6:00, the response panel starts at 7:00.

Of Pressure Cookers and Black Radish French Fries: How to Keep it Local in the Wintertime

By Adam Brock

With a million farmer’s markets, CSAs, and green restaurants starting up in the New York area, it’s getting easier and easier to eat locally - that is, between April and November. But what about during the dark, cold days of winter? Without all those local peaches and basil, it might seem like time to turn to Chile and California, but in fact there’s an abundance of great local food even in January - it just requires a different approach. I asked a bunch of my locavore pals how they dealt with the challenge, and was amazed with the feast of solutions they presented.

First up are some tips from Annie Myers of Thoughts On The Table:

• If you eat meat (smartly, of course) there’s plenty of it this time of year. Check out: 3-Corner Field Farm (Karen sells at the Union Square Greenmarket) and DiPaolo Turkey (also at Union Square, and several other greenmarkets).
• Root vegetables are in! And they’re my favorite, to be honest. beets, parsnips, turnips, carrots, onions, potatoes…are always good roasted with oil and salt, pureed thick or thin, boiled in soups, or made into spreads.
• Use milk and cheese! Especially as part of recipes with the root veggies. The animals need a rest at some point during the year of course, but it’s not necessarily this one! And plenty of cheesemakers are making their winter cheeses. go to the Greenmarket, or to Saxelby Cheesemongers at the Essex Street Market, for plenty of local cheeses, and Ronnybrook and Evan’s Farmhouse Creamery for milk and yogurt.
• Embrace the bread. Bakeries may not be using local grains, but I’m working on finding more of that, and in any case, it’s a good time of year to support your local baker. And there are always local jams and spreads available, preserved from the summer.
• Greenhouse tomatoes are great. Expensive, yes, but just as good as the summer ones.
• Can or pickle the root vegetables! And if you pickle beets, don’t put more than one or two cloves in the jar, like I did. You’ll get something that tastes like beet-shaped cloves.
• Embrace local businesses. If it feels like local products aren’t plentiful enough for you, it’s still “locavore” to avoid large companies, brands, and mass-produced foods, and support artisan work (like the baker), rather than industrial machinery.

My friend Abby Rosenbaum seconds Annie’s thoughts on root vegetables and canning, and also suggests making the most of dried fruits and beans.

Andrew Faust, permaculturalist and founder of the Center for Bioregional Living, gives us this handy list of veggies to buy (and grow!):

• All root crops: potatoes, garlic, turnips, celeriacs. Especially experiment with, say, black radish french fries, or rutbaga with your mashed potatoes.
• For leaf crops: kale, collards, dandelion, chickories
• Be starting mizuna, purple mustard, arugula and lettuce in indoor window boxes or pots.
• Cabbage (fermented and fresh), carrots and beets

Finally, Kerry Trueman of Eating Liberally gives us a cornucopia of tips for buying and cooking local winter foods like a pro:

First, let’s put to rest the notion that the winter pickin’s at the Greenmarket are slim. OK, so there’s not much in the way of salad greens, but we are, in fact, blessed with an abundance of root vegetables, squashes, apples, pears, and the meat, dairy, and bread vendors don’t go into hibernation either.

Thanks to our globalized food chain, though, we’ve grown so used to an eternal summer of hothouse tomatoes and raspberries from Chile that everyone turns up their noses at turnips. And the sweet potato’s only invited to most American dinner tables once a year, on Thanksgiving—what a waste of a versatile, nutritious and tasty tuber. Other root vegetables I’m especially fond of are parsnips and beets— if you can find beets with the greens intact, you get two vegetables for the price of one, because beet greens are essentially the same as Swiss chard.

Winter produce does require a bit more planning than summer’s eat-it-now bounty; you have to buy your Bosc pears a few days beforehand and let them ripen, and most root vegetables are better eaten cooked than raw. On the other hand, you can buy a gorgeous heirloom squash and admire it for weeks or even months before making it into a soup or stew.

The Greenmarket’s obviously the ideal source for those looking to eat as locally as possible. But it does have its limitations; if you’re pursuing a predominantly plant-based diet for your own health as well as the health of the planet, you’ll want to include plenty of beans and whole grains in your diet, most of which are not produced locally. I have been able to find locally grown and milled corn meal, spelt flour, and buckwheat, but for other grains and beans I go to Integral Yoga, Life Thyme or Kalustyan’s.

There are some staples I end up buying at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, things like ginger, soy sauce, olive oil, lemons, canned fish and so on. But we strive to buy as much of our food from our local farmers as we possibly can. I’m more of a retrovore than a locavore, which is to say that I prefer the kind of food that pre-dates industrial agriculture—pasture-raised animal products, minimally processed foods, ideally from our own region whenever possible. No pears from Argentina or asparagus from Peru or garlic from China.

I go to the Greenmarket nearly every other day to bring our kitchen scraps to the Lower East Side Ecology Center’s drop-off site, so I’m in the habit of browsing the stalls and buying whatever looks good. I bring a list, but it’s best to be flexible—yesterday, my list called for red onions, blue potatoes, and garlic, none of which was available. So I came home instead with sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and an acorn squash. It’s all good, and if you’re not sure what to do with it, the Greenmarket booth has pages of simple and
tasty recipes there for the taking.

The thing that makes it so easy for me to cook up all this produce is a life-changing—and, sadly, rather expensive—appliance; the new, improved pressure cooker (not to be confused with the ones that our grandmas used, which had a reputation for blowing their tops off.) I use mine two or three times a day and can’t imagine life without it. It’s the ultimate low-carbon cooker, because it lets you make all kinds of dishes in a fraction of the time they would take to cook conventionally. It’s a godsend for making grains, beans, soups and stews and cooks any kind of vegetable you can think of in just a few
minutes.

The Greenmarket is definitely a streamlined operation in the winter, but I know several farmers upstate who are devising ways to extend their growing season with alternatively heated greenhouses and other innovations, so I suspect we’ll have more variety in the future. In the meantime, though, take advantage of all the treats the market has to offer: the magenta-pink watermelon radishes that taste almost like jicama; Adirondack blue potatoes; Hawthorne Valley’s jalapeno sauerkraut; fresh-baked cider donuts from any of the apple vendors, and so on. Just go to the Greenmarket with an open mind–you’ll be sure to find something delicious and filling.

photo credit: flickr/ianqui 

Grass Roof in Singapore

Where are the buildings like this in the states??

Credit: flickr/vincent_flames 

A Sense of Place: The Pitchfork Collective

By Adam Brock

Over the last year or so, I’ve slowly begun to come to terms with the fact that everything that mattered in the first two decades of my life - all my achievements and disappointments, my aspirations and concerns - occurred under conditions that are fast becoming obsolete. The economic meltdown that’s currently underway only serves to underscore the fact that the growth-centric society in which I grew up is poorly suited to the new realities of a rapidly changing climate and declining supply of energy.

Fortunately, I’ve never been one to shy away from change. Instead, I’ve spent the better part of the past year trying to figure out what it might mean to live in a way that works with, rather than against, natural systems. Do l I have to renounce the urban lifestyle to live sustainably? Will it make me happier, or more stressed out?

For now, these questions are largely hypothetical: as long as I’m at school in New York, sustainable living remains little more than an abstraction. Sure, I can refuse plastic bags, buy local food, and use compact fluorescent bulbs in my apartment, but in the end these are only gestures at leaving a lighter footprint, greening the edges of a way of life that is fundamentally against nature. But with graduation fast advancing – and the prospects of finding a secure career seeming less attractive by the week – I decided to use the generous break between my final two semesters to seek out a Forest Green way of life in my hometown of Denver.

Which is how I found myself living in the Pitchfork Collective, a cooperative living space founded about a year ago in central Denver. The three-story house, in the historic Five Points neighborhood, is home to an ever-shifting cast of characters, all between the ages of 17 and 27. During the course of my stay, I met couch-surfing hipster vagabonds, transgender wiccans, crust-punk anarchists, and many other folks too unique to slap a label on. What united them all was a respect for diversity, defiant individualism, and a belief in sustainable community.

Like any group of activist youth, the Pitchfork Collective wasn’t without its downsides: the industrial-sized sink was rarely without a pile of dirty dishes, and during the course of my stay, more than a few non-residents took advantage of the house’s open-door policy by overstaying their welcome. Still, I continually found myself surprised by the amazing things going on around the house – at any given time, collective members might be busy making crafts to sell on Etsy, planning for the springtime permaculture garden, teaching a class on positive menstruation, or cooking burritos to hand out to migrant workers. Despite the griminess, the constant flux of residents, and the youthful naiveté, I had to admit that Pitchfork was thriving. And it’s not alone: at least five or six similar houses have formed just past the frontiers of central Denver’s gentrification, all of them connected in a tight-knit community of young radicals.

Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of Pitchfork was its role as host of Denver’s food not bombs, a program that cooks and serves recently expired food to needy communities across the country. Every Saturday morning, volunteers made the rounds at several local grocery stores that have agreed to donate unwanted food, delivering dozens of boxes of produce, baked goods and leftover bulk goods to Pitchfork’s front lawn. An ever-shifting crew of residents and friends assembled to sort, prepare, and cook the food, working with whatever was in abundance that week. Once the dishes were ready, they were loaded into an old biodiesel pickup and driven to a nearby park, where a crowd of eager customers awaited.

The long train ride back to New York gave me some time to assess my stay at Pitchfork. Is it sustainable? Probably not – even food not bombs is based on a surplus of produce grown far, far away. It’s also not for everybody; with such a diverse set of roommates, collective living can strain the most open of minds. Still, I don’t think Pitchfork really needs to be a universal template to be successful. After all, the whole point of the regeneration is to move away from universal templates in favor of new ways of living based on local climate and culture. Under these criteria, then, I’d say the Pitchfork Collective is a damn good first attempt at urban sustainability. In a society filled with cookie-cutter neighborhoods and lives that lack meaning, Pitchfork proves that diversity can succeed, that you don’t need stuff to be satisfied, that community is key – and that doing it yourself can be a whole lot more fun than letting others to do it for you.

What Happens to Non-Biodegradeable Soap

Coming from a storm drain in Sarasota, Florida.

From flickr/earthfreak.

Andrew Faust’s Biotecture Concepts

By Adam Brock

Yesterday’s City Dirt has a nice mini-interview with ecological designer Andrew Faust, founder of the Center for Bioregional Living. A recent Brooklyn transplant, Faust has been spending the past several years practicing sustainable living on a homestead in West Virginia and teaching permaculture courses. These days, he’s got some clever ideas for reintegrating nature into the five boroughs: how about a backyard wetland to soak up hundreds of gallons of stormwater runoff? Or a series of floating plant filters to clean up the Gowanus canal:

I want to design floating pond remediators. These are rafts will host plants that clean the toxins out of the water. In China they created floating walkways to clean up the open sewage canals. Not only are the plants removing the toxins from the water, but you have a beautiful area for people to stroll through and enjoy the waterways.

Plant pods seem to be on everybody’s minds these days: a similar concept was proposed in H2Grow, one of the finalists in the Envisioning Gateway contest.

Faust, meanwhile, will be keeping busy this spring teaching a permaculture certification course in Manhattan on fridays. Email andrew@homebiome.com if you’d like to sign up.