Urban farmer Ben Flanner of the Brooklyn Grange. Photo by JJ Sulin.
Today at noon PT / 3 pm ET, I’ll talk with Sierra magazine’s senior editor Paul Rauber about the rooftop farms springing up across New York City. Please join us.
The occasion is “Up on the Farm,” a feature story I wrote for the magazine’s November/December issue. Back in July, during a steamy heat wave, I visited Brookyn Grange and Gotham Greens — pioneering urban farms with drastically different approaches to feeding the city.
We’ll be talking about those different routes to local food, as well as the phenomenon of farming in the Big Apple, which has a prouder history and more momentum than most people realize. Here’s an excerpt:
Everyone knows that New York is full of foodies, but few realize that it is also full of farmers. City farmsteads are cropping up all over, and New York has more of them—and more on rooftops—than anywhere else. In addition to at least 7 rooftop enterprises, there are 17 ground-based farms in the Big Apple and 1,000-plus community gardens, far more than in any other American city.
Growing food in a city’s dense core, urban farmers say, can turn back the diesel-chugging trucks hauling salad mix across the country, lower energy bills by replacing hot black-tar roofs with cool greenery, slim waistlines by supplying bodegas with fresh-picked tomatoes, and let children reared on concrete learn the joy of yanking a carrot from the soil.
I first learned of Brooklyn Grange while reporting a couple of stories (here and here) about urban green roofs for American Way magazine. Words fail to convey the beauty of some of these gardens, however, so also I assembled this video of NYC’s best topside greenery.
What I discovered through reporting the Sierra story is that rooftop agriculture has manifold benefits to the city. It reduces stormwater runoff and cools the city down, like other green roofs, while also creating jobs and an extraordinarily local source of food. Furthermore, these sky farmsteads make the production of food visible and accessible to city dwellers — bringing a patch of our rural past to the concrete landscapes where most of America actually lives.
Lettuces growing within sight of midtown Manhattan aren’t just a novelty, but a significant development in agriculture and urban design with lots of room to grow. I look forward to answering your questions. See you at the hangout!
This afternoon I fly to Lubbock, a town at the base of the Texas panhandle, for the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists. The conference is one of the professional highlights of the year because I learn the latest about the burning issues and get to huddle with really smart reporters and editors.
The session is the brainchild of Marc Gunther, a fellow Washington, D.C. environmental journalist, but he was unable to moderate due to a conflict. I’m happy to be stepping in for him and hope to guide a substantive conversation.
The Ocean Sentinel, a platform for testing wave-energy harvesters, bobs off the coast of Newport, Oregon.
Last week found me in Oregon, hanging out with inventors and entrepreneurs who are focused on one goal: Turning the massive waves of the Pacific Ocean into a reliable and clean form of electricity.
You don’t hear much about the wave power industry, compared to other alternative energies like solar or wind, because it is just now emerging from its wild-eyed-inventor stage and starting to wear a suit. Or, better yet, a spiffy looking North Face jacket (this is Oregon, after all).
I came away with two insights. First, the machines that actually create wave power are a freakish menagerie of steel and fiberglass, with new specimens arriving all the time. One paragraph from a post for Forbes entitled “What the Future of Wave Energy Looks Like“:
While the wind industry has, for the time being, agreed on the design of wind turbines (tall, white, three blades) and the solar industry knows what a solar panel looks like (flat, black, rectangular), the endeavor of turning ocean energy into usable electricity is experiencing a Wild West of innovation.
For a proper rundown of the kind of wave devices that are competing to deliver electricity to your power outlet, check out this column I wrote for Sierra magazine, or .
Second, I discovered how earnestly and diligently Oregon is working to make itself the hub of this promising new industry. And promising it is. From a second Forbes post, entitled “Oregon Races to Catch Up to Europe in Wave Energy“:
The foundations for a new heavy marine industry are being laid in Oregon, where the prospect of turning the powerful waves of the Pacific Ocean into electricity is starting to be recognized as a multimillion-dollar, economy-building enterprise.
At a wave-energy conference last week in Portland, signs were evident that Oregon’s government, universities and private sector are coalescing around a long-term plan to use the state’s punishing ocean swells to create megawatts of power, in the process gaining an advantage over other hopefuls like Hawaii and California and laying the groundwork for a wave-industrial complex that could pose serious competition to Europe, which overwhelmingly dominates the field.
At the end of the week, I joined other conferees on a bus to Newport, Oregon, boarded a tour boat, and motored a few nautical miles offshore to see an innovative wave-energy installation.
Check out my video of the Ocean Sentinel below, and also a video I took of a small-scale wave-energy device being tested in Oregon State University’s Tsunami Wave Basin.
Nike's marathon singlet is dyed without a drop of water. Photo credit: Nike
During the Olympics, sportswear giants Adidas and Nike made simultaneous announcements of a new dyeing process that uses carbon dioxide instead of water. Though few noted it at the time, this development is a very big deal.
It is estimated that the dyeing of polyester clothing uses 2.4 trillion gallons of water every year, much of it in Asia, where water is becoming an ever more scarce commodity. By turning to CO2 instead, the companies aren’t just garnering a green badge, but gaining a long-term strategic advantage.
In Shanghai, growth is ready, set, go. Photo credit: Marianna at flickr Creative Commons
A “megacity” is a metropolis of 10 million souls or more. Back in 1950, the world had exactly two: Tokyo and New York. As of 2010, the world had 23 megacities, with 12 located in Asia. By 2025, according to the U.N., that number may rise to 37, with 21 of them in Asia. How are countries like China and India adjusting to such an epic migration?
According to a recent report from the Asian Development Bank, not so well. An eye-opening series of charts and figures make the case that the continent has barely begun to grapple with problems of waste, air pollution, and the prospect of floods that are more likely this century as the climate continues to change. I collected the most revealing data in a blog post on Forbes, “Asia’s Megacities Pose A Stark Environmental Challenge.”
The picture is not entirely foreboding. The report looks to urbanization on other continents and finds that concentration in cities eventually leads to lower infant mortality, higher levels of education, a braking of population growth, and a greater desire to protect the environment. Some large cities have made significant strides to lessen their impact, which I detailed in another post, “From Asia, 5 Inspiring Ways To Green The City.”
I’m interested to know how these facts and figures jibe with the experiences of people who live and/or work in the megacities of Asia. If that describes you, please reply in the comments here or (even better) in the articles on Forbes.
Two weeks ago I took a course called Code with Me, designed to help journalists break through their instinctive fear of computer code. While I know enough HTML to blog, my eyes glaze over whenever I look at the source code behind a webpage and see gobbledygook like this:
During the two-day course, held in a conference room at the headquarters for National Public Radio, the leaders — Sisi Wei, a graphics editor at the Washington Post, and Tom Giratikanon, a graphics editor at the New York Times — walked me and several dozen other journalists through the markup languages of HTML and CSS and the coding languages of JavaScript and jQuery. It is a credit to their organization, patience and gentle humor that I spent relatively little time with my fists clenched or wanting to tear out my hair.
To learn computer code, I worked with a mentor to create an interactive map of the U.S.'s renewable-energy resources. Click here to see the page.
Our big in-class assignment was to apply our new geek skills toward a project relevant to our beats. Recently, I’ve been intrigued by a new set of maps created by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that show the best renewable-energy resources in the country — basically, where the sun shines brightest, the wind blows strongest, the underground rocks are hottest, and where the most greenery grows.
For my project I took these maps and created a page where a user can toggle between one map and another. I am ridiculously pleased with the result, which you can see here. Also, I posted an interpretation the maps in a post on Forbes this morning.
What one learns, after squinting long enough at code like the section above, is that it is a language just like English. It follows rules as ironclad as those of grammar and punctuation. Just as every sentence must start with a capital letter and end with a period, every command in code (like <head>) must reach a conclusion (</head>).
Also like English, one well-chosen word or phrase can do the work of many. Take the sentence, “John’s interest flagged.” The word “flag” means “to become tired, weaker or less enthusiastic.” It is more elegant and economical to write “John’s interest flagged” than to write “John became more tired, weak and less enthusiastic.” In the code above, the phrase “./css/bootstrap.min.css” is a line of code borrowed from the amazing Twitter Bootstrap that performs complicated functions in one brief statement. (In this case, the amazing function it performed was establishing the toggling template for my web page.)
With shortcuts like these, David’s interest did not flag.
Special thanks to Danny DeBelius, a user-experience designer for NPR who served as my mentor during the course, and without whose help I would have been lost.
Photo credit: Francisco Osorio / flickr Creative Commons
Yesterday, Workforce.com published a couple of stories I wrote about a persistent and difficult puzzle that confronts manufacturing in the United States: Factories are more productive than ever, but manufacturing jobs continue a steady decline. What can be done to get people back to work?
The agony for manufacturers is that they do have jobs — well-paid, interesting jobs. There’s just not enough skilled candidates to fill them. Shop managers point an accusing finger at the schools, which no longer teach the skills that factories need. Machine shops have become a rarity in the modern high school, and students have an appetite for computers that is matched by an antipathy for the factory. One study found that factory work rates dead last as a career choice among 18- to 24-year-olds.
One solution may be found in a new trend toward local collaborations between factories and schools to create custom-tailored jobs. Here’s how I start a sidebar to the story:
Permac Industries, a maker of precision parts for medical technology products and other fields, is perpetually short of workers to operate its lathes. So acute is the shortage for the Minneapolis-area firm that some production lines shut down on nights and weekends because there’s no one to work them.
A couple of years ago, the company’s president, Darlene Miller, had an idea. She likes to hire graduates of nearby Dunwoody College of Technology if she can get them. But competition for graduates of its two-year associates’ degree is intense, and the coursework includes skills that Permac doesn’t need.
She approached Dunwoody with a proposal for a partnership that would get Permac its technicians while offering people without much post-high school education a quick on-ramp to a decent wage. This is one of a new brand of college-industry partnerships that might eventually help the U.S. grow as a manufacturing power while creating jobs.
Today I posted on Forbes about a simple, brilliant — and possibly annoying — new way to target America’s 43 million cyclists with ads. Read the post here.
Solar panels on the wing make the Silent Falcon a durable flier. Image credit: Silent Falcon
As “green” technology finds its way into more parts of our society, it is starting to be bent toward all sorts of ends — like spying on people. I just posted a story on Forbes about the Silent Falcon, a new robot drone that vastly increases its flight time with wings carpeted in solar panels.
Drones aren’t just for spying and killing, of course. In coming years they will take to the skies in order to census animals and guide rescuers. Nonetheless, I feel as ambiguous about them as I do about mud-powered fish-bots. Is the use of renewable energy in robots the start of something wonderful, or the beginning of the end? State your case in the comments.
A kayaker far better than I navigates a sketchy stretch of the Potomac. Photo credit: Ronald Hilton via flickr Creative Commons
Since moving to Washington, D.C. three years ago, I’ve had an angst familiar to outdoorsmen who transplant from the West Coast to the East. I aspire to climb big mountains but the mountains are stubby little Appalachians; I yearn to ski, but the runs are short and the snow is hard as ice cubes; I want to surf, but it’s a three-hour drive, and the water is infested with small waves and jellyfish.
An exciting sport existed right nearby but I hesitated because it was mysterious and scary. The Potomac River flows right through the city past Georgetown and the Jefferson Memorial. A few miles upstream, on the border between Virginia and Maryland, the Potomac plunges 76 vertical feet in a roaring torrent called Great Falls. Whitewater kayakers rate Great Falls as Class V or VI (ie, really hard and dangerous). Just below Great Falls is Mather Gorge, where numerous rapids are a much more manageable Class II or III, surrounded by acres of calm water where one can safely learn the strokes. Whitewater kayaking is one sport that the East Coast does very, very well.
I decided this was the year to try kayaking because I wanted to know what people were talking about when they talked about whitewater kayaking. Get a kayaker going and he or she gets a faraway look in the eye that you don’t often see in this striving and prosaic city. It’s so beautiful out there, these people say with a sigh. So peaceful. And so exciting.
It is the kind of expression that belongs on the faces of people who have climbed big peaks or surfed big waves, members of a fraternity whose membership must be earned.
I could have signed on with one of the local kayak outfitters, such as Potomac Paddlesports, but before I got around to it I met Danny Stock. Danny is the friend of a friend who I have seen at dinners a few times. He smiles and nods his way through a party without saying much. I knew he taught second grade and that he enjoyed kayaking. It wasn’t until May that we had a one-on-one conversation, and he mentioned in passing that he had tried out for the U.S. Olympic team.
I Googled him that night and found that this quiet fellow is the reigning national champion in kayak slalom (in this picture, he’s the one to far right; in the video below, he descends Great Falls).
Uh, Danny, I asked, could you show me a thing or two about whitewater kayaking?
