Tag Archives: green
The Wildfires in Hawaii Are a Loss for Our World
The wildfire created by the recent eruption of the Kilauea volcano on the Island of Hawaii has already burned some 2,000 acres in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, home to 23 species of endangered plants and 6 endangered birds. Because this fire now threatens a relatively pristine native rain forest that is home to Hawaii’s famous happyface spiders and honeycreeper songbirds, Park officials are quite rightly doing everything they can to stop it. As a whole, Hawaii is a globally important paradise that is dying on our watch. Three quarters of all the bird and plant extinctions in the US have occurred within these islands, and one third of America’s threatened and endangered birds and plants now reside within this state.
Read more of this post at on Huffington Post in their Green section.
Innovations in Urban Green, Questions for Peter Harnik
Peter Harnik discusses ideas from his new book Urban Green: Innovate Parks for Resurgent Cities on the Trust for Public Land’s City Parks blog:
We asked Peter Harnik to answer some questions about his new book, Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities, that covers how cities can plan for parks as well as how to create them in “all built-out” settings.
Your book addresses many age-old questions about parks and cities. Let’s start with the big one — how much parkland should a city have?
“Should” is the wrong verb. “Should” implies that the outcome is decided by planners. The right verb is “want”: “How much parkland do we as residents and taxpayers want?” It’s a political issue, and it’s got to be approached politically by building a base of active park supporters. Every city has a different geography, a different history and a different culture — it’s not one size fits all. I think people sometimes use the word “should” in the hopes that someone else will do the work for them. No great park system was created solely by planners using official standards.
But still — don’t even advocates need to know how their city compares to others?
Oh, definitely! That’s why I give some comparative numbers in the book and many more on our web page (at www.tpl.org/cityparkfacts). If you take a trip to Boston or Minneapolis and like what you see, you can compare what your city has with them — everything from acreage to playgrounds to recreation centers to swimming pools. Which is why I always say it’s not just about gross acreage. One place may have lots of young people primarily interested in sports fields, another may be tilted toward older folks who want walking trails through bird-filled marshes. The environment also matters: some cities easily support lush forested parks, others are built on arid deserts where trees are essentially alien species. But the most important factor is population density. Crowded New York and San Francisco have so much concrete everywhere that every added pocket park is magical. Roomy Jacksonville and Oklahoma City, with thousands of large suburban-style yards are already halfway natural even not counting their parks. Density has a major impact on how people think about parks and how they use them.
Read more at the City Parks blog or learn more about Urban Green
A New World Coming
Today we watched the assembly and installation of the thirty-foot blades of a 100 KW wind turbine on the 10 acre campus of the Woods Hole Research Center on the southern coast of Cape Cod. It was the latest step in the construction of a campus that burns nothing and will, with this turbine and an array of solar panels already operating, soon be a net contributor of energy to the region in addition to operating a 20,000 square foot building housing a scientific staff of nearly 60 active scholars. The campus is the answer offered by a small group of ecologists who have worked for decades on the issues of climatic disruption that have been forced on the world by the contamination of the atmosphere with the waste products of fossil fuels. The current political answer to the global crisis of climate is an expression of intent to restrict the average warming of the earth to 2 degrees C and the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide to 450 ppm. It is now about 387 pp and rising at 1.5-2.0 ppm annually. The problem is that the climatic disruption already experienced, far less than 1 degree C, is overwhelmingly expensive, threatening food supplies globally. A two-degree average change will dry out the tropics without much change in temperature there, while warming the higher latitudes as much as 6-10 degrees C. The continental centers will continue an acute drying trend. It assures accelerating climatic chaos for the world. The current political objectives are irresponsible foolishness, certain disaster for this civilization. One response is here in “The Nature of a House: Building a World That Works,” a small book about how a group of scientists saw an opportunity for an experiment and pushed that opportunity about as far as they could in designing and building a new campus on the coast of New England at 42 degrees north. Their campus uses no fossil fuels at all, and the building, soon to be supplemented in the same context with a second building, is comfortable in all seasons. It uses a small fraction of the total energy that other modern buildings of similar size and purpose use. A further innovation will be the use of some of the excess energy produced to charge the batteries of a small fleet of small electric cars to be used by the staff in commuting. The campus has been a magnificent success, a model of what can be done now, to the advantage of all, in shifting from a reliance on an energy system that is poisoning the world, back toward a reliance on renewable energy used in a system that is virtually infinitely sustainable.
About George M. Woodwell
Dr. George M. Woodwell is the founder of the Woods Hole Research Center. He was also the founder and director of the Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He was a founding trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a founding trustee of the World Resources Institute, a founder of the Environmental Defense Fund, and former president of the Ecological Society of America. Dr. Woodwell is the author of more than three hundred papers and books on ecology.
