new york

Green Your Happy Hour

scleaver — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Gust Organics restaurant in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village is now the world’s first 100% USDA Certified organic bar.

Among their sustainable practices: recycling, using wind energy and only wind energy to power the restaurant, solar lighting, biodegradable containers that are printed using soy ink, energy efficient and water conservation equipment, green cleaning practices, and a restaurant building that’s built using recycled woods. The servers wear organic uniforms, and you’ll have organic flowers at your table.

The menu (Buenos Aires style steak, homemade turkey meatballs, spinach fettucini) looks delicious, and now there’s a fully organic bar to go with it. Eaten at Gust Organics? What was the experience like?

If you’re not in New York, find a green restaurant near you and learn more at The Green Restaurant Association.

Photo from YumSugar and Gust Organics.

An Oyster's Bed of Dreams

scleaver — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Once, oysters covered the banks of the great island of Manhattan and were so plentiful, and so good at filtering water that the now murky waters around New York were probably clear.

But, oyster beds in New York and all along the East Coast have long been decimated from overharvesting, disease, and pollution. Around New York, oysters were all but extinct by the mid-20th Century. The water is cleaner now, thanks to the Clean Water Act, but scientists are still working on a way to bring the oysters back. The latest attempt: electric oyster beds.

The Christian Science Monitor recently described a new project by James Cervino, professor of marine biology at Pace University in New York City who wants to use electricity to reharvest oyster beds. Cervino has installed the Electric Oyster Reef Project, spiral shaped bands that maintain a low voltage of electricity thanks to solar panels, along College Point, Queens. The electricity reacts with the water and creates limestone build ups on the metal that helps oysters grow. Recreating the reefs could help clean the water, the way nature intended, or it could upset the new balance of the bay. Some are concerned that trying to bring the oyster back is a lost cause—once an organism is out of the food chain it’s hard to bring back.

In the meantime, learn more about coral restoration around the world (oyster beds are considered the coral reefs of the East Coast) at the Global Coral Reef Alliance. Or, if all you want to do is eat oysters, get your Oyster guide at Chow.

Image from Chow.

What's in a Name?

jchatraw — Tue, 20 May 2008 01:40:16 -0400

I don't remember the Love Canal fiasco that occurred in Niagara Falls, N.Y., in 1978, but the horror of this eco-disaster is just as gripping 30 years later to me as it surely was for the people who lived through it. I couldn't imagine discovering my house or apartment was built just above a toxic chemical waste dump site.

In Elizabeth D. Blum's new book, Love Canal Revisited: Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Activism, she looks at the far-reaching implications of this historic case study that galvanized a neighborhood across every barrier humans try to construct. If you're an activist, this book is must-read simply for its historical context. But if you seek to understand what motivates people to get involved in environmental causes, this book is also helpful.

Here's a green nugget discussing the historical implications of the role of gender in this ecological travesty:

"Gendered language was fluid at Love Canal, although certain patterns emerged among the different groups. The most prominent language among the women at Love Canal was certainly maternalism. Concern for the health and safety of their families, especially their children, crossed both racial and class lines. Men involved at Love Canal emphasized economic concerns most visibly, but this economic response varied somewhat with the men's class and status. The elite men who dominated LCARA focused almost exclusively on the adverse effects on tourism and tax dollars. The working-class men in the neighborhood used economic concerns as a basis for their activism, pressing for a freeze on mortgage payments or taxes.

"Yet this dichotomy was hardly set in stone. Economic worries motivated several women in the neighborhood, especially businesswomen and single mothers responsible for the financial well-being of their families. Conversely, the male resident representatives of LCARA focused on health issues. In addition, groups enlarged the frame of the debate by introducing and emphasizing different aspects. Working-class whites cited citizenship rights as a basis for activism. The African American renters believed that race and class bias perpetuated their situation, and their activism explicitly emphasized a more inclusive solution at Love Canal. The ETF saw its activism as part of the broader environmental movement and incorporated language stressing the widespread nature of the problem and the idea of stewardship as a way to work toward change and prevent future problems."

City Farmers Cash In

scleaver — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:31:06 -0400

Gardens are popping up where you’d least expect them—under elevated train tracks, in partially torn-down factories, on balconies, and behind rows of apartment buildings. And, these aren’t just home gardeners growing tomatoes for the occasional marinara sauce, they’re real enterprises and can make a pretty penny.

As The New York Times reported on May 7, the urban agriculture movement that’s sprung up in New York City with farmers who grow plants in small neighborhood plots and sell the harvest to neighbors, local restaurants, or at farmers markets is growing fast. The trend is old news in some cities. Prime example: Detroit, where gardens have taken over abandoned lots and partially destroyed factory buildings.

And, like I mentioned, there's money to be made in urban ag. The Added Value Community Farm was constructed on an abandoned three-acre basketball court started in 2003, and last year, the high school students who work the Brooklyn farm sold $25,000 worth of arugula, heirloom tomatoes, and Asian greens to local restaurants, community supported agriculture organizations, and farmers markets. In Detroit, gardens with the Garden Resource Program Collaborative have set up shop in Eastern Market. In Philadelphia, a non-profit grew $67,000 of lettuce, carrots, and radishes in densely packed plots. Finally, in Milwaukee, Growing Power operates a one-acre farm that includes greenhouses and pens of animals, they grossed more than $220,000 last year.

There is a definite need for fresh, affordable produce for low-income residents in urban areas, something that’s often easier said than done (Even with urban ag, Detroit is still considered a food desert, with few local produce options for many residents).

Interested in starting an urban farm? It could be as easy as setting up shop on your back balcony or finding just the right plot of land. Here are resources to get you started:

1. Learn about the nitty-gritty of farming, from seeds to market: The Detroit Garden Resource Program Collaborative, Milwaukee or Chicago’s Growing Power, and Just Food in New York all offer training. For a more formal education, The Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz offers a six-month course.

2. Remember, it’s more than a farm, it’s a business. Here’s how to write an Urban Farm Business Plan.

3. Keep up with the Urban Farm Project to see how other farmers are working the land.

4. Read gardening blogs like This Garden is Illegal and A Gardening Year for another type of education, and some camaraderie.

Urban gardens have a unique set of problems and solutions:

1. Soil contaminated with lead or other contaminants? Build raised compost beds to keep your plants out of the muck that can be urban soil.

2. Got too many wildlife friends? Marigolds deter squirrels, and avoid planting crops that rodents enjoy, like corn.

3. If you’re planting on a balcony, don’t mix sun and shade plants, make sure your balcony can handle the weight, and put tall plants in back, surrounded by shorter plants. To maximize water, try an Earth Box.

4. Connect with other gardeners at Garden Web.

Photo Credit: Denver Urban Gardens.

Zeno's Paradox

jbraly — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

If you want to know how my split life began, I suppose you have to start with Zeno’s Paradox. Zeno, you may recall from High School philosophy class, was perhaps the first person to realize it is theoretically impossible to be happy. Being a philosopher, Zeno expressed his realization as a formula: between any two points A and B, there is always a midpoint. That is, you never will get to where you want to go.

In my case, point A was my life: a speechwriter supporting a stay-at-home-mother-of-a-wife and two young children in New York City. Point B was the life I wanted to live: as an autobiographical monologist, with a stay-at-home-mother-of-a-wife and two young children who required less support. Going from points A to B therefore required either that I won the lottery, allowing me to shift from a lucrative profession to a pecuniary one while shouldering my crushing financial burden, or that I lightened my proverbial load.

Using the conventional load-lessening strategy--abandonment of the wife and children-- seemed beyond my limited emotional and logistical capacities. So I asked my wife to abandon me in New York and relocate to anyplace within a 2.5-hour radius of New York City. My thinking being, I could travel indefinitely between points A and B e.g. the city and the country. Just when I thought I was where I was supposed to be, I’d get in the car and drive the other direction. Zeno on the Taconic State Parkway.

My wife landed in a little hamlet in upstate New York called Harlemville, a radical leftist biosphere based on the Anthroposophical principles of the German mystical polymath Rudolf Steiner, which residents seem to think is a biodynamic farming community. The farmers plant with the cycle of the moon, believing the gravitational pull enhances the chances of seeds sprouting and crops flourishing.

As crops need fertilizer, so biodynamic farmers need cows. A biodynamic farm is, in a perfect world, a closed, sustainable system. Meaning, you don’t buy manure. You produce it, along with milk and cheese and whey and quark, and—out of the unlucky males and less-productive females--veal and steak.

Every output (hay or manure) is an input (feed or fertilizer), in other words, and every input (hay and manure) is an output (steak and potatoes). And the wheel goes round and round. The cycle of sustainability stops with human waste, I am relieved to report, though many locals do have composting toilets, and of course as in most if not all rural communities, there are no sewers, only septic systems.

Like Las Vegas, what happens in Harlemville stays in Harlemville. Except for me. I don’t stay – I come on weekends to raise my boys, and go during the week to write and perform in the city. As Zeno might have predicted, I miss my children when I’m working, and I miss the city whenever I see a middle-aged woman breastfeeding her six-year-old in the pink Anthroposophical house next to the farm. That this woman is my wife complicates matters, of course. And a house without right angles and doors just makes it harder to be separated yet living under the same roof, at least on weekends. But Zeno probably knew, in a world where you’ll never get to where you want to be, it’s all about the journey.

No Cars Go

Marcus — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

If you haven’t gotten the memo yet, bikes are taking the world by storm. And not just ‘cause they’re an environmentally-friendly, efficient way to get around town. They’re also cool. Really cool. Bicycles have not only moved to the forefront as a primary form of alternative transportation, they’ve also become a symbol of urban youth culture, representing a hip, bohemian way of life.

I’m talking primarily about cities here. Bicycles have always had their place outside of urban centers, whether they’re used for an invigorating mountain bike adventure through Yellowstone, or a lazy meander on a beach cruiser along a boardwalk on the Atlantic Seaboard. Bikes in cities have been prevalent for some time now, but it’s only recently that we’ve really started to see initiatives that promote the bicycle as a primary form of transportation. Just recently, I blogged about a potential San Francisco bike sharing program, as well as a Parisian initiative that has been quite successful thus far. Additionally, major cities like Chicago and New York have pledged to allot more space on major roads to bike paths in the years ahead. As the reality of climate change and the effects of pollution generated by urban transportation become major focal points for the sustainable future of cities, bicycles are becoming more glamorous by virtue of the fact that they represent a commitment to reducing carbon emissions and inducing change.

This commitment to the climate crisis should be all the reason you need to hop on a bike straight away. But, allow me to reiterate the following: bicycles are real hip right now. So, if you’re thinking that you can just take the bus and still be reducing your carbon footprint, you’re right. But again, bikes are cool. If you’re skeptical about this, check out any Critical Mass event across the country (if you haven’t heard about Critical Mass, click on this link immediately). It’s probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done. Bike culture has somehow merged with “hipster” culture nationwide, which has in turn made its way into mainstream culture. Why do you think brands like Timbuk2 and Chrome are so trendy right now? There isn’t a massive influx of people switching careers to become bike messengers, I’ll tell you that. No, dude. Riding a bike means something. So, if you’re interested in offsetting this little problem we’ve got called global warming, and you want to look like a bona fide bad-ass in the process, get yourself a two-wheeler, son. Do it.

The Gingerbread House Contest

jbraly — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The Gingerbread House Contest and Auction is a big deal up in Columbia. It’s a fundraiser for the local school--contestants donate their houses so they can be auctioned off. But it’s also a competition to determine who’s the best builder. Living in New York City during the week, and finding my weekend neighbors usually reluctant to reveal naked ambition, the seasonal lust for victory makes me feel right at home. The Columbians may live in a close-knit anthroposophical farming community, but they enjoy kicking each other’s butts once a year.

I’d seen the houses in past contests, displayed in the school auditorium, many evidencing extraordinary craftsmanship. And I’d always found it inspiring, to be among people striving for excellence--albeit through gingerbread and gumdrops. But I’d never been to the auction, and I always wondered who would actually buy a gingerbread house. And how much would they pay?

So this year I went. Like always, I quibbled with the contest results. Yes, “House on Pooh Corner” was decent, a puppet theater featuring a marzipan drawn curtain, marzipan Pooh and Piglet slumped in the corners. But it did NOT deserve the Grand Prize. That should have been awarded to “Mermaid’s Castle,” a whimsical, Disney-esque chateau filtered through a skilled baker’s vivid imagination: you really wanted to eat that little siren stuck to the castle wall, though she—like all the entries—was built to last, with inedible ingredients. “House on Pooh Corner” was made by the warlock’s daughter, however. And as he is a revered figure in the community, ostensibly with supernatural powers, the contest judges evidently thought it wise to crown the warlock’s offspring for the second year in a row.

The auction would be the great leveler, it seemed to me, and I looked forward to Columbians speaking with their pocketbooks. The auctioneer took the stage, and the houses were sold one by one. When “Mermaid’s Castle” went on the block, the auctioneer said, “This is a work of art and…whew, a whole lot more.” Even rendered in marzipan and set atop a fishtail, a breast is noteworthy in Columbia. It sold for $100. As did “House on Pooh Corner.” Less than the price of the “Ice House”--$125--which really was made of ice and by the time it sold had melted, like a wintry sand mandala, bought for the memory of its excellence.

Afterwards, I walked up to the woman who made “Mermaid’s Castle.” I told her I was sorry that the community valued her mermaid the same as Pooh and Piglet, and less than melted ice. She said she was sorry too. I thought of how much more she’d have gotten in New York. Only no one in the city makes castles out of gingerbread.

My Life in Storage

jbraly — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 20:59:59 -0500

A little intro: James Braly tried an experiment in downsized living: He sold his luxury apartment on the Upper West side of Manhattan and pared his life down to the bare essentials. He moved downstairs. To the storage unit in his apartment building's basement. For two years. Here is one of his tales from that small experiment.

The great thing about living in my storage unit is you don't need an alarm clock.

My headboard is the door to the service elevator shaft, and my sloped ceiling the underside of the back stairs. So when the building wakes up, I do too.

Behind me, the elevator operator hoists construction workers up to renovate another castle in the sky. Directly overhead, the dog walker descends, pulled by her hyperactive little pug scratching his way outside for his canine toilette. While in the middle of it all, unbeknownst to them, nestled amongst the packing boxes, a writer opens his eyes. It's another day in storage.

I didn't always live this way. I used to make a lot of money, writing speeches for pharmaceutical executives to finance my dream of writing autobiographical stories. But the only thing I seemed to have time to write besides speeches were checks on my glorious apartment overlooking Central Park. Instead of becoming a writer, I'd become a lifestyle.

So I downsized to a place I could afford to write in. And on the day I moved out of my apartment, I moved in to my storage unit, stacking the contents of the luxurious life I used to live, concrete floor to concrete ceiling. Leaving just enough room for the essentials: an air mattress, and a desk.

It's conveniently located a few floors down in the same building; it has a toilet and a sink, installed by the art dealer who once stored paintings here; and the lease doesn't say anything about storing people.

And now, I'm writing. I've been living in storage for two years now, and it's paying off. My monologue is opening Off-Broadway this fall. My book will be published next spring. So there's actually a reason to get up in the morning, when I hear that little pug panting in the service elevator behind my bed on his way back up from the street — like a canine snooze alarm.

I do miss the money. Especially when I take a shower — twice a week, 10 blocks away at the gym. Or when I see my apartment back on the market, advertised in a glossy real estate magazine, and am reminded I can no longer afford to live there.

But I've got my little concrete chrysalis: 30 square feet of usable space. And that's big enough to dream. And at 15 percent of what I used to pay, cheap enough to give me the time to pursue it. What more can you ask of home?

Braly's bed is right under the stairs. He's woken up each morning by the scampering and panting of dogs as the resident dog walker makes her morning trek outside.

The "bedroom" of Braly's storage unit.

WEBSITE: JamesBraly.com

Yoga Class Goes Green

salbert — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

During my Wednesday 10:45 am yoga class that I have been taking religiously for about two years I noticed a new guy in the corner wearing some sexy pants that show off his perfect abs and practicing on a funky looking mat. Trying to maintain my practice and "keeping my eyes gazing upward toward my third eye" I kept catching myself staring at his shoulders. It was a spiritual experience… of the earthly variety.

At the end of class we were both in line for the bathroom. I saw this as my opportunity to strike up a conversation. "Nice mat" I said. Nice mat? Real original, Shari. I was hoping my eyeliner wasn’t smudged under my eyes making me look like a football player.

"Thanks, it’s green".

"Call me crazy but it looks blue and white to me." At least he gave me a sympathy chuckle.

"It’s called the Naked Mat", he tells me. Ok, now my mind’s racing and I picture him naked on his mat. Very nice.

"Next thing you’re going to tell me is that your pants are made from hamp".

"It’s called hemp, with an ‘e,’ and, yeah, they are. For 2008 I’ve made the commitment to go as green as possible".

I noticed he had the most beautiful mouth. I totally hear what he’s saying and before I know it I blurt out, "Oh yeah? Me too. It’s really important to me".

What am I saying? I don’t know anything about being green! I’m from New York! I called his pants ‘hamp’! The most ‘green’ thing I’ve ever done was to pick up my dog’s poop and recycle my Smart Water bottle.

"I’m Dave and I can tell you where I got my mat over a cup of green tea at the coffeeshop next door?"

I believe Dave the green hottie just asked me out!

"Sure. Let me just get my act together" I say gathering my so un-green water bottle and environmentally un-cool PVC sticky mat. I suddenly became extremely aware ofhow un-green I’ve been living and felt kind of ashamed. I mean I support environmental awareness, Al Gore, organic coffee and sometimes I even buy that ’Seventh Generation’ toilet paper.

On the way to get tea Dave told me about this website called greenyoga.org where they have these great ‘Naked Mats’ made from Indian cotton with a latex underside. They also have cute hemp yoga mat bags.

Over our Jasmine Green tea Dave told me he’s an architect. An architect! I love that. I almost jumped up and down and did a little happy dance. It gets even better. He designs, develops and constructs sustainable living housing, schools, and office buildings.

"Oh, and I love to cook…" he tells me. I think I’ve found the perfect man, until he finishes the sentence "…all vegetarian food, of course".

Is he serious? I mean I gave up cigarettes for my last boyfriend, but I was ready for that. I got a tattoo once because of a guy. But give up Chinese Pork Ribs and Chili Cheese Dogs? I don’t know if I can.

"I’d love to cook you dinner sometime."

"That would be great ".

There’s that voice again. I can just see myself choking down some chickpeas. Instead I say," I’ll bring the wine. Wine’s ok, right?"

"Wine’s great", he says and flashes the most dazzling smile. Thank God he drinks.

I run home and hit the web. First I need to find some organic wine. Then I have to find some hot hemp clothes. Does this even exist? All I know is I am not wearing Birkenstocks. I wonder if anyone makes a ‘green’ platform stiletto?

If I have to go green by my next date with Dave, the hot green architect, pass the recycled notebook ‘cause I have a lot of homework to do!

RiverWired's (Slightly) Green Reality Series: This is the first in a series of blogs in which our heroine grudgingly learns about the brave new world of living (slightly) greener.