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Showing posts from July, 2008

Tree Walk: More than 36 hours in Toronto, part 2

Taking public transportation in a new city is a skill and one I did not fully master during my short stay in Toronto. My intention was to participate in the Rouge Park tree tour offered by Toronto Tree Tours but the series of transit was overwhelming. Rouge Park is at the edge of the city and I was staying in the university district. The more than one hour trip was a combination of subway, light rail, and bus , and shuttle . In lieu of the walk on June 21, I downloaded the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood tour . This tour is one of five that published on the Toronto Tree Tours website. I did not walk the entire route. Instead, I visited three locations: the London planetree at the Berkeley Castle; the ginkgos and Norway maples in the courtyard of the Canadian Opera Company; and the courtyard of a mixed-income housing project. I could not access the Berkeley Castle courtyard so the photograph, above, was taken from the sidewalk. The opera courtyard is gorgeous. The site, pictured

Sustainable setting for scholarship

None of the University of California campuses placed in the top tier of the Princeton Review's "greenness" index according to the Times reporter Kate Zernike. It is not hard to believe that UC Berkeley did not make the list; after all, the university will replace a carbon sink (an 80-year old oak grove) with a carbon source (a modern sports facility). Read about the lawsuit here . However, the university has taken some steps towards sustainability which can be seen on its sustainability walking tour . Interestingly, Strawberry Creek is featured on the tour even though the proposed sports facility will add impermeable surface area to the creek's watershed. The creek feature is described as follows: Cal has provided a role model of environmental education and stewardship through its program to restore Strawberry Creek: over 3,000 students use the creek as an outdoor lab annually, and design of new buildings incorporates features to protect water quality and improve

Bookshop: Alternatives to the lawn

Permeable landscape, San Francisco The permeable front yard design, pictured above, is a possible alternative to the lawn. Elizabeth Kolbert's makes an insightful statement about lawn alternatives in her essay titled "Turf War." She writes, "Of course, to advocate a single replacement for the lawn is to risk reproducing the problem. The essential trouble with the American lawn is its estrangement from place: it is not a response to the landscape so much as an idea imposed upon it--all green, all the time, everywhere." Below are several titles Kolbert mentions in her book review and which can be found at our bookshop along with other titles. Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn Redesigning the American Lawn: A Search for Environmental Harmony Second Nature: A Gardener's Education Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community Requiem for a Lawnmower, Revised Edition:

News: water collection, slow food, lazy locavores, and a Jersey tomato

More attuned than usual to storing water - the regional utility company has instituted water rationing - I've noticed several articles about doing so. For instance, Anne Raver, in her latest "In the Garden" essay, describes "garden reservoirs" in New York City. Raver features the 32 inch diameter, 165 gallon capacity tank at the home of Lenny Librizzi, assistant director of open space greening at the Council on the Environment. This tank is one of type of collector that Librizzi designs, mostly for community gardens. Rainwater is collected in community gardens over 20 cities and Raver visited several in New York: 1100 Block Bergen Street Garden (1,000 gallon tank); Long Island City Roots Garden (300 gallon tank), and Brooklyn Bears Carleton Avenue Community Garden (1,000 gallon tank collects water from the roof of an adjacent church). Raver does not mention permit requirements for disconnecting the downspout from the NYC sewer system. In San Francisco

Photo du jour: Green walnuts and lavender from Forage Oakland

In exchange for my mints and rosemary, Forage Oakland delivered green walnuts on Monday, above, and lavender today, below. The lavender is from a friend of Forage Oakland. I don't know the provenance of the walnuts, except that three of them I foraged from the walnut street tree on my block.

Vanishing neighborhood life: Beijing and Washington D.C.

Welcome to guest blogger, Nalini Rao. Nalini recently completed graduate studies in natural resource economics, works in Washington D.C., and "enjoys looking at global and local environmental issues." In Wednesday’s New York Times, there is an interesting article about a vanishing type of neighborhood in China. These neighborhoods consist of large, old houses which include stately courtyards which are connected by alleys, called hutongs, were designed in the 13th century by the Mongol founders of the Yuan dynasty. Photo: New York Times, Forrest Anderson As the article states, “the layout of the neighborhoods, with public life spilling into the hutong alleyways and private life hidden behind brick walls in the courtyard houses” existed until the 1960s, when population pressure forced city planners to fit three or four families in a house and courtyard previously designed for a single family. The families would then spill out into the hutongs, eating and socializing in

Site changes

Local ecology is undergoing style changes. Posts made between February and July 18, 2008 will not be available for an undetermined amount of time (you can re-read and comment on these posts here here ). New posts , however, will be available for reading and commenting here. Thank you for your patience.

Bird Watch: Central Park, East Bay regional parks, and the Okavango Delta

Marie Winn's fascination with the birds of New York is are told in her books "Red-Tails in Love" and "Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife." Winn and others track and observe screech owls, orioles, and moths among other wildlife in Central Park, at night. If I lived in New York I would be a participant in these moon- and ambient-light lit adventures! Birding also happens in Prospect Park (Brooklyn), Pelham Bay Park (Bronx), and Forest Park and Alley Pond Park (Queens). New York Times reporters Anne Raver (she writes engrossing essays column in the Home & Garden section) and Katherine Zoepf offer some online for birders: the blog, Urban Hawks ; nycadubon.prg; prospectpark.org/calendar/audubon_center_events; and Sibley and Peterson field guides.Closer to home, the East Bay Regional Park District offers "Tuesdays for the Birds" bird walks in its regional parks . The next walk is scheduled for July 22, 7 to 9:30 a.m. in Carqu

Photo du jour: Animal art in the city

The large and small of animal art in U.S. cities. Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, Calif. Fulton Street, Berkeley Addison Street, Berkeley Denver, Colorado Byers Evans Museum, Denver Public library, Denver Seattle, Washington (one of the Pigs on Parade, 2007) Finally, it's not quite art, and I think Boston's duck and swan boats are more creative, but here's Toronto's water tour vehicle:

More than 36 hours in Toronto, Part I

St. George Street Several weeks ago we took a six-day trip to Toronto (and Niagara Falls), Canada. My first photograph in the city was of plants and people. I was struck by the simplicity of this landscape feature: a tight allee of birches, a grove, between a last century modern building and traditional brick construction. Another interesting architectural-landscape combination is pictured below, also on St. George Street. The birches were sighted on a walk after dropping our bags at a friend's apartment in the Bloor/University neighborhood. We visited the Bata Shoe Museum. I was taken by the small sizes of the adult Chinese shoes on exhibit; the women who wore them had bound feet. Of the neighborhoods I explored, my favorite is The Annex. Respected urbanist, Jane Jacobs , lived in The Annex. (I will be writing about Jacobs's advice for park and neighborhood development in a future post.) The Annex is also home to the Ecology Park Community Garden which w

Ginkgo's smelly fruit is edible and the tree is long lived

Green (unripe) ginkgo fruit One day last summer on a stroll down 66th Avenue in Oakland, a smell brought me back to a short street (one block) in the South End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, lined with a single tree species. The smell and the tree: the ripe fruit of the female ginkgo tree ( Ginkgo biloba ). It was pungent; for me, a cross between a rotten apricot and vomit. Ginkgo derives from two Japanese words : "gin" meaning silver and "koo" or "kyoo" meaning apricot. (Biloba refers to the double-lobed leaf.) A recent essay in the New Yorker about ginkgos in New York City also brought me back to the afore-mentioned street in Boston. The article reports about a group of three youth, known as the Anti-Ginkgo Tolerance Group, who urge "citizens to call 311 if they encountered the smelly seeds." In my capacity as street tree program manager for the Boston Parks Department, I was once asked if the city would remove several ginkgos.

News: environmental services jobs, salt marsh sparrows, and Sacramento's Blueprint

Donning a Green Collar , Boston Globe Amid the uncertainty, there's a growing movement among community organizations, environmental groups, unions, and workforce development agencies to pinpoint what jobs will become available and how to get people into them. The goal is to create "green-collar" jobs that would provide those often shut out of new job opportunities - such as people of color, the poor, at-risk youth, the underemployed, the unemployed, and the formerly incarcerated - the training necessary to compete for positions in the burgeoning field. Wings & a Prayer , Boston Globe North Scientists aren't sure where the Plum Island contamination is coming from, but they do know that other species around the country with high mercury levels, such as loons, produce fewer offspring. Roughly 95 percent of the world's saltmarsh sparrows breed in the Northeast, where mercury contamination is among the highest in the nation. Because the sparrows spend their lives i

Fourth of July

Hale Street, Beverly, Mass.