MyCityGardens.com is up and running for the season.  We’re a local yard sharing website that connects gardeners, mentors, and people with access to space, to neighbors who want to roll up their sleeves and dig in.

If you have extra space in your yard you’d like help cultivating, need a gardening plot this summer or are willing to lend gardening advise to your neighbors, please sign up!

our site: mycitygardens.com

keep up to date on: https://www.facebook.com/MyCityGardens

about: The MCG team is comprised of small group of Boston Area (Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline) students and young professionals who are passionate about building sustainable communities and are developing the site in their spare time. Don’t hesitate to contact us at info@mycitygardens.com if you have any questions or want to get more involved.

HEET Home Energy Efficiency Team, a Cambridge, MA nonprofit which organizes public weatherization parties and barnraisings, is crowd funding a natural gas leak monitoring project in Cambridge and Somerville.  Boston University Professor Nathan Phillips, who drove the streets of Boston last year with a high-precision methane analyzer to find 3,356 natural gas leaks, will loan HEET his methane analyzer and other equipment to drive the roof Cambridge and Somerville roads mapping every leak. Moving at 15 MPH, covering both sides of every street should take about three weeks.   You can learn more about HEET’S Squeaky Leak project and help fund it, if so inclined, at http://www.heetma.com/what-we-…

Professor Phillips will analyze and map the results and HEET will do the driving, following up thusly:

Map of the leaks on the HEET website

Report the leaks to NSTAR to get all Grade 1 leaks fixed

Share the location and amount of leaks with the governments of Somerville and Cambridge so they can work with NSTAR to fix these leaks

Publicize the map to raise awareness about natural gas leaks in order to make sure effective actions are taken on the ground and in our legislature (https://malegislature.gov/Bills/BillHtml/122690?generalCourtId=11) as soon as possible to reduce the leaks not only in Massachusetts, but across the country

Lastly, to compare the amount and number of leaks between Cambridge and Somerville, to see whether Cambridge’s decade-long policy of fining NSTAR heavily for opening any roadway that the City is not already working on, while charging it nothing to repair pipes under the roads the City is about to work on succeeded.  Since NSTAR has not shared with the city any map or information about the current or past gas leaks, Cambridge does not know whether this policy worked or not.  HEET’s and Prof Phillips’ project would provide that data.

Peter Wilson (in a Cambridgewickedlocal with news from the Chronicle and Tab LtE http://cambridge.wickedlocal.c… wrote that “Net zero is not a practical goal in New England” and that may or may not be true.  There are a number of net zero energy single and two family buildings in NE, including in colder climates than Cambridge like Vermont, although the experience with larger and high rise net zero energy buildings is just beginning.  However, there are a few examples that approach net zero, including one in Vienna, Austria, the Raffeisens Bank, a 21 story building built to PassivHaus standards ( http://www.viennareview.net/ne… ).

Whether or not net zero is a practical goal, it is an essential thought experiment we need to run.  By viewing net zero energy as an approachable goal, the way statistical quality control views zero defects on a production line under Total Quality Management, we will assuredly come across many different ways we can reduce our energy needs, perhaps significantly.  

I say we are not going far enough.  We should be thinking not only about net zero energy but also zero emissions throughout our infrastructure.  We know that pollution causes problems, that pollution is waste, and should be smart enough, wise enough to think about reducing the waste we generate to as close to zero as possible.  I like the motto of Zero Waste Europe ( http://www.zerowasteeurope.eu ), “If you are not for zero waste, how much waste are you for?”

If you are not for net zero energy, how much wasted energy are you for?

However, even if we mandate that all new buildings achieve net zero energy, we still have to fix our existing buildings and probably have to start developing district heating and cooling to become a net zero energy community.  This is a hard problem and requires concentrated efforts.  Net zero energy for new buildings, if it is achievable (and I believe it is), is still only a start.

Thanks for your time and your work.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sailing-for-solar-bringing-workshops-to-caribbean-communities

Help empower coastal Caribbean communities with a solar sailboat that will provide workshops and materials for solar electric modules, solar cookers and phone chargers.  Campaign now going on at Indiegogo:  $18,000 over the next 40 days.

This is a project of Dr. Richard Komp, a solar scientist who has worked since 1977 empowering rural communities with solar energy projects around the world, providing both hands-on teaching and renewable resources.  

Susan Murcott, Bob Lange, and Richard Komp are three grassroots environmental activists who are changing lives all around the world.  Susan is a water researcher whose work on simple water filters has benefitted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people from Guatemala to Ghana.  Her latest project is building a block of toilets for a school in a village in Ghana, the second project of this kind she has been involved with.  Bob is a physics professor who has been doing science education in Africa for many years, an activity that morphed into installing small solar systems for villages in Tanzania and now into designing, building, and installing efficient cookstoves with the Maasai people.  This year, his work is expanding into Uganda.  Richard is a solar expert who has worked on everything from the physics of solar electricity to building solar stoves from scrap.   He has been teaching people all around the world how to do solar as a cottage industry for about three decades now.  His latest idea is to outfit a sailboat as a floating solar workshop that can teach people throughout the Caribbean how to better their lives with simple solar technologies. You can read his reports on his international work at http://www.mainesolar.org/Komp…

I consider myself immensely privileged to know all three of these remarkable and remarkably effective people.

Cambridge, MA has been debating a net zero energy and/or emissions standard ( http://www.netzerocambridge.org ) for new buildings over 25,000 square feet since the Spring of 2013, partially because of an ecodistrict plan with MIT and others on a large parcel in East Cambridge (a plan MIT refused to make net zero even though they are rumored to be building a net zero project with some of the same partners in Basel, Switzerland).

The City Manager (Cambridge has a city manager form of municipal government, along with proportionate representation so city politics get weird fast) has established a “Getting to Net Zero” Task Force to study the issue.  Cambridge Community Development Department produced a fine overview of the state of the art in larger buildings for zero net emissions at (pdf alert) http://www.cambridgema.gov/~/m…

As the national Ecodistrict Summit was in town recently, the Community Development Department and Sustainable Performance Institute ( http://www.sustainable-perform… ) hosted experts from Integral Group ( http://www.integralgroup.com/ ), a deep green engineering firm to present lessons from the more than 40 net zero buildings they’ve worked on.

Recently, I’ve noticed there has been a shift from talking about mitigation to adaptation to resilience when dealing with climate change.  From my perspective, this is not a bad development as resilience focuses on practical preparedness for immediate hazards.  This can partition change into small increments that are readily understandable and remove the polarized politics of climate change from the discussion.  If you’re talking about measures to prevent system failure because of a weather emergency, it tends not to matter what your position is on greenhouse gases because everybody remembers the last hurricane, flood, or blizzard.  In addition, resilience measures can also be adaptation and, even in some cases, mitigation strategies for climate change as well.  At least, this is what I’m observing here in the Boston area and what I’ve heard out of post-Sandy New York and other areas.

This week I attended a discussion at the Boston Society of Architects about a new report, Building Resilience in Boston

pdf alert:  http://www.greenribboncommissi…  

Before the meeting, I spent some time scanning the document and found it to be superlative work, a great introduction to the concepts of urban design for resilience and emergency preparedness and, most especially, a fine literature search of the state of the art all around the world.  If you want to begin the process in your own city or town, this document will give you plenty of useful ideas and show you where to get more.  It is useful not only for cities like Boston, London, and New York but also towns like Chula Vista, CA and Keene, NH.

Another indication of growing seriousness on these issues I noticed is that the dangers from temperature extremes are entering the picture, especially since there has been a 2,300% increase in casualties from heat waves and 189% increase from cold snaps in the 2001 to 2010 decade (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/16/1224282/-World-Meteorological-Organization-Heatwave-Decade).

According to Christina Figueres of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, whom I also saw this week, there are over 300 cities around the world which are actively working on mitigation, adaptation, and resilience in the face of climate change.  So while international organizations are struggling to find actionable agreements and individual countries are fighting to avoid responsibility, municipalities around the world are taking practical steps.

There’s a great exhibition at the Boston Society of Architects down by South Station called “Reprogramming the City” (http://bsaspace.org/exhibitions/reprogramming-the-city/).  It is all about small but significant design tweaks for urban infrastructures, imaginative and enlivening, from all over the world.  There are lamp-posts that include deployable umbrellas for shelter during rain and snow, bus stop walls that light up during the darkness of winter to prevent seasonal affective disorder (SAD), and billboards that become bamboo forests to clean the air or have small apartments attached to their back sides or that gather and store potable water.

My favorite is the Dutch Goedzak:

Meaning both “good bag” and “do-gooder” in Dutch, Goedzak is a bag for Amsterdam residents to use when packaging their trash for pickup, ideal for items that are still useable for others, and just in need of a new home.  

Goedzak is, says Waarmakers [the designers], “a friendly way to offer products a second chance and stimulate sustainable behavior.”

The exhibition closes on September 29, 2013 and, if you are in Boston, it’s a fine way to stimulate your urban dreaming.

http://www.sierraclub.org/sier…

7 of the 162 Sierra Club “Green Schools” were in MA, in order of standing:

Harvard 16

UMass Amherst 27

BU 88

Hampshire 89

Mount Holyoke 124

Worcester Polytechnic 125

Suffolk University 148

It was the seventh year the Sierra Club has asked colleges and universities to fill out their questionnaire.  According to one source, MIT didn’t participate.

This greenhouse at the former historic Fisherville Mill in South Grafton, Massachusetts, sits on the banks of a canal by the Blackstone River.  It is cleaning stormwater runoff and water contaminated by #6 fuel oil, also known as Bunker C oil, which leaked from underground tanks.  At the end of the process, 95% of the hydrocarbons are removed without the application of chemicals, using only ecological design.

The Blackstone River can rightfully claim to be the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in the USA as in 1790, Samuel Slater built the first water-powered spinning mill in America for Moses Brown, a founder of Brown University, in Pawtucket, RI using the Blackstone River as a power source.  By October 7, 1828, the Blackstone Canal from Providence, RI to Worcester, MA was completed and became the original industrial corridor of the United States.  Some say the Blackstone was the hardest working river of 19th century America with its water powering factories all along its length.

Perhaps now it will become an example of 21st century American technology that uses ecological systems thinking to clean up the wastes industrial development has left in its wake.