Sustainable Shorewood Distributes Reusable Shopping Bags

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/7/19/121053/707/392/553883
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Country, the City Version: Farms in the Sky Gain New Interest

By BINA VENKATARAMAN
Published: July 15, 2008

What if “eating local” in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?

Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact.

The idea, which has captured the imagination of several architects in the United States and Europe in the past several years, just caught the eye of another big city dreamer: Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president.

When Mr. Stringer heard about the concept in June, he said he immediately pictured a “food farm” addition to the New York City skyline. “Obviously we don’t have vast amounts of vacant land,” he said in a phone interview. “But the sky is the limit in Manhattan.” Mr. Stringer’s office is “sketching out what it would take to pilot a vertical farm,” and plans to pitch a feasibility study to the mayor’s office within the next couple of months, he said.

“I think we can really do this,” he added. “We could get the funding.”

Dr. Despommier estimates that it would cost $20 million to $30 million to make a prototype of a vertical farm, but hundreds of millions to build one of the 30-story towers that he suggests could feed 50,000 people. “I’m viewed as kind of an outlier because it’s kind of a crazy idea,” Dr. Despommier, 68, said with a chuckle. “You’d think these are mythological creatures.”

Dr. Despommier, whose name in French means “of the apple trees,” has been spreading the seeds of his radical idea in lectures and through his Web site. He says his ideas are supported by hydroponic vegetable research done by NASA and are made more feasible by the potential to use sun, wind and wastewater as energy sources. Several observers have said Dr. Despommier’s sky-high dreams need to be brought down to earth.

“Why does it have to be 30 stories?” said Jerry Kaufman, professor emeritus of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Why can’t it be six stories? There’s some exciting potential in the concept, but I think he overstates what can be done.”

Armando Carbonell, chairman of the department of planning and urban form at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Mass., called the idea “very provocative.” But it requires a rigorous economic analysis, he added. “Would a tomato in lower Manhattan be able to outbid an investment banker for space in a high-rise? My bet is that the investment banker will pay more.”

Mr. Carbonell questions if a vertical farm could deliver the energy savings its supporters promise. “There’s embodied energy in the concrete and steel and in construction,” he said, adding that the price of land in the city would still outweigh any savings from not having to transport food from afar. “I believe that this general relationship is going to hold, even as transportation costs go up and carbon costs get incorporated into the economic system.”

Some criticism is quite helpful. Stephen Colbert jokingly asserted that vertical farming was elitist when Dr. Despommier appeared in June on “The Colbert Report,” a visit that led to a jump in hits to the project’s Web site from an average of 400 daily to 400,000 the day after the show. Dr. Despommier agrees that more research is needed, and calls the energy calculations his students made for the farms, which would rely solely on alternative energy, “a little bit too optimistic.” He added, “I’m a biologist swimming in very deep water right now.”

“If I were to set myself as a certifier of vertical farms, I would begin with security,” he said. “How do you keep insects and bacteria from invading your crops?” He says growing food in climate-controlled skyscrapers would also protect against hail and other weather-related hazards, ensuring a higher quality food supply for a city, without pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

Architects’ renderings of vertical farms — hybrids of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Biosphere 2 with SimCity appeal — seem to be stirring interest. “It also has to be stunning in terms of the architecture, because it needs to work in terms of social marketing,” Dr. Despommier said. “You want people to say, ‘I want that in my backyard.’ ”

Augustin Rosenstiehl, a French architect who worked with Dr. Despommier to design a template “living tower,” said he thought that any vertical farm proposal needed to be adapted to a specific place. Mr. Rosenstiehl, principal architect for Atelier SOA in Paris, said: “We cannot do a project without knowing where and why and what we are going to cultivate. For example, in Paris, if you grow some wheat, it’s stupid because we have big fields all around the city and lots of wheat and it’s good wheat. There’s no reason to build towers that are very expensive.”

Despite its potential problems, the idea of bringing food closer to the city is gaining traction among pragmatists and dreamers alike. A smaller-scale design of a vertical farm for downtown Seattle won a regional green building contest in 2007 and has piqued the interest of officials in Portland, Ore. The building, a Center for Urban Agriculture designed by architects at Mithun, would supply about a third of the food needed for the 400 people who would live there.

In June at P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center in Queens, a husband-wife architect team built a solar-powered outdoor farm out of stacked rows of cardboard tube planters — one that would not meet Dr. Despommier’s security requirements — with chicken coops for egg collection and an array of fruits and vegetables.

For Dr. Despommier, the high-rise version is on the horizon. “It’s very idealistic and ivory tower and all of that,” he said. “But there’s a real desire to make this happen.”
Click here for original article at the New York Times
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Eat your way to a better brain

CHILDREN have a lot to contend with these days, not least a tendency for their pushy parents to force-feed them omega-3 oils at every opportunity. These are supposed to make children brainier, so they are being added to everything from bread, milk and pasta to baby formula and vitamin tablets. But omega-3 is just the tip of the nutritional iceberg; many nutrients have proven cognitive effects, and do so throughout a person’s life, not merely when he is a child.

Fernando Gómez-Pinilla, a fish-loving professor of neurosurgery and physiological science at the University of California, Los Angeles, believes that appropriate changes to a person’s diet can enhance his cognitive abilities, protect his brain from damage and counteract the effects of ageing. Dr Gómez-Pinilla has been studying the effects of food on the brain for years, and has now completed a review, just published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, that has analysed more than 160 studies of food’s effect on the brain. Some foods, he concludes, are like pharmaceutical compounds; their effects are so profound that the mental health of entire countries may be linked to them.

Last year, for example, the Lancet published research showing that folic-acid supplements—sometimes taken by pregnant women—can help those between 50 and 70 years old ward off the cognitive decline that accompanies ageing. In a study lasting three years, Jane Durga, of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and her colleagues found that people taking such supplements did better on measures of memory, information-processing speed and verbal fluency. That, plus evidence that folate deficiency is associated with clinical depression, suggests eating spinach, orange juice and Marmite, which are all rich in folic acid.

Another suggestion from Dr Gómez-Pinilla’s review is that people should eat more antioxidants. That idea is not new. Antioxidants are reckoned by many to protect against the general effects of ageing. Vitamin E, for example, which is found in vegetable oils, nuts and green leafy vegetables, has been linked (in mice) with the retention of memory into old age, and also with longer life.

Dr Gómez-Pinilla, however, gives the antioxidant story a particular twist. The brain, he observes, is peculiarly susceptible to oxidative damage. It consumes a lot of energy, and the reactions that release this energy also generate oxidising chemicals. Moreover, brain tissue contains a great deal of oxidisable material, particularly in the fatty membranes surrounding nerve cells.

That suggests, among other things, the value of a diet rich in berries. These have been shown to have strong antioxidant effects, though only a small number of their constituents have been evaluated in detail. One group that has been evaluated, the polyphenols, has been shown in rodents to reduce oxidative damage and to boost the ability to learn and retain memories. In particular, these chemicals affect changes in response to different types of stimulation in the hippocampus (a part of the brain that is crucial to the formation of long-term memories, and which is the region most affected by Alzheimer’s disease). Another polyphenol, curcumin, has also been shown to have protective effects. It reduces memory deficits in animals with brain damage. It may be no coincidence that in India, where a lot of curcumin is consumed (it is the substance that makes turmeric yellow), Alzheimer’s disease is rarer than elsewhere.

Peas of mind
Though the way antioxidants work in the brain is not well known, Dr Gómez-Pinilla says it is likely they protect the synaptic membranes. Synapses are the junctions between nerve cells, and their action is central to learning and memory. But they are also, he says, the most fragile parts of the brain. And many of the nutrients associated with brain function are known to affect transmission at the synapses.

An omega-3 fatty acid called docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), for example, provides membranes at synaptic regions with “fluidity”—the capacity to transport signals. It also provides “plasticity”—a synapse’s capacity to change. Such changes are the basis of memory. Since 30% of the fatty constituents of nerve-cell membranes are DHA molecules, keeping your DHA levels topped up is part of having a healthy brain. Indeed, according to the studies reviewed by Dr Gómez-Pinilla, the benefits of omega-3s include improved learning and memory, and resistance to depression and bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, dementia, attention-deficit disorder and dyslexia.

Omega-3s are found in oily fish such as salmon, as well as in walnuts and kiwi fruit, and there is a strong negative correlation between the extent to which a country consumes fish and its levels of clinical depression. On the Japanese island of Okinawa, for example, people have a strikingly low rate of mental disorder—and Okinawans are notable fish eaters, even by the standards of a piscivorous country like Japan. In contrast, many studies suggest that diets which are rich in trans- and saturated fatty acids, such as those containing a lot of deep-fried foods and butter, have bad effects on cognition. Rodents put on such diets show declines in cognitive performance within weeks.

In the past few years, several studies have looked at the effect of adding omega-3s to people’s diets—particularly those of children. One such, carried out in the British city of Durham, was controversial in that it was funded by a maker of children’s omega-3 supplements and did not include a control group being given a placebo. Despite the publicity this study has received, Ben Goldacre, author of a book called “Bad Science” that includes an investigation of it, says the results will not be released.

Work by other researchers, however, has suggested such supplements do improve the performance and behaviour of school-age children with specific diagnoses such as dyslexia, attention-deficit disorder and developmental co-ordination disorder. Moreover, although more work is needed to elucidate the effects of omega-3s on healthy school-age children, Dr Gómez-Pinilla says that younger children whose mothers took fish-oil supplements (which contain omega-3s) when they were pregnant and while they were breast-feeding do show better cognitive performance than their unsupplemented contemporaries.

Eating well, then, is one key to a healthy brain. But a word of warning—do not overeat. This puts oxidative stress on the brain and risks undoing all the good work those antioxidants have been up to. For those who would like a little practical guidance, The Economist has some suggestions for dinner (see menu). So why not put the Nintendo brain trainer away tonight, and eat your way to intelligence instead?
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London International Food Conference Inspired by Will Allen’s Growing Power Visits

This event follows on from the Sustain report Edible Cities (downloadable from www.sustainweb.org/publications), detailing the visit of London officials to urban agriculture projects kindly supported by the US Embassy.

The conference inlcuded an unexpected appearance from London’s mayor Boris Johnson who publicly announced his support for urban agriculture projects in the capital.

Growing Food for London conference

This event looked at urban agriculture: its impact on the food security of London, its role in preserving the capital’s open space, educating and improving the health of Londoners and potentially reducing the distance that London’s food has traveled.

Through a series of presentations from British and international experts, including academics, growers, and other experts we explored what opportunities there are for producing more food and how this can be achieved in a sustainable way. As hoped, we reached full capacity and the attendees included planners, growers, architects, policy makers and many more involved in the capital’s food sector. This event was jointly organized with the London Parks and Green Spaces Forum, as part of the London Festival of Architecture.

Location: City Hall Conference Rooms 4 & 5
Date: Monday, 30th June 2008, 09:30 −17:30 (Doors at 09:00)
Days events: Talks, presentations, stalls, networking session, lunch and tea and coffee breaks provided using locally sourced ingredients.
Agenda & Presentations

Presentations, speakers and themes for the Growing Food for London conference.
List of Themes

Throughout the day, the current global food crisis provided as useful rationale for more food to be grown in cities.The day was split into a series of sessions focusing in on opportunities to increase the amount of food being grown in London and what urban agriculture projects are currenty running in the capital. An international dimension was also provided with examples of urban food growing in Canada.

Commercial viability of urban agriculture

• Social enterprises as a model

Spaces for growing more food

• Parks
• Housing estates
• Roof gardens

Future opportunities

• Planning food growing into new developments
• Greening 2012 Olympics
• Skills and training for growers
• Funding opportunities

Speakers include:

Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, former Director of the Centre for Food Policy at Thames Valley University

Joe Nasr, author of Urban Agricultrue: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities, www.ryerson.ca/foodsecurity/who/people/nasr

Fritz Haeg, author of Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, http://www.fritzhaeg.com/

Ian Collingwood, Middlesborough Council regeneration, and lead on the Middlesborough Urban Farming project. www.dott07.com/go/food/urban-farming

June Komisar, Assistant Professor, Department of Architectural Science, Ryerson University www.ryerson.ca/foodsecurity/who/people/komisar
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Looking for industrial space for a biodiesel brewery

Looking for 1000–1200 square feet of industrial space on Milwaukee’s south side. Need zoning for Class IA Liquid use, access to dock or garage. Please write with location (i.e. Walker’s Point, Greenfield Rd), rent, etc.

jhaas@wisconsinite.net
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Taking a Cue From Ants on Evolution of Humans

By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: July 15, 2008

To reach Edward O. Wilson’s office on the Harvard campus, one must first push through a door with a sign warning the public not to enter. Then, enter a creaky old elevator and press two buttons simultaneously. This counterintuitive procedure transports one into a strange realm.

It is a space that holds the world’s largest collection of ants, some 14,000 species. Curators are checking the drawers, dominated by the tall figure of Dr. Wilson, who is trying to contain his excitement: the 14,001st ant species has just been discovered in the soils of a Brazilian forest. He steamrolls any incipient skepticism about the ant’s uniqueness — the new species is a living coelacanth of ants, a primitive throwback to the first ant, a wasp that shed its wings and assigned all its descendants to live in earth, not their ancestral air. The new ant is so alien, Dr. Wilson explains, so unlike any known to earthlings, that it will be named as if it came from another planet.

Ants are Dr. Wilson’s first and enduring love. But he has become one of the world’s best-known biologists through two other passions, his urge to create large syntheses of knowledge and his gift for writing. Through the power of his words, he champions the world’s biodiversity and regularly campaigns for conservation measures.

Though he celebrated his 79th birthday last month, Dr. Wilson is generating a storm of literary output that would be impressive for someone half his age. An updated edition of “The Superorganism,” his encyclopedic work on ants co-written with Bert Hölldobler, will be published in November. Dr. Wilson is at work on his first novel. He is preparing a treatise on the forces of social evolution, which seems likely to apply to people the lessons evident in ant colonies. And he is engaged in another fight.

Beneath his gentle manner and Southern charm, Dr. Wilson is a scrapper. He grew up in Alabama and Florida, where the local custom with respect to fistfights was that one could prevail or get knocked out, with no third option. “I never picked a fight,” he wrote in “Naturalist,” his autobiography. “But once started I never quit, even when losing, until the other boy gave up or an adult mercifully pulled us apart.”

Dr. Wilson was not picking a fight when he published “Sociobiology” in 1975, a synthesis of ideas about the evolution of social behavior. He asserted that many human behaviors had a genetic basis, an idea then disputed by many social scientists and by Marxists intent on remaking humanity. Dr. Wilson was amazed at what ensued, which he describes as a long campaign of verbal assault and harassment with a distinctly Marxist flavor led by two Harvard colleagues, Richard C. Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould.

The new fight is one Dr. Wilson has picked. It concerns a central feature of evolution, one with considerable bearing on human social behaviors. The issue is the level at which evolution operates. Many evolutionary biologists have been persuaded, by works like “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins, that the gene is the only level at which natural selection acts. Dr. Wilson, changing his mind because of new data about the genetics of ant colonies, now believes that natural selection operates at many levels, including at the level of a social group.

It is through multilevel or group-level selection — favoring the survival of one group of organisms over another — that evolution has in Dr. Wilson’s view brought into being the many essential genes that benefit the group at the individual’s expense. In humans, these may include genes that underlie generosity, moral constraints, even religious behavior. Such traits are difficult to account for, though not impossible, on the view that natural selection favors only behaviors that help the individual to survive and leave more children.

“I believe that deep in their heart everyone working on social insects is aware that the selection that created them is multilevel selection,” Dr. Wilson said.

Last year he and David Sloan Wilson, a longtime advocate of group-level selection, laid out a theoretical basis for this view in an article in the Quarterly Review of Biology. Their statement evoked a heated response from Dr. Dawkins in New Scientist; he accused them of lying on a minor point and demanded an apology.

Proposing an idea heretical to many evolutionary biologists is one of the smaller skirmishes Dr. Wilson has set off. In his 1998 book “Consilience,” he proposed that many human activities, from economics to morality, needed to be temporarily removed from the hands of the reigning specialists and given to biologists to work out a proper evolutionary foundation.

“It is an astonishing circumstance that the study of ethics has advanced so little since the 19th century,” he wrote, dismissing a century of work by moral philosophers. His insight has been supported by the recent emergence of a new school of psychologists who are constructing an evolutionary explanation of morality.

Dr. Wilson’s treatise, on the shaping of social behavior, seems likely to tread firmly into this vexed arena. Morality and religion, he suspects, are traits based on group selection. “Groups with men of quality — brave, strong, innovative, smart and altruistic — would tend to prevail, as Darwin said, over those groups that do not have those qualities so well developed,” Dr. Wilson said.

“Now that, obviously, is a rather unpopular idea, very politically incorrect if pushed, but nevertheless Darwin may have been right about that. Undoubtedly that will be another big controversy,” he said without evident regret, “and that will be my next book, when I get through my novel.”

It is time for lunch, and he walks a visitor over to the Harvard Faculty Club. He calls attention to the “glass palaces” of the molecular biologists that tower over the humble old buildings inhabited by whole-animal biologists like himself. He is pleased that the cause of biological diversity is at least getting high-level attention: a day earlier, he testified on the subject before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He talks about the Encyclopedia of Life, a project he started with the help of the MacArthur Foundation.

Over lunch he describes his novel in progress, currently titled “Anthill.” Its contents have occasioned certain differences of emphasis between himself and his publisher, even though it was his editor at Norton, Robert Weil, who suggested he write it. Dr. Wilson would like ants to play a large role in the novel, given all the useful lessons that can be drawn from their behavior. The publisher sees a larger role for people and a smaller, at most ant-sized, role for ants. The novel is rotating through draft after draft as this tension is worked out.

Dr. Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes for literature, but that is no shield against a publisher’s quest for perfection. “They said, ‘You can do better than that, Ed,’ ” he recalled. “I wrote another draft. They said, ‘This is great, Ed, but we need more emotion, ambivalence.’ ” In the next draft, he plans to have the human characters stand alone, without the ants if necessary.

Looking back at the “heavy mortar fire” that rained down on him over “Sociobiology,” he said he had risked his academic career and feared for a time that he had made a fatal error. His admiration for the political courage of the Harvard faculty is not without limits; many colleagues told him they supported him, but all did so privately. Academic biologists are still so afraid of inciting similar attacks that they practice sociobiology under other names, like evolutionary psychology.

Though Dr. Wilson is a fighter when necessary, he is also a conciliator. In his most recent book, “The Creation,” he calls for scientists and religious leaders to make common cause in saving the natural life of the planet. He has addressed major meetings of Mormons and Southern Baptists to ask for their help in protecting biodiversity. Of the differences between science and religion, he says: “Stop quibbling — I’m willing to say ‘Under God’ and to hold my hand to my heart. That’s recognition of how this country evolved, and that we are using strong language to strong purpose, even if we may not agree on how the Earth was created.”

Lunch is over. He banters with the waitress, who has neglected the order for coffee. Then it is back to the ants and the writing and the endless quest to understand how the hand of evolution has shaped every aspect of life.
Click here for original article with full links.
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Most Inspiring Food Co-ops of North America

Brooklyn

There is a really interesting food co-op movement going on in Brooklyn, NY

Existing co-ops:

Park Slope
http://foodcoop.com/

Flatbush
http://greenbrooklyn.com/how-organically-sweet-it-is-flatbush-food-co-op-celebrates-grand-opening-of-new-store-triples-in-size/2008/05/16/

Developing co-ops:

Clinton Hill / Ft. Greene

http://greenbrooklyn.com/brooklyn-going-co-op-crazy-clinton-hill-ft-greene-co-op-meeting/2008/05/19/

Bay Ridge

http://www.brooklyneagle.com/categories/category.php?category_id=27&id=21405

Plenty of links and contact info to be found in those urls.

Green Brooklyn is my website/blog about all things green in Brooklyn (obviously!)…

Ithaca

I would also nominate Ithaca’s Greenstar Food Co-op as one of — if not the — best in the country.

http://www.greenstar.coop/

Colorado

Looks like the High Plains Food Coop is up and running. Their pickup locations are listed at http://www.highplainsfood.org/shop/locations.php , and include Boulder, several locations in Denver, Ft. Collins, and Colorado Springs. They operate on the “Oklahoma Plan” and received technical assistance in their startup from the Oklahoma Food Coop, and also took advantage of using our free local food coop software.

Bob Waldrop,
www.oklahomafood.coop
www.localfoodcoop.org free General Public License software to start your own local food coop

Milwaukee

We know well an inspirational food co-op. We are one of the only collectively-managed, democratically-run, nonhierarchical, volunteer-staffed cooperatives in existence. The Riverwest Co-op is the crowning accomplishment of baba Carl, who’s been a part of the cooperative movement for many decades and active in every co-op Milwaukee’s had. Our structure is his real jewel, specifically the practice of the principles above.

The Olympia Food Co-op in Washington is another extremely ethical and successful cooperative. The Park Slope Co-op in Brooklyn that another person mentioned is about as purist it gets.

Ask Carl about the Outpost Natural Foods sometime, I’m careful not to shit on them from where I stand. They are a successful cooperative that’s stood the test of time. They’ve sacrificed a lot at the alter of that supreme idol: Efficiency, spawn of Lord Profit.
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Minneapolis

Believe it or not, the Minneapolis/St. Paul area has the highest concentration of food co-ops in the country (last time I looked…). We even have a co-op of co-ops to which most of them belong: www.twincitiesfood.coop.

My personal favorite is Seward Community Co-op (www.seward.coop; Sean Doyle, GM) because their produce department rocks - all the local stuff that’s in season, well labeled. In addition, Seward is using their success to open a new LEED Gold certified store & has recently instituted a sustainability self-assessment in which they are tracking everything from waste to employee satisfaction to energy efficiency. They are also one of two co-ops piloting a new local fair trade label (www.localfairtrade.org). I love them.

Oklahoma

www.oklahomafood.coop
www.localfoodcoop.org free General Public License software to start your own local food coop

Philadelphia

Check out Weavers Way Co-op in Philadelphia. I work on their farm, where food is grown for the co-op, sold at farmers markets, donated, and sold to local cafes and restaurants. They have a very active education program where students and anyone from the public is welcome to come to the farm and learn about farming. The co-op is very popular and very successful, with a new store that just recently opened, and plans for further expanding. Check them out at:

www.weaversway.coop

Viroqua, Wisconsin

Check out Viroqua Food Coop in very rural Vernon county Wisconsin is an amazing
success story, check them out at http://viroquafood.coop/

Viroqua is a town of just over 4,000 in the second poorest county in Wisconsin,
but the Coop is an amazing little store.

Useful Book on Key Co-ops

Mark Winne, “Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty.”
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