Paul McRandle - OnEarth Magazine, from NRDC

Stopping Ocean Sprawl

The oceans that surround the U.S. create more than 2 million jobs and over $128 billion in gross domestic product annually. And with the continent thoroughly developed, we are being drawn into developing more and more of the oceans, driven by the profits from tourism, recreation, and living resources that the oceans provide. As a result, it’s beginning to look a lot like sprawl out there even without the telltale markers—the housing developments, highways and parking lots—that make up sprawl on land. Instead, “ocean sprawl” is a combination of offshore oil rigs, shipping lanes, wind farms and ever more ocean uses—and it puts increased pressure on ocean and coastal resources already under enormous strain as a result of overexploitation, habitat degradation, coastal pollution and climate change. This sprawl, and our ocean strain in general, has arisen in large part because our oceans, coasts and Great Lakes are currently governed by more than 140 laws and twenty different ...read full post

Comments (0) | September 22, 2009
Climate and Labor Disputes Unsettle the U.S. Conference of Mayors Gathering

This year’s gathering of the U.S. Conference of Mayors got to a rocky start this weekend in Providence, Rhode Island, where firemen across the state struck in support of the city's firefighters’ union in their contract disputes with Mayor David Cicilline. Joe Biden, San Francisco’s Mayor Newsom and other scheduled speakers steered clear of the conference to avoid crossing the picket line. Conference president Mayor Nickels of Seattle had vowed he wouldn’t cross picket lines and whether he did or did not by entering the conference building was unclear—he says he didn’t, the president of the union says he did.

But while the strike seethed on, the conference raised other contentious issues, including a subtle but real change in its position on climate change that embarrassed Mayor Nickels and those who have worked to keep U.S. cities ahead ...read full post

Comments (0) | June 16, 2009
New York's Newest Park: Trekking the Highline

I have to admit that I didn't have high hopes for the Highline--too many rehabbed industrial sites wind up as patchy city parks with gaudily painted girders, the occasional swingset and the uncomfortable sense that under a thin layer of topsoil lie years of toxic waste. And yet it is critical for our cities' well being that we find a way to preserve elements of their industrial fabric in the post-industrial age—not only for their historical value but for the beauty of their craftsmanship, the scale on which they were built and the vistas, both literal and metaphorical, they give us access to. London's Tate Modern is a prime example: A vast, outsized, defunct power station becomes a vast, outsized, vibrant museum with a turbine hall so large it inspires artworks such as Olafur Eliasson's artificial sun, which seemed to create its own apocalyptic weather within the hall's five stories and ...read full post

Comments (1) | June 10, 2009
No Cars, But Plenty of Life on Broadway

When you hear that Bloomberg has shut down Broadway, it sounds like the morality police have muscled in to stamp out illicit pleasures. But never fear, a previous administration already took care of that over a decade ago. If anything, the closure to vehicles of chunks of Broadway, which began two days ago, may help Times Square take tentative steps towards developing a new spirit. It may even (could it be?) turn Times Square into a place that will attract New Yorkers as much as tourists. Just not yet.
As The New York Times notes, New York’s transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn—the dynamo behind the city's new miles of bike lanes and pedestrian plazas—has drawn on Copenhagen’s years of experience turning its city center over to walkers. Sadik-Kahn's Broadway experiment is two days’ old and, for the moment, she has managed to close a series of five “plazas” ...read full post

Comments (2) | May 26, 2009