The Royte Stuff
Hint: It’s probably the wrong things -- because by focusing on recycling, we risk missing the bigger picture.
As an eager consumer, and sometime producer, of garbage-related writing, I was thrilled to be invited to provide a blurb for Robin Nagle’s recently released Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. Plunging into the book with the zeal of a dumpster diver, I emerged utterly charmed by Nagle’s precise and often hilarious descriptions of how people function -- or not...
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In the midst of the domestic energy boom, livestock on farms near oil-and-gas drilling operations nationwide have been quietly falling sick and dying. While scientists have yet to isolate cause and effect, many suspect chemicals used in drilling and hydrofracking (or “fracking”) operations are poisoning animals through the air, water, or soil.
Earlier this year, Michelle Bamberger, an Ithaca, New York, veterinarian, and Robert Oswald, a professor of molecular medicine at Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine, published the first and only peer-reviewed report to suggest a link between...
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Big storms generally don’t faze honeybees. When temperatures drop or rise, when wind wails, or when rain falls in sheets, bees simply hunker down in their hives, huddle up, and self-regulate. And so during Hurricane Sandy, bees in New York City’s inland areas abided. The apiaries of East New York Farm survived (with extra weights set atop their hives), as did those of...
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Five days after Hurricane Sandy, my local greenmarket in Brooklyn was in nearly full flower. Everywhere I went, citizens were asking food producers, or their hired hands, “Is your farm OK?” Largely, they were. (The fishmonger was absent, dealing with storm-related damage to his boats.) Kira Kinney of Evolutionary Organics, a small farm 90 miles north of the city, told me how strange it felt "to be here as if nothing happened when, to the south, there’s devastation. Last year it was me.” In the wake of Irene, the only thing Kinney was selling were pastel drawings of the vegetables that were underwater in her...
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A day after the winds of Hurricane Sandy died down, I cycled down to Brooklyn’s soggy waterfront to sort out the winners and losers that any natural disaster leaves behind.
The Red Hook neighborhood smelled like oil; everywhere, gas-powered generators running electric sump pumps roared. Greasy hoses spurted murky water onto cobblestone streets, and vast piles of storm-wracked household chattel -- clothing, furniture, electronics -- lined the sidewalks, ready for disposal. A high-end grocery store was...
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Our cameras had a tough time getting into the Hunts Point food market. So do local farmers, who have to sell their produce at the nearby Wholesale Green-market instead. PHOTO: ROB HOWARD
By the time the sun had risen over the Bronx River, the crush of delivery trucks at the Hunts Point market -- the largest wholesale produce market in the world (which you can read about in my latest OnEarth cover story) -- had slowed to a tolerable roar. Walking the length of a loading dock a third of a mile long, I no longer...
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I recently ordered a grilled cheese in an airport restaurant, but along with the sandwich came a napkin, wrapped and taped around a plastic fork and knife that I didn’t want or need. The sandwich was deliciously greasy, so I ended up using the napkin, but I felt bad about the accompanying utensils that are now headed for a landfill. (Sure, I could have kept them for later use, but that would merely delay their trip to the dump.)
It was a tiny moment of garbage guilt, out of many, but I remembered it when I read about the efforts of...
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Environmentalists in the United States have long pushed to keep compostable organics -- yard waste, food scraps, paper and the like -- out of landfills. Diverting this material conserves landfill space; it avoids the generation of methane, which occurs when organic material breaks down in the absence of oxygen; and it allows these compostables to be put to beneficial use. (Learn more about these efforts at www.cool2012.com, a project of the Grassroots Recycling Network.)
Out in front of the U.S. on this particular issue is the European Union, which has issued a directive...
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After nearly eight years of litigation, Syngenta, the maker of atrazine, the most widely used weed killer in the world, has settled a lawsuit filed by water utilities in a half-dozen Midwestern states.
The utilities’ beef? They were paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to remove the chemical from drinking water. Regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, atrazine has been linked with low birth weight, birth defects, and other reproductive problems when consumed at levels below the federal standard. The EPA is currently reviewing atrazine’s safety: read NRDC’s take on the contaminant...
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Today is National Bike to Work Day, which may help explain why you saw more bicycles on the road this morning than you normally do. It's a good opportunity for evangelization by urban cycling advocates, who often make the case that the addition of more bicycle lanes and other bike-friendly infrastructure cuts air pollution by getting commuters and other residents out of their cars.
I’ve often wondered how this could be accurately measured. I’m a long-time New York City bike rider, and I would certainly love to see more bike-friendly infrastructure, but not one of my bike trips has ever replaced a car trip. (I’m guilty of...
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