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A huge step in the right direction was taken last night by the New York State Senate when they voted to put a moratorium on hydro-fracking for one year so that there might be time for further study. New York Times Over two thirds of our Senators, including 28 Democrats and 20 Republicans, voted . . . → Read More: NYS Senate votes to ban fracking for 1 year NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard. But fracking already is in the back yard: Pennsylvania. Soon to be in New York if we do not act. Why will I fail to act? Because disaster this preposterous just can’t happen in my back yard. I can’t believe it. I can’t wrap my mind around it. Right. Tell that to . . . → Read More: Fracking in my back yard Watching the oil disaster playing out in an area of the country that feeds millions of people, we ask ourselves, why wasn’t this prevented? We know oil rigs blow up, we know that our dependence on oil creates environmental disasters year after year. How long will it be before our seas be unable to recover from . . . → Read More: Extreme energy = extreme disasters Only you and your neighbors can stop hydrofracking in Onondaga County (our drinking water’s watershed). Your government (Albany) is dysfunctional and too busy figuring out the economic mess. Think this (below) can’t happen to us? If not, what are you thinking? CAN YOU DO THIS WITH YOUR TAP WATER? from JOSHFOX on Vimeo. Read and learn: Catskill Mountain Keeper WORKING TOGETHER . . . → Read More: Can you do this with your tap water? Some time ago I started posting about our efforts to get the plastic out of our lives. One of the reasons was to avoid BPA, bisphenol-A, which is toxic and is found in water bottles, baby bottles, toys, even the lining of tin cans. All of the drinks in our household now are held only in glass: Continue reading BPA: now this is scary! Some time ago, I got to posting on giving up plastic, especially when it might touch food. Now that there are more young families moving into Eastwood, it might be a good time to revisit this idea. Plastics break down, and there really is no safe amount of plastic molecules that you’d want in your body, much less baby’s. If you don’t use it in the first place, you don’t have to even recycle it. So we like buying milk in returnable glass bottles. No chance of plastics molecules ending up in our bodies (unless the cows are somehow ingesting it) and the milk tastes better. If you don’t throw it away, but rather re-use it . . . → Read More: Beyond blue-bin recycling For all its connectivity to downtown, how is it that Syracuse University blew the exam on global warming? Last evening, people in great cities large and small throughout the world participated in Earth Hour. We decided to do the same, turned off all our lights and headed downtown, expecting to see people walking in the balmy evening, enjoying the 60-minute relief from light pollution, maybe even talking to each other in candle-lit bars and restaurants. I’m sure there has been mention of this in the press, and perhaps some members of the reading public have been to meetings about it, but I completely missed this one: Syracuse Brownfield Opportunity Area Steve Skinner, owner of the Eastwood Plaza, brought it to my attention. The big question is: opportunity for whom? And: What impact will it . . . → Read More: Syracuse Brownfield Opportunity Area For many of us living in the city, the closest we come to the power of nature is its power to give us a serious backache as we lift seemingly endless shovelsful of snow out of our driveways and off our sidewalks. It’s a fact of life in Syracuse that affects us a lot more slowly than the tornadoes, floods and fires affect other parts of the country, but one we deal with nevertheless. And it’s getting worse. Online Climate Time Machine I get a newsletter from the Organic Consumers Association. In today’s note, we are told: “NASA has launched a website that provides a dramatic visualization of temperature change, sea level rise, co2 emissions, and ice melt from the beginning of the industrial revolution to the present.” Give it a try (the link at the top . . . → Read More: How much more can we take? Here in Walkable Eastwood, we’ve known for about 150 years that it’s easy and quick to get from here to just about any place in the Syracuse metropolitan area. We have the lush green of a suburban setting but the proximity to all the necessities and many of the joys of life. This “village within the city” was developed at a time when there was no gasoline and no cars. Just feet and public transportation, unless you happened to have a horse. This is old urbanism at its finest, residential and business development on a human scale. Continue reading “Save The Planet: Live In a City” We’re avid readers of Anthony Bourdain’s books. Two of them have impacted our family somewhat dramatically. The first was Kitchen Confidential. Aside from being just a great read, it was also the third book our then-early-adolescent son read. He read it cover to cover, but it was at the third chapter that he came running to announce that he wanted to be a chef. Why? He pointed to the title of Chapter 3: “Food is Sex”. That did it. A couple culinary degrees under his belt, he’s now in charge of the mignardises in a restaurant in New York. But the book that continues to inspire me is A Cook’s Tour, and specifically the chapter, “Where Food Comes From“. Read it, and you’ll understand why he says that where our food comes from is not always pretty. But it’s the larger concept behind that chapter that makes me think a lot and sometimes do strange things. Strange thing #1: I make coffee in a 70-year-old vacuum coffee pot. How’s it going with the reusable grocery bags, folks? Some time ago, I started blithering about the switch from plastic to something safe and reusable. It was oh so hard to remember to carry the danged things into the grocery store. Sometimes I even forced myself to walk twenty yards back out to the parking lot – in the snow! – to fetch them. Oh my. Continue reading The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is going to bite us. Lots of opportunities to clean up Eastwood this year! Here’s one in the park: Join your neighbors at the Take a drive down West Onondaga Street and notice the amazing architecture. One mansion after another, some in great shape, but far too many broken up into apartments, turned into slums. At one time, these were the McMansions of their time. The same holds true for much of James St. Think this couldn’t happen out . . . → Read More: The next slum is not in the city That’s not my title. It’s the title of this article. I’m shocked. I’m thrilled. I’m in the USA. Oops. We weren’t the first to do it! Dang! Oh well. We can do it soon, right? We can do it with panache. We can do it fashionably, with all of Hollywood to promote it and all of the government behind it. Continue reading China bans the use of plastic bags No-one creates a blog like this one if they don’t love the city in which they live. But not all the news is good. Syracuse is being used, fairly, as an example of environmental racism. Did you know that we were featured in Ms. Magazine last spring? Take a look. From that article:
I don’t know about you, but I find this appalling. Continue reading Syracuse: nationally known for environmental racism What a brilliant idea! Beautiful cloth holiday gift bags. We’ve all used those paper ones, even recycled them. But think how much longer a cloth one will last. Give a gift – maybe some Chicobag bags?- and bag it in a bag they can use over and over! Continue reading Recyclable Holiday Gift Bags |
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