Living the dream in Copenhagen. (Photo by Mikael Colville Andersen.)

Once was that American cities competed to look more like Detroit, with gleaming lanes of highway stretching as far as the eye could see. Any more, it’s a race to imitate Copenhagen, the Danish capital where 36 percent of residents commute to work via bicycle.

So it seems, at least, when looking at today’s announcement by the League of American Bicyclists of the latest — and largest — round of official Bicycle Friendly Communities in the U.S. Some of the cities on the list will come as no surprise: Portland, San Francisco, and Chicago are here, as is Missoula, Mont., where 7 percent of residents bike to work, versus the 0.6 percent national average. But so are cities like Baltimore, Cincinnati, and Cottonwood, Ariz. Twenty-five more cities applied for bicycle-friendly status, but were denied.

The league hands down its Bicycle Friendly certification with a multi-tier, Olympics-like grading system: Cities can earn bronze, silver, gold, and platinum. The awards, which have been around since 1996, recognize cities that both promote cycling as a means of transportation and actively work to make cycling safer. A panel of national experts brought in by the league and local enthusiasts (bike shop owners, advocacy group leaders) assesses applications along five main criteria: engineering, education, encouragement, evaluation and planning, and enforcement.

The best cities, League of American Bicyclists President Andy Clarke says, have action plans in place to ensure that residents have opportunities to ride. They have city-sponsored bike rides, and networks of bike trails, lanes, and sharrows that connect them to where they need to go.

Louisville, Ky., is one city that’s done what Clarke advocates. In 2005, then-Mayor Jerry Abramson held the city’s first bike summit and vowed to make Louisville a gold-level Bicycle Friendly City by 2015. The city then set up bike facilities at traffic-heavy locations downtown, installed eight miles of striped cycling lanes, hosted community rides on Memorial Day and Labor Day, and raised $20,000 for bike education classes in 2006. In 2007, the city earned bronze-level certification one year ahead of schedule, and continues its cycling advocacy today.

Clarke says many of the winners are beneficiaries of some sort of cycling crusader or organization pushing hard for reforms, enforcement, and acknowledgment of bikers. “Having a champion like a mayor or city councilperson who set outs measurable targets and goals that you can hold yourself accountable to — that seems to make the biggest difference,” Clarke says.

One sticking point for the league is measuring how well local police enforce laws designed to protect cyclists. A recent study [PDF] conducted by Johns Hopkins University researchers found that cyclists in bronze-level certified Baltimore are routinely passed by vehicles traveling within the three-feet buffer mandated by law.

And while the latest round of awards is music to many bikers’ ears, “I will be the first to admit we have a long, long way to go,” says Clarke. Even Portland, Ore., which gets a platinum certification from the league, “would be a pretty crappy Dutch city when it comes to cycling,” Clarke says.

No guarantee that the bike you rent will be this stylin', unfortunately. (Photo by Velovotee.)

Forget riding your friend’s handlebars as he blindly navigates a crowded city street — unless you’re into that sort of thing. Thanks to a new peer-to-peer bike-sharing website called Spinlister, you may soon be able to rent a bike almost anywhere.

The brainchild of co-founders Will Dennis and Jeff Noh, a pair of 20-somethings living in New York City, Spinlister is like peer-to-per car-sharing services such as RelayRides, only for bikes. Bike owners snap photos of their two-wheeled trophies and post them to Spinlister’s online marketplace, along with the type of bike, the price per day, and the pick-up location. For those in search of a rental, it’s as simple as punching in their location, selecting the ride they want, making an online payment/reservation via credit card, and coordinating a meet-up time with the bike owner.

In addition to individual listers, Spinlister also works with bike rental shops. And while right now the service itself is only online in San Francisco and the Big Apple, Dennis says there will soon be nearly 1,000 bikes available for rent. And that’s just in the barely two weeks’ time since the official launch on April 1.

“We’ve got some great responses so far,” says Dennis.

Lest you think an online bike rental service screams flannel-wearing hipsters, let’s not forget what’s happening to millennials all over the U.S.: They don’t care about cars anymore. (See: the writer of this article.) As the cost of driving increases — gas, insurance, plus the autos themselves — and they spend more of their time in the online sphere, the youth of today are looking to alternative modes of transportation. Forget Rebel Without a Cause. Now it’s, “Hey, has anyone seen my bus pass?”

Or, with Spinlister: “Hey, I’m in New York for the summer and need a set of wheels.” That was Dennis’ predicament: He spent last summer in New York City — at a student start-up incubator, no less — but says there was nothing “that served a long-term rental purpose for me, and short-term [bike] rentals were expensive.”

Dennis has been working with Noh on Spinlister full-time since graduating from college in Los Angeles in December. The company takes a cut from each transaction: 12.5 percent from both the lister and renter, which goes toward credit card processing, the company, and Spinlister’s insurance policy to make sure you don’t get left in the lurch if some schmuck steals or wrecks your bike.

Of course, while bicycle theft is a real concern, Dennis doesn’t foresee it being an issue. “It’s way easier to steal a bike off the street than meet a person and not come back with it,” he says.

As of now, the two have been accepting listings in other cities — more than 80 different sites in 30 countries, which they’ll gradually roll out and make live over the next few months. They’re looking at possible expansion into Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Austin next.

And even though many cities are instigating officially sanctioned bike share programs, there’s not always a convenient pick-up and drop-off point — and most charge by the hour. And there’s something else, too, says Dennis.

The overarching goal of Spinlister is to create a community — to get bicyclists together with their own kind. Eventually, the company plans to build in mandatory Facebook connect and phone number-trading components to the online site. “I went out to dinner with a guy from South Africa I rented a bike to,” Dennis says.

Ladies … can I interest any of you in a bike-up theater date?

Planting trees in West Philly. (Photo by Danielle Clarke.)

One Saturday in November, a few hundred volunteers descended upon parks and creek banks in and around Philadelphia to plant more than 2,000 trees. That day’s plantings were just a piece of a broader initiative to plant 300,000 trees in the City of Brotherly Love by 2015. And that initiative is but one part of a much larger program spearheaded by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society that aims to plug 1 million trees into the ground across 13 counties in southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. The mid-Atlantic is seriously putting the moves on Mother Nature.

As cities around the country jockey to be the King of Green, mayors and community organizations have been eager to claim their place as the next urban Johnny Appleseed. (Upon becoming mayor in 2008, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter declared the city would become the greenest in America, and established an office of sustainability to show everyone he meant business.) But despite all the work days and feel-good volunteerism, urban forests are losing ground, in part because many, if not most, trees planted in cities die early deaths.

“Trees are so essential to our life, health, and safety,” says Caryn Bosson, a communications manager for the Los Angeles-based TreePeople, founded in 1973 for the express purpose of using trees to make cities more sustainable. Just one tree planted near a home has the potential to reduce heating and cooling costs by as much as $2,500.

If you can keep the tree alive, that is. “The planting of trees is a sexy thing to do — people want to plant trees,” say Ryan Allen, TreePeople’s tree care manager. “Getting them to come back within five years is tricky.”

That first five years is perhaps the most crucial part of a tree’s lifespan. A variety of factors can kill off an urban tree relatively quickly: Transplant shock to the roots of trees dug up at nurseries leaves trees susceptible to insects and disease; damaged tree roots, often the result of transplanting, can result in water stress where a tree loses water at a faster rate than it absorbs water. For city trees, vehicle traffic, air pollution, and street design can make healthy growth even more difficult. A report published in the journal Cities and the Environment [PDF] two years ago estimated that between 34 and 99 percent of young trees die off within the first five years.

A study published early this year by the journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening [PDF] showed that tree cover across the country is declining by roughly 4 million trees each year. Of the 20 cities studied by the U.S. Forest Service, 17 had experienced net losses in tree cover, while 16 saw net gains in impervious cover — pavement, rooftops, and anything else that doesn’t allow rain to seep into the soil.

To stop this backsliding, organizations like TreePeople are trying to get volunteers to care for trees after the planting festivities are over. But that’s the unsexy part of urban tree planting. It’s far easier to get people to come out to plant if you have a gaggle of cheerleaders in tow, or if tree planting culminates in a huge event, like when the NFL planted thousands of Floridian mangroves in anticipation of the 2007 Super Bowl in Miami.

How do we make urban tree plantings more than mascot-filled publicity stunts?

“Our starting point around any involvement with trees is to start with the stewardship,” says Maitreyi Roy, the senior vice president of programs and planning with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS). Before trees are even planted, she says, people are taught what it takes to keep trees alive. To that effect, the PHS has some 3,600 Tree Tenders, 2,500 in Philadelphia alone, who not only make annual checks of trees, but also teach volunteers about watering, pruning, and other tree-care techniques. Last year, Tree Tenders trained city staff and created a Tree Team for continuing tree maintenance in city parks. Also in use is a texting system that blasts volunteers with information on when to water trees in drought conditions.

“The goal here is to create a decentralized system so that the drive at the grassroots [level] fuels stewardship on an ongoing basis,” Roy says.

At L.A.-based TreePeople, community tree care teams serve a similar role. They educate volunteers, organized into Green Teams, on how to water, prune, and mulch trees, and then demonstrate at sites around the cities before helping Green Teams develop a maintenance plan according to a tree care checklist — pruning, watering, weeding, removing stakes and ties, and so on — specifically created for planting volunteers. In July, TreePeople kicks off its citizen arborist program, which will offer six weeks of “really in-depth education and planning,” Allen says, and is based on the International Society of Arboriculture’s certification program.

In the end, however, the simple trick to taking care of urban trees might be removing the gimmicks from tree planting altogether: Don’t let tree planters wash their hands of the whole affair after a few hours of work on a weekend afternoon. Allen suggests a solution, one that guides TreePeople’s involvement with the urban forest: “We’re not going to plant trees with you — schools, companies — if you’re not going to make the commitment to take care of the trees afterwards.”

Photo by JB London.

Since gaining a foothold in the U.S. in the early 2000s, bolstered by pop culture (think: the opening scene of Casino Royale), parkour’s popularity has grown steadily, if slowly, in this country. Numerous informal organizations promote and teach this art of urban acrobatics, and a proliferation of YouTube videos show traceurs “freerunning” through the cityscape.

Still, many cities view parkour enthusiasts as lawless street ruffians, akin to skateboarders and street artists. In Manhattan’s Battery Park area, a “No Parkour” rule slaps practitioners with a $300 fine. In Hollister, Calif., anyone seen doing parkour is charged with trespassing. In November, the city of Margate, Fla., just north of Miami, banned the sport from all city parks, citing liability concerns. Mayor Pam Donovan said she thinks the sport is “dangerous and I’m never going to change my mind.”

Gradually, however, the sport seems to be gaining some acceptance — as a tourist spectacle, if nothing else. Parkour competitions featuring professional traceurs have been around for a few years: The Red Bull-sponsored Art of Motion events are big both in Europe and the U.S. But could street parkour, like street art, come out of the shadows and become an economic boon for cities?

This November, the city of Miami will find out when it hosts the first large-scale, international, amateur parkour event in the U.S. Some 125 freerunners from 40 countries will descend on the city for the three-day Cross Urban Scramble. A parkour arena in Bayfront Park will house singles and team competitions. Other activities will include a film festival, rock climbing, and an open forum about parkour insurance and safety.

Roch Nakajima, the co-founder of Parkulture, the organization sponsoring the event, says the goal is to bring a “global perspective” to the sport in the United States — already, teams from Palestine, South Africa, and Russia are scheduled to compete. But he also hopes the event will be accompanied by a substantial infusion of cash, from tourists and locals alike, earning it some much needed credibility among city officials.

Two recruiters from Cirque du Soleil will help judge the competition, Nakajima says, and Parkulture is currently negotiating sponsorships with two branches of the Armed Forces. Still, he admits, getting buy-in from City Hall is tough when “you’re kind of a new sport trying to establish yourself out there.”

Indeed, parkour aficionados have to do a lot of explaining.

Ask Derek Klein, the 25-year-old founder of Miami Parkour, to define his sport, and you’re likely to get hit with a one-sentence apophasis. “We’re not kids throwing ourselves off of rooftops,” he says.

Developed by a soldier’s son and in use by the French military for two decades, parkour “has deep roots in being able to help others,” Klein says. “If you’re climbing a wall in order to help someone who’s dangling off a ledge, you don’t want to act reckless and get injured.”

As unlikely as that might seem, this isn’t Homer Simpson and Ned Flanders doing somersaults atop cars driving on a busy freeway. Klein and the roughly 100 members of his group pull some remarkable stunts, and the serious ones claim to live by an ethic like those you find in martial arts.

“Parkour concentrates on this all around fitness idea of being strong in order to be useful,” Klein says, “and then to know your limits in order to know what you can do with out hesitation.”

In Europe, many cities make room for the sport in special “parkour parks,” similar to skate parks, where people can learn basic skills and hone their moves. Westminster, England’s park is purportedly the largest in the world.

On this side of the pond, Celerity Park in Converse, Texas, on the outskirts of San Antonio, was gunning for the title of first dedicated parkour park in the U.S., but plans have apparently stalled.

For now, the Miami area appears to be on the leading edge. In Margate, where officials banned parkour in November, Klein says that city officials have given traceurs a claim to an old roller derby rink, and are considering a proposal to turn it into a parkour park.

Whether it is a parkour park or an international competition, the major hurdle is insurance, says Nakajima, the organizer of the Cross Urban Scramble. “We are a litigious society,” he says. “There are no benchmarks for parkour that insurance companies have — no risk management plan.”

Still, Nakajima is optimistic that, in this age of X-Games-style stunt shows, he’ll find companies willing to cover his event. Perhaps then the sport will finally vault into the American mainstream. “As long as you get the insurance,” Nakajima says, “cities really don’t care.”

Photo: Solé Bicycles

As head of business development for Solé Bicycles, Standley is one part of a five-man team bent on bringing fixed-gear bicycles to the masses. Fixies, as they’re affectionately known, are bicycles at their most basic: frame, wheels, pedals, seat, and handlebars. Whereas most bikes have a “freewheel” system that allows the wheels to spin independently of the pedals, on a fixie, if the bike is moving, your feet are too. This makes for bikes that are simple, lightweight, and low maintenance, although they’re not well suited for tackling hilly terrain Tour de France-style.

“Fixies were big in the ’80s and kind of died out. Now it’s sort of this trendy thing that’s starting to come back,” Standley says.

Indeed. In Seattle, there’s a dude who peddles pies from one. Credit bike messengers in New York City for the resurgence. A fixie’s ideal for shuttling a parcel through traffic-clogged city streets or jetting across campus.

It was the appearance of fixies around the University of Southern California alongside skateboards and beach cruisers that inspired Jake Medwell and Jonathan Shriftman to found Solé Bicycles two years ago, when they were still students. At that time, it was more common to either purchase a custom fixed-gear bike — which could be costly — or rig together your own fixie by stripping down a standard road bike. Over lunch one afternoon, Medwell and Shriftman decided they wanted to build fixies and sell them at prices the typical college student could afford.

A $15,000 grant won through a competition sponsored by Inc. magazine allowed the duo to get the company up and running. They traveled to China to meet with a manufacturer and design the Solé fixie prototype, and placed an initial order for 200 bikes. The first bikes, which they sold for $200 apiece, quickly evaporated. (Note to readers: We originally stated that the bikes sold for $80 each. That is what it cost to manufacture them. Apologies for the error.)

Today, Solé sells out an 850-bicycle order each business quarter. Medwell, Shriftman, and three new employees, including Standley, have shipped bikes to every state. They have distributors in Mexico and Puerto Rico, and are working to get Solé into the British isles too.

Although they haven’t deviated much from the original concept, a Solé will now cost you $349. Standley says that the price is still something “college kids can afford,” which is the main reason Solé builds the cycles overseas; the company now uses a Taiwan-based manufacturer, Headline Development — the same company that produces Huffy bikes. “There isn’t really anywhere in the U.S. where you can make ‘em that cheap,” Standley says.

You can get a fixie cheaper. A quick search on the Interwebs turns up a Schwinn single-speed bike for $190, as well as another company started up by a pack of 20-something entrepreneurs, Pure Fix Cycles, whose bikes start at $325. But Standley stands by his product. “Our frame — everything — is different from other fixies,” he says. Solé frames are composed of hi-tensile steel, and the entire thing is TIG-welded. A Solé weighs just 26 pounds, where a similar Schwinn comes in at 41 pounds. Solé riders also have the option of adding freewheel, turning their fixies into single-speed cycles.

So far, the formula seems to be working. Solé is now exploring doing pop-up shows in New York City, Chicago, and Austin. Street artist Gregory Siff featured the bikes in a gallery show in Beverly Hills. A “flash sale” on Gilt.com had 100 Solé fixies sold in 14 minutes; another on Fab.com sold 100 fixies in seven minutes. Even Whoopi Goldberg rides a Solé fixie. (Eat it, GM.)

But ultimately, it’s not the cool kids that Solé is targeting. “We’re not really focusing on the trendier crowd that would traditionally ride a fixie,” Standley says. “We’re trying to put our bikes in the hands of people who wouldn’t normally buy a fixie: college kids [and] high school kids.”

Perhaps, ultimately, that’s the real appeal of Solé’s product: taking something that used to be hipster trendy and converting it into something accessible to the masses. Whatever it is, the bikes seem to sell themselves, says 21-year-old marketing chief Ben Petraglia. Sales have been driven by word-of-mouth and through online brands like Fab.com and Gilt.

And anyway, the guys have bigger things to think about on this late December day — like three days of moshing in 20-degree temperatures. “We’re gonna party in Tahoe,” Standley says. “It’s gonna be awesome.”

Photo: Iscan

The Mariners, along with roughly 50 other sports teams in baseball, the NBA, NHL, NFL, NCAA, and several other professional leagues, are members of the Green Sports Alliance, a nonprofit organization formed in March. The alliance was created to encourage sports companies to clean up their acts — and to “use the nonpartisan status of professional sports to advance the environmental message,” said Allen Hershowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, where he founded and now directs the council’s sports-greening initiative.

But for the fan just looking to get his hands on some friggin crackerjacks and a beer — well, who wants a bag of dirt? Is the message getting through? And for all their greening efforts, are sports teams making a dent in the climate problem?

I went to high school on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Even though my home team, the Eagles, led the sports world’s charge toward greening the games in 2003, I had my doubts. Making a stadium more eco-friendly and convincing fans to embrace and spread that message themselves are two entirely different things. I balked at the idea.

To test my theory, I asked my Facebook pals if they cared that sports teams are going green.

“I’d rather them spend money on winning than recycling,” wrote one buddy.

“I don’t go to a game and pay money to go green,” said another. “I do it to enjoy myself and watch my team win.”

“I probably wouldn’t really notice if they ‘went green,’” replied a third. “I would notice if my ticket price went up.”

Alright, so maybe it’s just the company I keep. But what relevant research I could scrape together didn’t help the cause. A 2005 Gallup poll showed that three-quarters of men are sports fans, but in a recent study by OgilvyEarth, 82 percent of responders said they viewed “going green” as girly. Heh. More yards lost for Team Green.

Finally, I took my question to Max Tcheyan at the sports news website Bleacher Report. He said the sight of a composting bin like the ones at Safeco Field probably wouldn’t get him to start composting at home, but it would “cause a sort of disruption in my thinking and hesitation on my part.”

As in: What’s that doing here?

But that may be the ticket. “People do not go to sporting events to get educated about the environment,” Hershowitz admitted. “But when people go to baseball games and they see [the] environment celebrated … they see ribbons going around the stadium saying ‘please recycle’ … what’s happening is, environmental stewardship is being communicated as routine. It doesn’t have to be explicitly shouted at people.”

To the Green Sports Alliance’s credit, its member teams have some measurable progress to report when it comes to cleaning up their venues. The Mariners now recycle or compost 80 percent of their food and beverage waste, says Scott Jenkins, vice president of ballpark operations for the team, and also board chairman of the Green Sports Alliance. “We’ve cut our electrical use by over 30 percent, cut our water use by over 20 percent, cut our natural gas by up to 60 percent depending on the month, and we’ve saved about $1.5 million over a five year period.”

On the national level, Major League Baseball has instituted a Green Track system for measuring energy and water usage, recycling, and paper purchasing among the teams, and the league also awards a Green Glove award to the franchise that recycles the most each year. (The San Francisco Giants have won the title three years running.)

Still, teams in football, basketball, baseball, and hockey continue to pump between 179 and 716 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each game. (Hershowitz notes that 72 percent of all the energy powering arenas in the U.S. comes from fossil fuels, while solar and wind power makes up just 2 percent.) The alliance clearly has a long way to go.

“In an ideal world, every sports facility would be LEED certified … that’s just not in the cards,” says Jenkins. But he maintains that incremental progress toward getting greener is preferable to doing nothing at all.

As for reaching the fans, maybe what we really need are a couple of high-profile players to speak up about the climate. Athletes, especially ones playing for winning teams, are often revered — along with the products or causes they endorse — regardless of whatever else they’ve done. (Remember when Eagles quarterback Michael Vick was electrocuting pit bulls?)

Then again, the fans in the stands spitting their light beer over a bad call by the ref may surprise us. In September, University of Nebraska-Lincoln fans booed an ad for the proposed Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline that appeared in the Cornhuskers’ Memorial Stadium. The university’s athletic director ultimately banned all Keystone advertisements. Last week, President Obama sent federal regulators back to the drawing board with the pipeline, a move that could ultimately kill it.

For now, it seems, it’s too early to throw the red challenge flag on greening the games.

Photo: thisisbossi

“Do you know anything about the solar panels?” I ask a group of about 15 Occupy D.C. protestors who are holding the day’s first “general assembly” outside the tent.

“I don’t know anything about solar panels,” replies a woman with muddy pants and a head bandanna. “But if you could help us carry some boxes, I can get someone who might know.”

We maneuver deeper into the encampment, past a makeshift mess hall, guys with long, gray beards in sleeping bags on the concrete walkways, and rows of multi-colored Coleman tents. Signs shouting “Occupy D.C.!” and “People are a good investment!” are strewn about.

The solar panels and media tent.Photo: Andrew ZaleskiEventually, the woman directs me toward the media tent, constructed from sheets of plywood and blue tarps held up by poles and cut in the center by a tree. Just outside, a small array of four solar panels is propped up on an adjustable rack and two black plant potters. It’s a small statement of independence from the energy giants amid a chaotic many-voiced movement.

The idea to bring sun power to Occupy D.C. was hatched by Glenn Hurowitz, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, where he does writing and advocacy work on environment and climate issues. (Hurowitz is a longtime contributor to Grist.) “I saw a story in the New York Times that mentioned [Occupy Wall Street] was running on gas generators,” Hurowitz says. “It didn’t seem right that a movement that’s supposed to change the world should be propping up big oil.”

So when Hurowitz ran into Greenpeace Director Phil Radford at a whiskey tasting in Virginia, he suggested that the group send the Rolling Sunlight — a biodiesel-fueled truck kitted out with 256 square-feet of photovoltaic cells — up to the New York City protests. Then Hurowitz pitched a similar idea to the protestors at Occupy D.C.

To raise the $1,375 to purchase the panels, Hurowitz set up a fundraising campaign on WePay, and donations came in from a slew of individual donors. Last Friday night, the general assembly agreed to donate an additional $250 if costs warranted it. The panels were ordered off of Amazon and delivered Tuesday to McPherson Square, where they were set up on Wednesday.

When I arrive at the media tent Thursday morning, though, the only one on the scene who knows anything about the solar panels is Kelly Mears, a 24-year-old software developer who quit his job to join the protest movement. (Come the evening, he assures me, more occupiers who worked to acquire the solar panels will be on hand.) Mears, who has camped in McPherson Square for 20 days, says he handles “all of the tech stuff here.”

“The true Occupiers are very, very excited about this,” he says, with a nod to the panels.

Mears’ contraption.Photo: Andrew ZaleskiThe photovoltaic system itself is 120 watts, and it’s used to charge an external battery that is then hooked up to an inverter, into which electronic gadgets can be plugged. When charged, Mears estimates that the battery can “probably run a few laptops for about 12 hours.” He shows me a contraption he has rigged with a baby stroller that will allow him to take his computer (perched on the shade canopy) and a battery (where the baby would usually sit) along on marches so he can do a live stream online.

The trouble is, the tech crew is missing an adapter necessary for connecting the panels to the battery. So they’re charging the battery with their gas-powered generator instead. “Right now, we’re not using the output in the smartest way,” Mears says.

Nick Bryner, a 27-year-old, fourth-year law student at George Washington University who assisted with the solar panel installation, says that even when the solar array is connected, “It’s not going to be enough to cover all the energy needs.” But that, he argues, is the lesson of solar energy. “It’s a transition, but it’s something we need to start building in more.”

Other Occupy locations have turned to solar energy as a means of powering their protests. Occupy Boston has devised a solar-charging USB box to keep cell phones juiced up. The Rolling Sunlight did make it to Wall Street, where it powered the media center there. But three days in, it had to be driven back to D.C. for repairs, according to Greenpeace media officer Molly Dorozenski. There was apparently some sort of charging problem with the batteries.

Hurowitz says there are natural overlaps between the protests and environmental issues. “Nobody is a better symbol of … corporate greed and corruption than the oil and coal industries,” he says. “For a lot of people in the Occupy movement, part of creating a better world is making sure we have a living planet.”

Of course, Hurowitz isn’t the first to make the case that the green movement is a logical addition to the nationwide Occupy movement. Environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org (and Grist board member), stated defiantly at Occupy Wall Street, “The reason that it’s so great that we’re occupying Wall Street is because Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere.”

But for now, at least, environmental concerns don’t seem to be bubbling to the surface of a movement that’s largely fueled by economic woes — and populated by a wide range of individuals who bring their own agendas and ideas to the encampment.

“Fuck the system!” yells an occupier with a New York Jets hoodie, Dickies pants, and a black head bandanna, walking over to the media tent, where I’m talking to Mears. I’m about to ask the newcomer about the solar panels positioned directly behind him when he launches into a diatribe about corrupt cops, crooked bankers, and how “nonviolence only goes so fucking far.”

Mears casts me a sideways glance. “It’s never going to be a utopia.”