This has to be the most amusing beekeeping story to come out of Brooklyn in at least a few weeks: A beekeeper in the gentrifying Red Hook neighborhood finds her bees returning from their foraging with strange red markings. She hunts for a source and finds her way to a Maraschino cherry factory. Mystery, whimsy, and a musing about cultural divides ensue. Susan Dominus reports for The New York Times:

Of course, it was the foragers — the adventurers, the wild waggle dancers, the social networkers incessantly buzzing about their business — who were showing up with mysterious stripes of color. Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.

An acquaintance, only joking, suggested the unthinkable: Maybe the bees were hitting the juice – maraschino cherry juice, that sweet, sticky stuff sloshing around vats at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company over on Dikeman Street in Red Hook.

“I didn’t want to believe it,” said Ms. [Cerise] Mayo, a soft-spoken young woman who has long been active in the slow-food movement. She found it particularly hard to believe that the bees would travel all the way from Governors Island to gorge themselves on junk food. “Why would they go to the cherry factory,” she said, “when there’s a lot for them to forage right there on the farm?”

Photo: Mark Mishler

Further investigation finds the bees are in fact tippling from the syrupy cherries factory. Which raises the troubling question of whether animals have the discipline to choose “natural” foods over junk:

It seems natural, by now, for humans to prefer the unnatural, as if we ourselves had been genetically modified to choose artificially flavored strawberry candy over strawberries, or crunchy orange “cheese” puffs over a piece of actual cheese. But when bees make the same choice, it feels like a betrayal to our sense of how nature should work. Shouldn’t they know better? Or, perhaps, not know enough to know better?

Anyone who’s seen a dog grovel for table scraps (or a bear steal a pic-a-nic basket) can vouch that animals are perfectly amenable to junk food.

The Times piece takes a stab at connecting bees to the Larger Issue of neighborhood culture clashes:

A story of the perils of urban farming, this is also a story of the careful two-step of gentrification. Red Hook embodies so much of Brooklyn culture — an infatuation with the borough’s old ways, just so long as those do not actually impinge on the modish design and values.

The maraschino cherries that emerge from the Dell’s factory have probably graced thousands of retro-chic cocktails and sundaes in Red Hook itself, or at least in Williamsburg. Finding some solution to the maraschino juice bee crisis — to all urban clashes of culture — is part of the project of New York, a wildly creative endeavor in and of itself.

It’s a nice reminder that not all urban dilemmas are discouraging; some are downright funny.

Rumors have been floating around for a while, but on Monday the unfortunate fact became public: the sustainability news and advocacy site Worldchanging is shutting down. The 501c3 non-profit will dissolve by the end of the year, though the hope is to preserve its seven-year online archive.

A note on the site says the organization had grown almost completely dependent on revenue from the speaking fees of co-founder and editor Alex Steffen:

Why is this happening? Worldchanging readers were generous over the years and an important part of our ongoing operations, but we were never able to secure major foundation support, so Worldchanging relied most heavily on income generated from Alex Steffen’s speaking engagements (Alex gave more than 400 talks over the past five years) and the Worldchanging book. The strenuous travel schedule it takes to deliver that many talks, though, was unsustainable, both personally for Alex and in terms of the impact it had on Worldchanging’s ability to develop new work.

At Grist, we’ll be pouring one out for our Seattle neighbors. Alex and Worldchanging have been the best sort of competitors a news org can hope for — they’ve highlighted and questioned our work; served as occasional collaborators (Alex and David Roberts conducted a monster three-part interview a few years ago); and pushed some important ideas closer to the mainstream.

Alex’s chief contribution has been promoting “bright green” environmentalism through the website, international lectures, a TED talk, and a two-part Seattle presentation that prompted the city council to adopt the goal, on paper at least, of carbon neutrality.

If “dark green” environmentalism is about making do with less — smaller houses, colder showers, fewer daily indulgences — the “bright green” promise is that, through technology, design, and a careful assessment of what we care about most, we can build sustainable places that are more sociable and pleasant than the neighborhoods most of us live in now. In short, walkable, resilient places can be fun.

Alex’s presentations use images and aphorisms that make this much more vivid than my rambling here suggests. “People don’t want the drill; they want the hole in the wall,” is his way of illustrating the wisdom of neighborhood tool-sharing libraries.

Hammarby Sjostad neighborhood, Stockholm, SwedenPhoto: ccfoto.se

He also recognized, before much of the environmental movement did, that cities are hotbeds of innovation, leadership, and people who have internalized a sustainability ethic. When I talked to him last winter for a story on the post-Copenhagen strategy for climate groups, he put hope not in self-identified activists and environmentalists, but in people working and volunteering in areas like architecture, design, planning, community development, housing, building, local energy, local food, and alternative transportation. The U.S. Senate may be inept and the U.N. climate treaty process may be obsolete, he said, but the good work of people figuring out local solutions goes on.

Alex will continue giving public talks, and a new edition of the org’s book, Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, comes out in March. It’ll be worth tracking down.

A hefty new investigation from the Center for Public Integrity takes the Energy Department to task for giving stimulus (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) funding to industrial polluters while waiving requirements that they conduct environmental-impact reviews.

It’s an important, substantial report, but it glosses over the Obama administration’s central dilemma with the stimulus: It’s difficult to spend money both quickly and smartly.

The administration, with the support of mainstream economists, decided it should spend stimulus quickly to kick-start the economy. Environmental safeguards — even when they’re well-designed, user-friendly, and absolutely necessary — slow down construction and research projects.

To balance these two factors, the administration issued 179,000 “categorical exclusions” that exempted stimulus projects from review under the National Environmental Policy Act, a 40-year-old cornerstone of American environmental law. CPI details how the money went to some companies and plants with filthy records. Three of the more striking examples:

• BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas — which has the oil industry’s worst safety record and was the site of a deadly 2005 explosion and a benzene leak earlier this year — received funding free of NEPA safeguards to do preliminary work on a carbon-capture-and-sequestration project (which has since died).
• Duke Energy, one of the nation’s largest polluters, received $226 million to develop wind-storage battery technology and deploy smart-meter equipment, despite the company’s record of getting slapped with air-pollution violations and fighting the charges rather than cleaning up its coal plants.
• DuPont secured $9 million for algae/seaweed biofuels research, despite a record of poisoning drinking water that resulted in a $108 million class-action lawsuit settlement with victims of cancer and liver disease.

Instead of holding up stimulus dollars while it conducted more thorough vetting, the administration developed what CPI describes as “a speedy review process that relies on voluntary disclosures by companies to determine whether stimulus projects pose environmental harm.”

The administration decided that compromises were justified in order to stimulate the economy and move forward on clean-energy projects. Administration officials “argue that [NEPA] exemptions were essential to accelerate more than $30 billion in stimulus-funded clean energy projects, allocated by the Energy Department, which they say have already created 35,000 jobs,” CPI reports. “And in the long run, they say, the exempted stimulus activities will serve to boost energy efficiency and curb pollution.”

That argument isn’t quite convincing. The Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico makes a rather strong case against trusting corporations to conduct their own environmental accountability. Excusing them from independent review (or getting lazy about reviews) is likely to bite us in the a** again. Wind, solar, and smart-grid projects are inherently safer than fossil-fuel excavation, but there are still risks in many of the stimulus projects. Safeguards are a good thing.

On the other hand, I’m glad the administration supports research by historically dirty companies. Like it or not, the history of American industry involves a lot of pouring waste into public rivers and releasing it through smokestacks into public airspace. If we’re going to ask the private sector to invest in energy solutions, that means doing business — and occasionally awarding research money — to companies like BP, Duke, and DuPont.

Pete Danko of EarthTechling offers an analogy: “To nab mobsters, law enforcement has to do business with some pretty unsavory characters. A similar reality might be at play in the U.S. government’s pursuit of job-creating clean-energy projects.”

We don’t have the luxury of working only with players with clean records.

The drawbacks seem to be (1) it looks a little heavy to carry around and (2) if I were a bike thief, I can’t imagine a challenge more fun to take on than stealing a bike suspended 20 feet in the air in broad daylight.

A Berkeley transportation scholar offers an appealingly simple rule in Adam Nagourney’s dispatch on the sizeable subway and light-rail expansion in Los Angeles:

Robert B. Cervero, the director of the University of California Transportation Center in Berkeley, said that if the subway expansion cut commuting time as promised, it would indeed change ridership habits. Transit officials said the ride from Koreatown to Westwood by subway would take 24 minutes, compared with 50 minutes during the rush in a car or on a bus.

“The science of public transit is not too complicated,” Mr. Cervero said in an e-mail message. “It comes down to how time-competitive transit is with the private car. If it takes two to three times longer to get from Point A to Point B by transit, the vast majority of folks will drive. If it’s faster going by bus or train, then most will forsake their car and ride transit.”

Is it that simple? Social-science research proves over and over again that people are less rational with their money than we’d like to believe — which has forced the field of economics to reconsider once-cherished assumptions. It’s hard to believe people are any more rational with how they allocate their time.

Don’t habit, social pressure, perceptions about what’s pleasant and safe all affect which mode of transport people choose?

The Mobility Choice Coalition — a collection of environmentalists, fiscal conservatives, and national security specialists — ranks the most effective ways to reduce transportation-oil dependence in a new report, Taking the Wheel: Achieving a Competitive Transportation Sector Through Mobility Choice.

Image: Mobility Choices

They must have forgotten to include “tax cuts for the $250,000-plus income bracket.”

The key phrase in the title is “technically achievable oil savings.” The report doesn’t wade into whether the best strategies — a gas tax and congestion pricing — are politically feasible.

More from Tanya Snyder at Streetsblog:

Unlike many similar reports, the Mobility Choice study doesn’t put emissions reductions front and center. They’re more interested in fiscal restraint and national security — well-timed considerations for our current political climate.

I was surprised to see “Liberalize local land-development rules” so far down the list. Nearly everywhere in the U.S., outdated zoning laws mandate things like lot setbacks, building-height limits, parking space minimums, and 14-feet-wide road lanes — whether or not they really make sense for a location. The authors clarify that compact, mixed-use development takes longer to create oil savings — and their report focuses on benefits in the next 10 to 20 years.

That said, our building stock is rebuilt more quickly than you might assume. By 2035, approximately three-quarters of the built environment will be either new or renovated, according to Architecture 2030.

Stephanie Mencimer reports in Mother Jones on the hilarious and frightening Tea Party campaign against sustainable development — the shocking idea that neighborhoods and streets should be designed to promote human well-being rather than maximum traffic flow. It’s funny in a tinfoil-hat sort of way because it revolves around an old  U.N. conspiracy theory. And it’s troubling because it could be effective. Here’s the heart of the story:

[T]ea partiers have trained their sights on a new and insidious target: local planning and zoning commissions, which activists believe are carrying out a global conspiracy to trample American liberties and force citizens into Orwellian “human habitation zones.”

At the root of this plot is the admittedly sinister-sounding Agenda 21, an 18-year-old UN plan to encourage countries to consider the environmental impacts of human development. Tea partiers see Agenda 21 behind everything from a septic tank inspection law in Florida to a plan in Maine to reduce traffic on Route 1. The issue even flared up briefly during the midterms, when Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes accused his Democratic opponent of using a bike-sharing program to convert Denver into a “United Nations Community.”

…  And now that the midterm elections are over, they’re descending on planning meetings and transit debates, wielding PowerPoints about Agenda 21, and generally freaking out low-level bureaucrats with accusations about their roles in a supposed international conspiracy.

Dan Maes is easy enough to laugh off. His rants about an insidious U.N. plot were part of an astoundingly inept campaign that saw him — the Republican candidate in a swing state — finish with a mere 11 percent of the popular vote.

And as a former small-town reporter who’s sat through a lot of local zoning meetings, I can’t help but laugh at the thought of area planning commission members — shopkeepers, school-facilities managers, stay-at-home moms, country lawyers — being accused of supporting an international conspiracy.

Except, as Mencimer notes, this is precisely where vigorous, paranoid obstruction can have an impact. If Tea Partiers want to influence national health care, they’ve got to deal with high-powered politicians and lobbyists in the national spotlight.

If they want to block bike lanes, safer streets, walkable shopping districts, and housing close to workplaces, they’ve only got to hassle and bully local planning boards. In that context, it’s entirely possible for angry protestors to drown out people who support walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods.

More about the passionate intensity:

In the tea partiers’ dystopian vision, the increased density favored by planners to allow for better mass transit becomes compulsory “human habitation zones.” They warn of Americans being forcibly moved from their suburban dream homes into urban “hobbit homes” and required to give up their cars and instead — gasp! — take the bus to work.

There’s nothing inherently political about walkable neighborhoods and safer streets, just as there’s nothing inherently political about climate science. But lately the fact that progressives and Democrats, including the Obama administration, support livability and sustainability seems to be enough to raise the suspicion and the ire of the right.

Greenbuild is the big annual trade show for green construction businesses and related industries — it brought 27,000 people to Chicago’s McCormick Place last week. Shari Shapiro of the Sustainable Cities Collective has a telling observation:

Notable lack of dealmakers–When I attended GreenBuild Boston [in 2008], I was overwhelmed by the numbers of banks, insurance people, consultants and so forth that had booths on the exhibit floor. This year I saw many more products, and fewer dealmakers. Bank of America was the only financier with any presence at the conference. I was surprised not to see at least PNC [a bank] which boasts so many LEED outlets. I am concerned that this reflects the ongoing weakness in the construction industry

That’s the barrier to more sustainable buildings in a nutshell. The technology is available — hence the entrepreneurs hawking energy-smart products. There are loads of talented designers and architects eager to design buildings and places that make more sense than the ones they were born into. Policy “uncertainty” is no higher or lower than it ever is.

What’s lacking is money, both because Americans are broke and underemployed and because we don’t have the financial innovations in place that help people get past higher up-front costs to access the long-term payoffs of energy-efficient buildings.

Today, Walk Score rolled out new heat maps for the 2,500 largest American cities, providing a quick way to get a sense of where cities are most walkable. That could be useful if, say, you’re visiting an unfamiliar city on holiday travel and want to burn off some extra stuffing. Or if you’re thinking about moving.

Many of the maps, like St. Louis’s, are marked by isolated pockets of bright green walkability surrounded by seas of red auto-dependence. Others, like San Francisco, are veritable fields of green. They make nice illustrations of Alex Steffen’s concept of “deep walkability” — “deeply” walkable places give walkers and cyclists more freedom than just sticking to tiny neighborhood centers.

Image: Walkscore.com

The heat-map feature builds on Walk Score’s namesake 1-100 walkability scoring tool (integrated into lots of real estate sites), its similar Transit Score, and several other innovative web tools from the Seattle software firm Front Seat.

Those offerings are helpful for giving people an intuitive way to understand walkability and transit connectedness — and for putting these concepts in the cultural lexicon.

They’re also limited in their accuracy, since they run off Google Maps data that doesn’t measure how busy a road is, whether it has sidewalks or crosswalks, or how desirable nearby amenities might be (a strip club helps a neighborhood’s rating as much as a grocery store does).

Professional doomsayer James Howard Kunstler made these shortcomings painfully obvious in his photo essay “The Horror of Downtown Atlanta.” Walk Score gives the city’s downtown Hilton an 86, a “Walker’s Paradise” score, yet the blank concrete facades and forbidding alleyways that Kunstler finds show that the presence of commercial activity does not always create a place normal people want to walk.

The Walk Score team has been forthright about the tool’s limitations — “If you live across the lake from a destination, we are assuming you will swim.” It’s working on improving some of those flaws in an upcoming release, although it hasn’t announced a date. Even with a brilliant, much-needed idea, it’s the execution that counts. And the execution here is still coming along.

Photo: Planet Gordon

Increasing the amount of parking by building large lots on the outskirts of town seems to be the most prominent proposal. Like the author of this Bloomberg article which claims that parking spaces in the city “meet 30 percent of needed capacity,” Muscovites don’t seem to recognize that all cars obviously already have places to park, and that increasing the amount of parking is only going to increase the ease of owning a car, and hence the amount of people who choose to do so. Russian urban planners seem to be stuck in the 1950s, too – here is the president of the national planners’ guild claiming that Moscow needs to more than double the surface area it dedicates to roads.

The plan also seems to operate under the assumption that public transportation is the problem — their promises to expand mass transit ring hollow when they’re also contemplating banning trolleybuses from the city center and banning the private fleets of jitneys, known as marshrutki, which provide higher quality and more expensive service than the city’s decrepit buses.

Some of the elements of the plan seem just too ridiculous to be true. Are they really going to “[ban] most ground-level pedestrian crossings,” as the first Moscow Times article suggests? Or forbid all new commercial construction inside of Moscow’s Third Ring Road, which means essentially everywhere within five miles of the city center?

I’m sure the city’s nightmarish traffic, chronicled in an August New Yorker dispatch, can only be good for local business. Right?