Finland's first floating village is under construction in Pori, a small city on the country's west coast. The floating villas are very cool looking, have energy-saving technologies, and were designed to handle the occasionally extreme local weather. Sixteen such houses will be built when the project is complete. After Grist List moves into three of them, that leaves 13 for the rest of you.

Regular readers are aware that my hopes for sustainability are largely bound up with cities. By the simple act of bringing people together in close proximity, cities encourage diversity, health, innovation, and economic growth. They are the proving grounds where we will test new, more sustainable patterns of work, play, and mobility. I wrote a series of posts about this a while back called "Great Places."

To me, one of the key barriers to truly green and enjoyable urbanism is the continued domination of urban spaces by cars (and parking). Cities, especially cities that grew up in the post-WWII era, are designed for cars; people scurry around on the margins, perpetually nervous about their safety. There's really no way around this as long as car ownership is required to attain a convenient level of mobility, which it still is in the vast majority of cities.

Most public-transit alternatives to personal cars require a substantial investment of time and cognitive energy. Most people, like it or not, just want things to be easy. And so traffic congestion remains the rule in cities, even cities with robust public transit systems.

Tony Hsieh, the celebrated CEO of Zappos.com, wants to change that. (Side note: I never read management books by corporate titans, but for some reason I ended up reading Hsieh's, and damned if it wasn't pretty inspiring. He's an interesting guy.) Hsieh moved Zappos to Las Vegas a while back and ever since he's been investing heavily in making the city a vibrant, livable hub for tech innovation. Now he's dreamed up something truly ambitious and (to me, anyway) exciting.

The idea is to provide an alternative to personal cars that is fast, flexible, multi-modal, and personalized -- something that is easy the way returning shoes to Zappos is easy. It's called Project 100. Ace reporter Katie Fehrenbacher has a great write-up of the plan, but to quickly summarize, Hsieh wants to populate downtown Las Vegas with:

Paris is finally catching up with those cutting-edge trendsetters in Ohio -- the City of Lights has decided to follow the herd and use a flock of adorable sheep as lawnmowers. The city's municipal archives have a half-acre or so of grass right next to them, and four two-foot high Ouessant sheep will have the honor of grazing on that grass to keep it in check.

When Zach Pickens first started gardening on his New York rooftop six years ago, he learned the hard way that growing plants in an urban environment isn’t the same as tending them in a suburban backyard. “The first year was really terrible,” he says. But he welcomed the challenge, and his struggles prompted him to learn more about the science of gardening -- microclimates, ecosystems, seed development.

Seed saving -- the practice of collecting the seeds of naturally reproducing plants to be used again from year to year -- particularly intrigued him. “I got interested first and foremost because it was saving me money. I’d save my own seed and didn’t have to buy [more] next year,” Pickens says. As he immersed himself in New York’s urban-gardening culture, he started to see seed saving’s potential to help the movement thrive, and wanted to spread the word.

Pickens noticed that if he saved the seed of the season’s healthiest plants, next year’s crop would be even better -- he was essentially selecting for whatever traits helped his veggies grow best in containers on the roof. Before Monsanto and other corporate giants began pushing patented seeds that didn’t reproduce, forcing farmers to buy new seed every year, seed saving was a common practice that not only saved growers money but produced hardier plants, as the varieties selected year after year adapted to local conditions. By saving seed, Pickens can home in on plants that thrive in the hyper-local conditions unique to the big city.

Okra, for example, takes advantage of the urban heat island effect, in which all that concrete and asphalt absorbs the day’s heat, making New York City toastier than nearby rural communities. “In the city we can grow okra pretty well because it stays so warm through the night,” Pickens explains. “The okra loves it.”

If I were to tell you this is a story about a tornado in Kansas, it would probably bring to mind a certain doe-eyed girl and her little dog. Well, sometimes tornadoes transport girls and their adorable pets to magical lands. Other times they level entire towns.

That is what happened the night of May 4, 2007, when an EF-5 tornado (for non-Kansans, that’s a really freaking big -- the biggest, in fact) nearly two miles wide hit the town of Greensburg, a farming community in south-central Kansas. Almost all of the 1,383 residents lost their homes, nine died, and the town was left looking like this:

The destruction was sudden and the rebuilding process was daunting. However, as thoughts on how to rebuild swirled, a number of people thought, “Hey, what if we rebuilt Greensburg with ‘green’ principles? Ha, guys, see what I did there? Do you get it? ... Guys?”

To which many of their neighbors responded with a “yes, we do get it” and a “yeah, we thought of that idea, too.” Even before the tornado hit, the community was shrinking and its population getting older. Greensburg residents knew they needed a new strategy. The tornado, awful as it was, provided a clean slate.

These awesome elementary school kids saved a California state park from closing, and you can learn their story in a new documentary called (kinda prosaically) How The Kids Saved The Parks.

Back in 2011 and 2012, the state of California, racked by budget cuts and the general fallout from having so many assholes live there who want to enjoy this amazing state without paying the kind of taxes that make such enjoyment possible, made an attempt to close South Yuba River State Park. Some kids at Grass Valley Charter School were not happy about this. So they took action.

It’s always a pleasure when scientific studies confirm your own long-held opinions, especially when what you think flies in the face of all conventional wisdom.

For instance, who knew that chocolate éclairs and triple fudge caramel brownies actually contain fewer calories than a 12-ounce glass of skim milk? Or that every $1,000 you spend on lavish vacations before the age of 65 will, over the long run, provide you with more retirement income than if you’d stashed that same $1,000 in a savings account?

Well, to be honest, I made up the fact about the éclairs. And the one about vacations, too.

But here’s bona fide scholarly research that excites me in the same way: Biking for transportation appears more helpful in losing weight and promoting health than working out at the gym.

Environmentalists and green marketers are always talking about “saving the planet.” Buy this car, this laundry detergent, or this light bulb and you will help save “the planet” or “nature” or “the environment.” Jenny Price, for one, wishes they’d stop.

Price is an activist, historian, and self-appointed Los Angeles urban ranger. When she’s not trying to inject a little humor into the generally unfunny world of environmental preaching with her satiric blog Green Me Up, JJ, she gives tours of the concretized L.A. River. She’d be happy to tell you why she loves the river, why it is every bit a part and parcel of “nature,” and why she thinks that places like this have got to be at the core of the environmental movement.

When it comes to rhetoric about “saving the planet,” she has two main beefs: First, it encourages a “greener-than-thou” form of preachy consumerism that does not encourage real change nor help those most in need. Second, the rhetoric clings desperately to the historical notion that nature = pristine wilderness, obscuring the muddy, mixed up reality visible in places like her beloved L.A. River.

Remember when you were in fifth grade and Miss Pierce gave you an empty map of the U.S and you had to fill it in? And Florida was pretty easy and maybe California and Michigan and then you got to the Midwest and were like whhhat? Well, the Louisville-based nonprofit Code for America (not exactly clear on what they do but they want to "make a difference" so they must be reasonably OK) has created a really awesome game called Click That 'Hood where you kind of do that. Even better, it lets you be smug about how well you know your city!

On the equinox, March 20, a mostly forgotten sliver of a city neighborhood, where Goldeneyes and Coots fly low and fast along the river, the stalks of last season’s brush still steeped in snow, hummed with the celebration of the season’s unfolding.

They gathered along the water’s banks, cutting back old growth, repairing paths and railings fashioned from tree branches. And when the day’s labor was done, the local chorus, calling themselves the Bullfrogs, sang songs bidding farewell to winter with a rousing cheer to spring.

This is life among the Riverbank Neighbors, ages 0 to 90, so named because of their close proximity to the once-shunned North Branch of the Chicago River and the life they’ve built around it. In one breath, they are both a throwback and the future, recalling a time when community thrived, often centered around the local landscape. Their recapture of life writ small and meaningful makes the art of porch sitting seem regal, a wooden step, a throne.