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  • Unprecedented land conservation deal

    The biggest land conservation deal in California's history was announced yesterday, totaling nearly 240,000 acres in Southern California.

    A couple of features, while not entirely new, are worth pointing out:

    1. The deal involved allowing the owners to develop about 10 percent of the area pretty intensely and maintain some natural resource extraction while preserving as wilderness the overwhelming majority -- a good example of making a trade-off that doesn't pit economic and environmental interests against each other and allows for much greater public access at the same time.
    2. New wildlife corridors are being constructed to allow animals and plants the ability to migrate; I have written about this before, since this type of flexibility will be crucial to ensure that species can adapt to climate change.

    All in all, a good deal for California and the country. Something to celebrate.

    Jason D Scorse Cities

  • Stressed by housing slump, developers sell land to conservationists

    Looking for a bright side to the real-estate crunch? Look no further: Some developers, financially stressed by the housing slump, are selling land to folks who want to conserve it. It’s a win-win situation: developers aren’t stuck building expensive real estate that no one wants to buy, and conservation groups like the Trust for Public […]

    Grist staff Cities

  • People’s Grocery is rebuilding food connections in West Oakland

    Global Oneness Project has finished a great new series of interviews with Brahm Ahmadi, co-founder/director of People's Grocery. Their food justice work is crucial to Oakland: like many cities, there are usually lots more opportunities to buy beer or smokes on every block than fresh, healthy fruits and veggies. Check out this inspiring 8-minute film to get some new ideas for how we can reconnect urban populations and the planet through food. The sidebar clips are great, too, as are all the short films on this site I've viewed.

    Erik Hoffner Cities

  • The NYT on urban farming

    Viewed through a wide lens, the world’s troubles seem overwhelming: climate change, pointless war, spreading hunger, surging food and energy prices, etc. There’s a tendency to seek big-brush answers to these vast problems, to ask: what’s The Solution? Failing inevitably to find it — much less implement it — we plunge deeper into despair and […]

    Tom Philpott Cities

  • A modern city can be remade

    Check out this great video of the street life in Melbourne, Australia, which is my new Place I Want to Move: From the accompanying post on StreetFilms: Melbourne is simply wonderful. You can get lost in the nooks and crannies that permeate the city. As you walk you feel like free-flowing air with no impediments […]

    David Roberts Cities

  • New peak oil documentary fluffs the faithful

    A while back I wrote a short review of 2004’s End of Suburbia, and after watching the sequel, Escape from Suburbia, I guess I’d say roughly the same things. I want a movie like this to convince Average Joes. And when it comes to the Romantic agrarian peak oil evangelism this movie traffics in, the […]

    David Roberts Cities

  • The longer we wait to move away from gasoline, the more high gas prices will hurt

    Like Americans, Europeans are generally not fond of rising fuel costs. Unlike Americans, they’re much better at handling them. It isn’t difficult to understand why; they simply planned ahead. Geoffrey Styles writes: A big part of our problem is that most Americans are still driving cars that were purchased when gasoline was under $1.50/gal., to […]

    Ryan Avent Cities

  • The ghost of link dumps past

    So I was thinking to myself, self, you should do a link dump post so you can close out some of this cluttery crap in your browser. I go to start one, and what do I find? An old link dump post that I’d never published! So here’s an old link dump. Watch for a […]

    David Roberts Cities

  • Pittsburgh beats out L.A. for sootiest U.S. city

    Pittsburgh, Pa., has received the dubious honor of being the U.S. city most well-sooted for short-term particle pollution, topping an annual list put out by the American Lung Association. Los Angeles came in at a surprise second as Pittsburgh became the first non-California city to top an ALA list. “It’s not that Pittsburgh has gotten […]

    Grist staff Cities

  • Ousted L.A. gardeners continue to farm

    In June 2006, a land dispute led to the shutdown of the South Central Community Garden in Los Angeles. Weeks of protest and tree-sitting by celebrities and regular folk proved unfruitful, and the 14-acre garden, tended by 350 low-income families in the middle of one of L.A.’s poorest neighborhoods, was bulldozed. Nearly two years later, […]

    Grist staff Cities