Climate Cities
All Stories
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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 […]
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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.
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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Architect R.K. Stewart on building the future of sustainable design
If you build it, they will come. But if you build it green, you just may be able to save the planet. R.K. Stewart. Or so says a recent report, which suggests that green building could help cut North America’s greenhouse-gas emissions more quickly and less expensively than any other measure. And word is getting […]
