Tis the material and nonmaterial season

Everyone's talking about cutting back on holiday shopping, which is good for the soul. But for the economy? Not so much. In my household we're doing our best to stretch our gift dollar by doing most of our shopping at Seattle's Archie McPhee, home of the Freud Action Figure and The Cubes.

Another area where a lot of people are worried about cutbacks is gifts to charity. Philanthropic professional groups and journals are trying to reassure charities about the bad economy. The conventional wisdom is that people find a way to keep giving to charities, and some experts say giving tends to stay flat during recessions. I'm not so sure this is an accurate picture; 'surveys of the field' reflect averages. I don't see how every charity sectors can avoid reduced contributions, especially those reliant on foundations whose investment portfolios have taken it in the shorts.

Germs

November, for all the joy the presidential election brought, ended up being lost time for me. I spent much of it flat on my back with pneumonia.

Based on average incubation times, I figure the nasty little bacteria took up residence in my lungs on or about Halloween. A big reason for the lengthy recovery was that it wasn't until the second week that I stopped treating it as the flu, and got my hands on some serious antibiotics.

I spent the second week musing about how and where I picked up the bacteria. The odds were pretty low that it happened at home. Not that I'm a cleanfreak -- my partner used to be a surgical assistant and workplace OSHA supervisor. She set up some simple procedures around the house that allow us to easily avoid things like cross-contamination in the kitchen.

Must-See TV

I'm quite excited that Sea Shepherd, the anti-whaling direct action group (based up the road and a ferry ride away, in Friday Harbor, WA), is the subject of "Whale Wars," a new seven-part series on Animal Planet. Tune in starting this Friday.

Now go out and vote (Americans)!

An opportunity for cleaner water AND walkability

A victory for Puget Sound environmentalists contains possibilities for far-reaching changes in controlling stormwater, one of the main sources of Puget Sound water pollution, as well as improving conditions for pedestrians in Seattle.


The victory is a recent ruling by Washington's Pollution Control Hearings Board, regarding a suit by environmentalists on the inadequacy of the National Pollutant Discharge Emission System. Among other things, NPDES regulates municipal and industrial stormwater discharges.

Washington is one of the states which has received federal permission to self-administer NPDES.

Bye Bye, Black(faced) Sheep

Restoring the natural environment around a landmark means foodie sacrifice

Mont Saint Michel -- St. Michael's Mount in anglais -- is one of the coolest places in the world, a medieval abbey that to the eye seems to grow from a rock that juts out of the sand on the coast of France.

Solar energy - Storage breakthrough at MIT?

Ever wonder how we can make solar energy available at night? Batteries are too expensive and inefficient, so until now people have been proposing beaming power down from collectors in orbit, where the sun always shines. Also expensive.

So it's exciting to read about a potential breakthrough at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the project leader says it's easy and cheap:

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said MIT's Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science.

Plastic oh no ban, industry says

Don't celebrate the Seattle 20¢ plastic bag fee/styrofoam ban just yet, canvassers are gathering signatures on a petition that would put a bag fee repeal on the November ballot.

Who could possibly want a repeal of the fee? Why, the plastics industry. Of course, they call it a tax:

Stuff I noticed in France

It's good to be home, lame attempts by Danny Westneat to whip up a tax revolt in Seattle notwithstanding. I see America continues to be economically bloodied yet unbowed.

Nonetheless, having had two weeks to see the land of Binoche, escargot and Sarkozy up close and personal, I have to say that France has it all over America in many important ways.

Cityscape. Tired of high speed, high volume traffic in city neighborhoods and on arterials? Then stop facilitating it! France has expanded its freeways, but retains the traditional configurations of its surface streets in cities and villages.

Paper nor plastic? - Part Deux

The Seattle City Council today approved the measure imposing a 20 cent fee on plastic and paper shopping bags, to encourage the adoption of reusable bags. The council also passed a ban on use of foam containers by businesses that serve food.

The City will distribute reusable bags, and the per-bag fee will start in January 2009. Then the choice of whether to pay the fee is up to the individual shopper. As the next mayor of Seattle, Richard Conlin, says: "You only have to pay it if you choose not to use reusable bags."

The foam ban has three phases. This coming January, restaurants and the like will have to stop using polystyrene and styrofoam. Then a year after that, all other plastic containers and utensils must be replaced by biodegradables.

The enemy of my enemy is Light Rail

Why transit innovators should embrace trains (and buses) too

On a recent trip to the Bay Area I was reminded why I like trains almost as much as Personal Rapid Transit.

After only a 5-10 minute wait I was able to take BART from the Oakland Coliseum/Airport station to Dublin/Pleasanton (site of Hacienda Business Park, Oracle, etc.) in only 24 minutes, including temporary slowdowns for construction. The journey, including stops at three intervening stations, covered about 17 miles -- an average speed of 42 mph. The return trip was similarly fast and trouble-free.

Yes, I know all the pro-PRT arguments -- PRT would have been faster; PRT would have been on-demand and nonstop; PRT would have been more energy efficient. All true, but that's not my point here.

Infernal plastic doo-dads

All I wanted to do last week was buy a shirt. I went from rack to rack at the Fred Meyer (Kroger), picking up one shirt here, another there, one from over there, and so on. And when I had all my options in hand, I couldn't help but marvel at the unnecessary use of those little zip-ties they use to attach the price tags, manufacturer tags and Sale tag. Not to mention the plastic stickers that advertise, redundantly, the size, special features and fiber composition.

One shirt, though, stood out from the others by using no plastic doo-dads at all: a short sleeved, organic linen/cotton shirt by Great Northwest, which I believe is the Fred Meyer in-store brand. The single tag was made from recycled paper, and attached with a piece of biodegradable twine. Oh, and FORTY PERCENT OFF, because I can smell a bargain from a long way away.

Look Ma, no plastic

RoboTrike

I made a quick trip to the Bay Area last weekend. Saw some sights, rode the BART out to Pleasanton, the full tourist experience. But the oddest thing I saw was when I was back home on Sunday, on the ground at SeaTac airport:

"The Future of Policing" (The Stranger)

Also today:
Kill a protected species (and be part of a club killing 2,000 of them a year), don't go to jail

Neat-o bikesharing layer on gMaps

I have to figure out how to customize Google Maps. Paul DeMaio, a transportation consultant and blogger who specializes in bicycling, has fiddled around with gMaps and created a layer that shows the location and status of bikesharing programs around the world. It's called -- wait for it -- the Bike-sharing Map.

A biker icon indicates an operating program, while a question mark seems to mean the program is either being studied, or planned, or maybe DeMaio hasn't yet researched the details.

Paper nor plastic?

Seattle debated whether the city may follow in the footsteps of San Francisco, on July 8 discussing a proposal for a 20 cent fee on all disposal shopping bags, as well as a long overdue ban on foam food containers. The meeting was called by the City Council's Environment, Emergency Management and Utilities Committee.

Those who attended the meeting (including The Bag Monster) heard from fellow citizens in overwhelming support of the ban, which if approved would go into effect in 2010. One provision of the ban is that each household in the city would receive a free reusable shopping bag.

Who opposes the fee? Professional curmudgeons and the grocery industry, who counterproposed a per-visit fee.

Is Masdar for real?

Many are excited about the green technologies that could come out of the zero carbon, zero waste project in the desert. Others call it hype.

eager000010 (Flickr)

The good Puget Sound news

Lest anyone think Puget Sound environmental policy and water quality are going completely to hell, I am glad to report that a piece of good news happened last week. The Neah Bay rescue tug, which stands ready to assist oil tankers and other vessels transiting the can-be-stormy Strait of Juan de Fuca entrance to Puget Sound, returned to duty on July 1.

"The tug" is actually two boats that will split the assignment: the Hunter and the Gladiator, both under contract from Crowley Maritime.

What is notable is that this marks the first time the tug will be on duty for 12 continuous months. In past years state funding was only available for part of the year. As if oil spills check the calendar. This time the state legislature voted a full 12 months, but there is no guarantee for the following year.

Court ignores environmental factors

I have received word that a state appeals court has struck down King County's "65/10 rule," requiring property owners retain 65% of forest and limiting impervious surface to 10%. This rule is critical to the issue of reducing stormwater runoff, which is a major source of pollutants that enter Puget Sound.

65/10 is meant to comply with Washington State Growth Management regulations, but my source has told me the appeals court has held the rule to be an illegal fee.

More as it develops.

Update (1518 PDT): The Seattle P-I has the first media report on the ruling. (since updated and extended)

Update (08 July 0926 PDT): King County's rural-land restrictions go too far, court rules -

Locking-in green behavior

Ten observations related to how people are adjusting to high fuel prices, and maybe we can have a discussion.

1. "Peak oil" is on the digital lips of many progressive bloggers. This event, assuming it has happened, signals the start of a fundamental restructuring. The economy will have to respond by replacing oil with another energy input.

2. Progressive opinion leaders are observing, however, that the problem is not supply, and speculation is responsible for higher pump prices. This is borne out by events and expert opinion:

John McCain's Connection to Big Oil

Sustainability is People

Seattle experienced a passing this week: Edith Macefield, 86, a longtime Ballard resident who loved animals and the opera, and may have been a spy in World War II. But she is best known as the person who dug in her heels and made a developer build around her little house:

Edith's story always made me smile, and she was always a popular figure in the media and blogosphere. I think it gives everyone a little charge to see someone fight ‘progress,’ or at least keep the powerful at bay. I suppose it's Davida v. Goliath.

A little extra effort, please

I bet there are a lot of stark, unfriendly pedestrian routes in your town. One of my least favorite is the corner of Pine & Boren (satellite view) in downtown Seattle.

Climate Change roundtable for Seattle readers

A last-minute invitation came my way this morning -- let's find out what the technocrats are planning.

=====================

YOUR HOUSE, YOUR CAR, OUR CLIMATE: STATE DEPT. OF TRANSPORTATION DEPUTY SECRETARY TO DISCUSS HOW LAND USE IN WASHINGTON AFFECTS CLIMATE CHANGE

I just adore a penthouse view

Blurring the line between city and Green Acres, Seattle architecture firm Mithun has come up with this concept for a high-rise urban farm:

Read the rest of the story about 'growing' interest in urban agriculture.

Are machines the CO2 answer?

An Arizona company, GRT, is the subject of a Guardian piece about using a machine to extract CO2 from the air.  According to GRT it can build scrubber units each able to collect a ton of CO2 per day.

The article -- using a cliche I particularly hate -- stresses the concept is "not a  magic bullet," as it would take millions of the machines to handle all of our carbon emissions.  But while it doesn't solve the problem by itself, "this can help" and "this will help," says Richard Lackner, a Columbia University physicist who leads the team building the scrubber.

In other words, CO2 scrubbers are neat ideas that might be technically possible, but are a long way from implementation. What they need to do is miniaturize them, and install them in CO2 producing machines and processes.

Video - new pudu deer in Seattle

James Howard Kunstler doesn't get it

I'm in agreement with James Howard Kunstler's overall messages about planning, sprawl and walkable communities. But his conclusions about Personal Rapid Transit are based only upon his encounters with PRT advocates at conferences and his own snap judgments.

Kunstler's remarks are on his podcast, 13th edition, starting around :01:30.

His perception of PRT (like a railroad with one person per carriage) is so superficial, it shows he hasn't taken the time to learn about the concept. Instead, he calls advocates "a particular kind of crank" and "crazy." Klassy, Mr. Kunstler.

Kunstler rails (*rimshot*) against the amount of PRT infrastructure he thinks would be needed, but later praises light rail (around :05:00) without a mention of the cost of its infrastructure.

Of course, about PRT he also admitted "maybe I'm missing something." Well I guess so.

(h/t Michael D. Setty -- thanks for the email!)

Paul Krugman gets it

The size of the car vs. transit problem, that is. It's in his blog at the New York Times.

NPR picks up on Masdar City zero-carbon project

Masdar -- and its Personal Rapid Transit project -- are prominently featured on NPR yesterday and today. It's part of the Climate Connections series.

• May 5 (PRT introduced at :6:30)
• May 6 (PRT @ :1:45)

Big news -- the PRT system will run off the city's solar power grid!

Baby gorilla video

Bicycle safety PSA video

Uses a power-of-suggestion trick that worked on me. Your mileage may vary.

The size of the problem

Sometimes people ask me why we need to add innovative technologies such as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) to our urban transit networks.

The usual argument goes something like, transit ridership is up! If we just add more buses and build more light rail, we'll be able to solve our transportation problem.

In particular, the hackles tend to go up over cost -- PRT is expensive, so it will take resources away from transit. As though PRT would not be transit.

"Building the world's cleanest city"

CNNMoney covers the Masdar zero-waste city project, and the involvement by a major U.S. contractor (March 7, 2008).

By Marc Gunther, senior writer
(Fortune) -- Halfway around the world, a zero-carbon, zero-waste, automobile-free city known as Masdar is rising from a 2.3-square mile plot of desert in Abu Dhabi.

If all goes according to plan, Masdar - financed with $15 billion in oil money - will become a showcase for smart urban planning, green building, renewable energy, sustainable materials and advanced recycling.

"There is nothing like it in the world," says Masdar CEO Sultan Al Jaber, without exaggeration. "Masdar has a simple promise - to be the world's center for future energy solutions." Should this grand experiment work, Abu Dhabi will profit from the clean energy economy of tomorrow, just as it profits from $100-a-barrel oil today.

To get from here to there, Abu Dhabi will tap into the vision of London architects Foster and Partners and the skills of a big U.S. engineering firm called CH2M Hill.

Read more

Artist imitates life

Last year at my primary blog I made up a joke about George W. Bush wanting to make artificial ice floes for polar bears out of garbage -- a transparent excuse to dump American garbage in the oceans.

Now it seems some people think fake ice habitat for bears is a good idea. Seattle artist Susan Robb has gotten a lot of publicity for her work on the idea.

No word on what the bears will eat after the seals learn to stay away from the Hummer-shaped platforms, or how the bears will get back to land when it's time to hibernate. Nice out of the box thinking, though

Pacific Ocean: Rare white Orca seen off Aleutians

This is pretty cool:

(AP) - The white killer whale spotted in Alaska's Aleutian Islands sent researchers and the ship's crew scrambling for their cameras.

The nearly mythic creature was real after all.

"I had heard about this whale, but we had never been able to find it," said Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist with the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who photographed the rarity. "It was quite neat to find it."

The whale was spotted last month while scientists aboard the Oscar Dyson, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research ship, were conducting an acoustic survey of pollock near Steller sea lion haulout sites.

It had been spotted once in the Aleutians years ago but had eluded researchers since... More

 

Does Smart Growth have to look like this?

On Architecture: The townhouse scourge
A rash of identical homes weakens the city's individuality

Seattle has the townhouse pox. A rash of trite, stale and clumsy faux-Craftsman eightplexes is ripping through the city's neighborhoods, bleeding vitality and visual interest out of the streetscapes.

Some at least offer the virtue of low price -- or relatively "low" in the pathology of Seattle's real estate market -- but we're trading short-term affordability for long-haul blight.

Architects and neighborhood advocates are worrying aloud. "People are going to get turned off to density by equating it to all these bad examples," says John DeForest, who founded the Northwest chapter of the Congress of Residential Architects. "There's an urgent need to put more good alternatives out there."

Former city councilman and architect Peter Steinbrueck goes straight to the projects' typical worst feature, the driveway or "auto court" that bisects the eightplexes to provide access to garages and, frequently, main entrances as well. "Who wants to look into these narrow, dark, paved-over spaces?" Steinbrueck asks. "They're like tenements, and it doesn't even matter whether they dress them up with this faux-Craftsman crap."

The auto courts are decidedly dreary and barren, but the problems don't end there...

More

No	Yes

Silent running

The Seattle city government's destruction of Hamm Creek wetlands (This Week in Precipitation, 2/13) was not an isolated case. A community group in Seattle's north end last month filed suit to stop the city from filling nearly six acres of wetlands in a park near the University of Washington:

The suit was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Seattle by Friends of Magnuson Park. It claims that proposed city plans to fill 5.86 acres of wetlands for the development of five lighted athletic fields violate the Clean Water and the National Environmental Policy acts. ...

The [U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] last month gave Seattle Parks and Recreation the go-ahead for the project when it granted a permit, which included "special conditions" requiring the city to perform mitigations.

"The damned train"

In most areas of the USA we aspire to European levels of density and transit usage.  But Florence is an example of what they have to deal with when they attempt to add modern (relative to the 16th century) infrastructure; it could be an object lesson.

There is a plan to install a modern, at-grade (i.e., surface) light rail line in Florence.

The destinations--the Santa Maria Novella intercity rail depot, a hospital, the airport, and a piazza--all make sense. But they are all either outside or on the edge of the historic city center. The plan is for the airport LRT line to enter the city center where the Duomo and Baptistry are, then back out to the Piazza della Liberta. [ Info ]

More on Less Dissolved Oxygen

Scientists fear 'tipping point' in Pacific Ocean

Coast has seen deadly drop-off in oxygen levels for sea life

Where scientists previously found a sea bottom abounding with life, two years ago they discovered the rotting carcasses of crabs, starfish and sea worms, swooshing from side to side in the current. Most fish had fled -- and those that didn't or couldn't joined the deathfest on the sea floor.

Extraordinarily low oxygen levels were to blame -- swept up from the deep ocean into normally productive waters just off the Pacific Northwest coast by uncharacteristically strong winds.

On Thursday scientists announced they had documented that low oxygen levels that killed the sea life in 2006 were the lowest in a half-century -- and that for the first time, parts of the ocean off our coast were measured with zero oxygen in the water; 2007 looked only a bit better.

Strong winds and low oxygen levels have persisted for eight summers now, leading scientists to conclude that the ocean may be "poised for significant reorganization"-- their way of saying an ecosystem gone awry...

Read the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article

All that's missing is the signing statement

When a City Hall is run like the White House

Maybe you've heard of Greg Nickels, Seattle's Green Mayor. Maybe because he's singlehandedly done the most to promote his leadership of a national effort to get American mayors to sign a Climate Protection Agreement. It's an end run around the Bush Administration's refusal to endorse the Kyoto treaty.

But there's green, and then there's green. Sure, he's cut the city government's emissions. Although in at least one case a source, a coal-powered electricity plant, was merely transferred to private hands, and continues to pump out the CO2.

Sure, he has an initiative to plant more trees. But city policy also continues to allow developers to cut trees down, if they're in the way of new retail or the crackerbox townhouses going up all over town.

A shopping card I can support

Are you like me? One of those people who refuses to get one of those infernal club cards from Safeway and other chains? Because shouldn't they give you a benefit for the simple fact that you're giving them your money???

Well in the Seattle area we have a sort of club card that benefits NGOs: the Puget Sound Community Change Card. You get a rebate when you shop at a participating store (restaurants too), and a donation goes to a nonprofit (18 groups so far in 12 categories).

More trouble for Orcas

Puget Sound pod roams south to California in search of food -- just in time for the collapse of the salmon stock there.

Masdar interview

AME Info speaks to Masdar spokesman Ron Heyselaar in a video, here.

Bruce Babbitt to make Seattle appearance

Former Congressman, Democratic presidential candidate and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has accepted an invitation from People For Puget Sound to give a talk on the environmental topics of his choice. The Seattle green NGO has signed up Babbitt, who is hilarious, to be the featured speaker at its third annual A New Day For Puget Sound event on May 8.

It's a pre-work breakfast time event, which means EARLY. It's also a fundraiser. But Babbitt is, as noted, hilarious, so it's well worth the money and rising at the crack of dawn.

Details will be posted at pugetsound.org as soon as it becomes available.

The Orca-Salmon Link

A nicely timed pair of articles in Puget Sound's leading dailies reminds us of the interconnectedness in nature, as well as our responsibility to repair the mistakes made in less enlightened times.

And it won't be cheap:

Saving orcas will cost billions, feds say
Expressing "considerable uncertainty" about how to rescue Puget Sound's imperiled orcas, federal fisheries officials on Thursday said the job will take more than 20 years and cost some $50 million.
Even that price tag considers only the extra costs of the National Marine Fisheries Service. The agency's recovery plan for orcas assumes that billions more will be spent to restore Puget Sound and bring back battered salmon runs -- their main food.
...
The plan specifically recommends stationing a fulltime rescue tugboat near Washington's outer coast to prevent an oil spill -- the biggest short-term threat to the orcas. It says "more aggressive initial responses" are needed.
It also calls for "greater efforts ... to minimize pollution," including the stormwater that washes filth into the Sound after every good-sized rain. More

No sir. Not cheap at all:

Unveiling "The Source"

This is some interesting news of an event that I've not really seen covered in the U.S. media: A World Future Energy Summit held in Abu Dhabi, including plans for a sustainable new-city (Breaking: TIME has brief story). I'm mostly an NPR-Air America listener and I read at least two newspapers a day, so you think there would have been something about it crammed in amongst the other Mideast reporting about who Dubya wants to attack next.

But no. I have to be Googlerted to pieces running in the UK media -- and mostly because they're all excited about Lord Foster (the architect behind The Gherkin and other notable edifices) unveiling his master plan model for the Masdar ("the source") project's showpiece Masdar City. Dubya got a sneak preview last week (you can kinda see it in the photo attached to this article), but I expect it went in one ear and out the other as usual.

Virginia PRT study -- Not too bad

The Examiner has the story on the release of the Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation study on the viability of Personal Rapid Transit. The bad news -- PRT is still "unwise," because there are no full-fledged true PRT systems currently in operation. VDRPT (great acronym by the way) therefore concludes PRT might cost the state too much in research and development.

Basically, another example of a jurisdiction not wanting to be first to innovate, because it would have to assume the risk. Which is fine, really, we are after all talking about public funds.

The good news -- there's a lot of it in the report itself.