Green Options

Growing food in your own backyard is hardly a new concept, nor is utilizing any open space available if you live in the city, but turning your rooftop into a garden?  Well that idea has caught on in cities throughout the world, and now is starting to gain a foothold in the United States as well.

Rooftop gardens are by no means new.  Forward thinking, environmentally conscious, or penurious city dwellers have been doing it for as long as there have been city dwellers.  But recently the rooftop garden movement has started to gain some traction, inspired by the environmental benefit of more green space in a city (it reduces the “heat island” effect), and the appeal of home grown organic veggies just steps away have given the movement some serious traction.

Large metropolises across North America - including New York City, Washington DC, and Chicago have also sweetened the deal by offering tax incentives and subsidies to encourage green rooftops, and Toronto, Canada also has a new law requiring buildings of a certain size to have a green roof.  Though the Green Roof Bylaw in Toronto has garnered some criticism (mostly from developers) it has been well received by residents in the city as a means to increase the amount of green space, offset their carbon emissions, and generally to be a greener city.

Last year, 300 folks across North America turned in their car keys for a month as part of the 2008 Zipcar Low-Car Diet. And, in addition to cutting congestion, they also walked 85% more, biked 136% more and decreased their miles driven by 71%. Pretty impressive, eh? Starting July 15, a new crop of participants from all Zipcar cities worldwide* will begin the 2009 Low-Car Diet: one full month of living [...]

Despite vocal opposition from the city’s developers and media, Toronto’s Planning Committee has recommended expanding the controversial green roof by-law to make it even more inclusive than before.

North of the border a controversy is starting to gain steam in the nation’s largest city, Toronto. The city has proposed a by-law that would make ‘green roofs’ mandatory in most new condos and office or retail complexes.

Why is it so easy to be green in Canada?

I spent the first night of my summer vacation in a bed-and-breakfast in Toronto with my family.  (Yes, I blogged while on vacation.  That’s what happens when free wireless is available everywhere and you have obsessive-compulsive disorder.)  We drove from Chicago in our Toyota Camry.  It’s not exactly a Prius, but while averaging about 30 MPG, we had a smaller carbon footprint than we would if the three of us traveled by plane.  We brought most of our own meals and snacks in reusable containers, printed out travel and maps on previously used paper, and reused our water bottles.  So we thought we were being green.  But a morning walk around Toronto made us feel only light green, at best.

The home of my blessed Toronto Blue Jays have started a program that, just maybe, might get them closer to their goal of reducing its carbon footprint by 6% by 2012. The program is called “Live Green Toronto,” and with $20 million in its coffers, the program is designed to provide financing to those who want to go green.

“We won’t meet our ambitious targets if we don’t have the support of every Torontonian and every Toronto-based business,” said David Miller, Toronto’s mayor, at the Green Living Show last Friday.

Renovating and ‘re-using’ older homes may be one of the greenest forms of construction. But fixing up an old house tends to be a highly individual endeavor, and the lessons learned while retrofitting a single home are difficult to adapt to larger-scale applications.

In spite of this, Lorraine Gauthier, co-founder of the socially-conscious Toronto design studio Work Worth Doing, has identified a housing type which offers a high degree of consistency across a large number of homes: post-war housing. Post-war homes, built to accommodate returning WWII veterans, are still a part of the landscape throughout Canada and the United States, and many of these aging homes have poor energy performance. By assembling a team of designers and other sustainable building experts to retrofit a single home in the Toronto area (as part of an undertaking known as the Now House™ project), it is hoped that a formula can be created and then applied to literally millions of homes.

Streets are for People sponsored this anti-car petition on an actual car in Ontario.

We the undersigned do hereby demand that not one more dollar go to promote, support, or perpetuate car culture. We want bike lanes, public transit and a train system. We want our public space back. We want local food, clean air, sustainable industry, a liveable future for our children, and an end to oil

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Image source: http://timblair.net | Lights out for Sydney, Australia 2007

An http://greenprinteronline.com dispatch. 

Earth Hour is tonight, March 29th from 8 to 9 pm. The idea is to turn off the lights as a symbolic gesture that us citizens, business owners, uber-corporations (hello, Google’s black screen, hello McDonalds in Toronto saving 10 000 kilowatt hours) local governments and non-profit groups are taking climate change seriously.

Despite gripes that Earth Hour falls on the NCAA basketball regional, it’s lights out for over 23 major cities worldwide like Toronto and Bangkok.

“C” is for Congestion; and that’s good enough for me.

What do Singapore, Oslo, Toronto, and London have in common? They are among a number of cities to adopt traffic-reducing legislation. Popularly known as congestion charging, this legislation aims to improve the health of urban areas.

If your city suffers from congestion, stuffiness, poor air quality, slow public transportation, and irritating gridlock, you may be able to benefit your community by recommending congestion charging

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