Green Options

I met several lovely chickens yesterday when I was in Oakland, and I am now quite smitten. They are truly engrossing creatures to observe; the animal’s social behavior is very complex, their vocalizations are both soothing and fascinating, to say nothing of the delicious fresh eggs they provide. More and more urban chickens are being raised in cities, as increasing numbers of people are growing their own food and trying to create a more locally-based, sustainable and self-sufficient food supply.

This is car news, and it isn’t. But it is definitely…interesting.

Detroit was once the 4th largest city in America and it held the title of Motor City because most of America’s cars came from there. Flash forward 40 years, and Detroit’s population has dwindled from a high of 2 million people to just over 800,000. The average price for a home in Detroit is $15,000, the lowest in the country. With so many empty spaces, criminals have no shortage of hideouts and drug factories. And with America’s auto industry still reeling from the recession, as well as having outsourced many jobs to other states (or countries), the future looks bleak for Detroit’s long-deferred recovery.

Unless one millionaire gets his way, and turns the city into farms. Yes, farms.

In my last post, I wrote about Nathan McClintock’s research on the potential of alternative food to enhance social justice in economically impoverished neighborhoods.

Here, I present a different perspective.

Julie Guthman, a sociology professor at UC-Santa Cruz, thinks that alternative food activism has a tendency to reflect white desires more than the needs of the communities these programs supposedly serve.

Guthman’s surveys of UC-Santa Cruz undergraduates who do six-month field studies with alternative food organizations as well as the managers of California farmers markets and CSAs demonstrate that alternative food is burdened by white rhetoric.

Given all of the attention on alternative food right now – from backyard chickens to guerilla gardeners to illegal rooftop beekeeping – I decided to start a series of posts on research examining the sociology and ecology of this movement.

Nathan McClintock, a graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley, studies the potential of urban agriculture to enhance social justice for economically impoverished neighborhoods.

His research focuses on Oakland’s so-called “food deserts,” areas where healthy, fresh food is rare.  Cheap, industrial food such as fast food and heavily processed snack foods, however, is common in these neighborhoods.

Food deserts arise from difficulties developing and sustaining supermarkets in low-income areas or the net loss of supermarkets to the suburbs.  McClintock’s research investigates the potential for urban farming to improve access to affordable, healthy food in these areas.

Using spatial mapping techniques, McClintock inventoried vacant and underutilized public land in Oakland to assess these parcels’ potential contribution to urban food production.  He estimates that converting suitable spaces to agriculture could supply five to 10 percent of Oakland’s fresh produce needs.

McClintock’s field research also considers the influence of urban agriculture on the ecology of urban environments.  Urban farms can boost air quality, control flooding, provide a sink for urban wastes, cool cities, buffer against climate change, and increase the diversity of insect and bird species in urban areas.

He also proposes that the green spaces created by urban agriculture can raise property values and make communities safer.

His research is currently being used as reference by the Oakland Food Policy Council, of which McClintock is a member.  The council is trying to determine how to make urban agriculture in Oakland’s food deserts a reality.

We spent a few hours today at Arc Ecology, slowly trying to comprehend 4000 pages of the Draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) that was recently released for our Bayview neighborhood’s “redevelopment”. If you are inspired to read it yourself, you can download the entire EIR document here on the SF Planning Department’s website. The plan is entitled: Candlestick Point-Hunters Point Shipyard Phase II Development Project (formerly known as the “Bayview Waterfront Project”) Draft EIR.

Peter searching through the Draft EIR at Arc Ecology’s library in Bayview.

If you start reading today, you will only have to read about 170 pages each day if you want to finish it by the time the public comment period is over. The allotted time in which we are allowed to give our input ends on the third day of Kwanzaa, in just twenty-six days. Many neighborhood residents and activists are demanding a 90 day extension on the public comment period, which hopefully will be granted. Two hearings are scheduled on December 15 and 17 at SF City Hall for public comment.

Many of our Bayview neighbors joined us last weekend to celebrate the second anniversary of the Latona Community Garden. What used to be a smelly skanky debris-filled eyesore, is now a thriving organic community garden. The formerly blighted corner has been transformed into a warm and welcoming public space where neighbors gather, local kids play, and organic food is grown.

Several of the neighborhood kids climbing the walnut tree in the Latona Community Garden.

A new report ranks ten leading world cities on their greenhouse gas emissions. It also examines how and why the emissions differ.

As the report says, over 50% of the world’s population lives in urban areas. Leading cities of the world, global cities, are the places where greenhouse gas emissions really need to be cut. The greenest city from the study is Barcelona and the worst is Denver.

My happy transportation moment of the week came when I stumbled across this most excellent song on the Muni Diaries. The rap was created for the Transit Authority of River City in Louisville, Kentucky to explain how to use the bike racks on their buses. The infectious chorus has been stuck in my head all week: “Bring it down, pull the bar, put it on, put it on, take it off, put it

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My long held fantasy of a car-free Market Street became just a little closer to reality today. A transit improvement report was just approved by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority that encourages travel by bus, foot and bicycle along this busy thoroughfare. District 6 Supervisor Chris Daly, who requested the report, expressed his support for the positive changes being implemented that will limit

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As a pollutant polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (or PAH’s as we call them in the business), are of concern because they have been identified as carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic (not good things if you were wondering). PAHs are created as a byproduct of the burning of coal, oil, and fossil fuels. Often they are of concern in urban areas where there is a higher carbon footprint, and it forms that nice cloud of yellow smoke you see floating over some of your major cities.

Now, new research out of Columbia University is showing that exposure to PAHs, can reduce neonate’s intelligence. The study performed in New York city where PAHs are in no short demand, showed IQ scores that were 4.31 and 4.67 points lower, respectively than those of less exposed children.

That was one of the many probing questions that the visionary former mayor of Bogotá Colombia, Enrique Peñalosa, asked a packed auditorium in San Francisco last night. How do we define what makes a good city, what is our criteria? What makes an urban environment desirable and livable, and how do we judge the quality of life? What is socially and environmentally sustainable?