At Some Superfund Sites, Toxic Legacies Linger

In The New York Times
Like many Superfund sites in New Jersey and elsewhere in the New York City area, it has an intriguing history that is hard to trace — mobsters reportedly owned one business here before abandoning it abruptly years ago. In 1981 a brush fire exposed 70 drums containing silver cyanide and other dangerous chemicals.

This 12-acre site is among the 114 hazardous waste sites in New Jersey on the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List, which includes about 1,200 sites nationwide that the agency has determined present a “significant risk to human health or the environment.”

Add comment Datestamp: January 27th, 2008

Nature Version 2.0: Ecological Modernities and Digital Environmentalism

Jan. 21 – Feb. 16, 2008 @ Colgate University’s Clifford Gallery, Hamilton, New York.

http://www.ecoarttech.net/sustainablefutures

Featuring works by Natalie Jeremijenko, Brooke Singer, Joline Blais, Jane Marsching, Colin Ives, Alex Galloway, Amy Franceschini, Tom Sherman, Michael Alstad, Don Miller (aka no carrier), and Andrea Polli. Curated by EcoArtTech (Cary Peppermint & Christine Nadir)

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Nature Version 2.0 is a survey of artists who reinvent environmentalism for a digital age in a number of ways: by examining how digital technologies can make ecological problems more salient, by reusing and recycling obsolete technologies for new uses, and by exploring how digital spaces and the public domain may require environmental protection much like nature.
Re-imagining the relationship between nature and technology, Nature Version 2.0 suggests an ethics of the network and an environmentalism of natural, built, and digital spaces.

This exhibition is in conjunction with Environmental Art and New Media Technologies: Imagining Sustainable Futures, a two-day symposium on interdisciplinary, digital, and networked art and research that draws upon environmental science, computer science, design, hacking, gameplay, engineering, and ecocriticism. Following the Nature Version 2.0 artists’ reception on February 8, keynote speaker Natalie Jeremijenko will launch the two-day Environmental Art and New Media Technologies symposium in Golden Auditorium, Little Hall, at 7pm. “90 Degrees South,” a multimedia performance by Andrea Polli will follow at 9pm in the Clifford Gallery. The symposium will resume in Golden Auditorium on February 9 for a day of talks and presentations by critics and exhibiting artists, 9am-5pm.

Hosted by Colgate University’s Clifford Art Gallery, the Department of Art and Art History, and the Environmental Studies Program, these events were made possible through funding provided by the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts, the Film and Media Studies Program, the Environmental Studies Program, and the Center for Ethics and World Societies at Colgate
University. All events are free and open to the public.

Add comment Datestamp: January 27th, 2008

It’s Happened Agian: NYC Forces Loft Residents onto the Street with No Notice

This story echoes what happened to my building last OCT on Troutman Street in East Williamsburg. The fire hazards should be addressed, of course, but why throwing people out on the street with no notice and in freezing cold, winter weather?

This is shameful of NYC, again.

From the New York Times:
City Evacuates 11-Story Building in Brooklyn, Citing Safety - New York Times

An estimated 150 people had to relocate when city officials evacuated an 11-story factory building in Brooklyn on Sunday night, citing illegal loft conversions and fire safety violations involving a matzo bakery in the basement.

The city also shut an adjoining four-story factory building, which had been converted to a Hasidic school and catering service.

The loft building, a blocklong concrete structure converted from a pasta factory years ago, is at 475 Kent Avenue in South Williamsburg. The smaller building is at 32 Division Street.

Firefighters and buildings inspectors gave tenants a midnight deadline to leave. The American Red Cross was on hand offering hotel lodging for the night..

“People have been living here for 10 years, so why, all of a sudden on the coldest day of the winter, the night before a holiday, are we being asked to leave?” said Yuri Sivo, 48, a screenwriter, who said he had moved there last fall.

Add comment Datestamp: January 21st, 2008

3 out of 2,679 questions put to presidential candidates have been about global warming…

Dear MoveOn member,

In the last year, the major TV networks asked the presidential candidates 2,679 questions. Pop quiz: How many were about global warming?

A) 514—after all, it’s one of the top issues facing the country
B) 165—as many as were asked about illegal immigration
C) 3—the same number asked about UFOs

If you guessed 3, you’re right: Reporters asked as many questions about UFOs as they did about the climate crisis—the biggest threat to our planet.1

Can you sign our petition urging top TV reporters to ask the presidential candidates about global warming? Click here to add your name:

http://pol.moveon.org/climatequestions/o.pl?id=11909-8578123-_e.wUJ&t=165

Add comment Datestamp: January 15th, 2008

VotePoke!

From Moveon.org:

Super Tuesday is coming up, the day when 24 states—including yours—will go to the polls to vote in the Democratic and Republican primaries. The next Presidential nominee may well be decided that day—but many people who could vote are not registered yet, and time is running out.

That’s why we built VotePoke, a new website that lets you quickly and easily check to see whether you are registered to vote—and then invite your friends to do the same. Click here to make sure you—and your family and friends—will be able to vote on Super Tuesday, February 5:
http://votepoke.org.

Voter registration is public information, but states don’t make it easy to access. So until now, this data has mostly been available to the political consultants, but not to real people. Now, with VotePoke, that’s all changing—anyone can make sure their friends are signed up and registered.

Add comment Datestamp: January 10th, 2008

What’s Your Consumption Factor?

Jared Diamond - New York Times

The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.

Add comment Datestamp: January 4th, 2008

Chemicals linked to lost frogs

From The Australian

AGRICULTURAL chemicals have been linked to the collapse of frog populations, which experts have previously attributed to a combination of climate change and a deadly fungus.

Brisbane environmental consultant Glen Ingram, who has studied some of the eight Queensland frog species that have become extinct since the late 1970s, said: “There is a growing view that pesticides have a role in the extinctions of these frogs.

“People had assumed it was a fungus, probably being spread by global warming. Now, we’re not at all sure.”

Scientists have previously highlighted the extinctions of dozens of frog species worldwide as a dramatic indication of the consequences of climage change arising from increased greenhouse emissions.

Add comment Datestamp: January 4th, 2008

The Workbook Project

About
Our goal is to create a free resource for content creators that will become a user contributed repository of information. The concept is part of an “open source social experiment” called the workbook project. It’s a simple concept, the workbook is meant to be spread and edited. Meaning that content creators can add their own info, war stories, advice etc. We’re hoping that the workbook can grow as a resource. We’re building it with an open source “client side” wiki called tiddlywiki that can be saved to the desktop, edited and then uploaded again.

Add comment Datestamp: January 4th, 2008

What’s in a word?

Michael Pollan - Sustainability - New York Times

The word “sustainability” has gotten such a workout lately that the whole concept is in danger of floating away on a sea of inoffensiveness. Everybody, it seems, is for it whatever “it” means. On a recent visit to a land-grant university’s spanking-new sustainability institute, I asked my host how many of the school’s faculty members were involved. She beamed: When letters went out asking who on campus was doing research that might fit under that rubric, virtually everyone replied in the affirmative. What a nice surprise, she suggested. But really, what soul working in agricultural science today (or for that matter in any other field of endeavor) would stand up and be counted as against sustainability? When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”

Add comment Datestamp: January 2nd, 2008