It’s Earth Day Today!

Americans have been observing Earth Day since 1970,  when some 20,000,000 Americans participated in a national “teach-in” proposed by Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin). Gaylord’s hope for Earth Day was to send a message to Washington that public opinion was solidly behind a bold political agenda on environmental problems.

In the decade following the first Earth Day, 28 pieces of environmental legislation were passed, including: the Clean Air Act, the Water Quality Improvement Act, the Water Pollution and Control Act Amendments, the Resource Recovery Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act!

At this moment in history, that is simply astounding!

Earth Day is a good day to pause and reflect on the state of our Big Blue Marble in Space; it is also a good day to celebrate with others or to make a lifestyle change, large or small.

In New Haven, Connecticut, where I live, Earth Day is the kick-off to a series of environmentally focused events. Here are just a few:

The New Haven Land Trust’s Long Wharf Nature Preserve Clean Up (tomorrow from 10 am - 1 pm).

The 8th Annual Rock to Rock Earth Day Ride (April 30); there is still time to join a team or support a rider (like me). 

And, the entire month of May is Bike Month. 

Whether or not we make it to an event, there are always changes we can implement in our daily lives to lessen our own carbon footprint.

Need some inspiration?

Check out IKEA's Sustainability Guide. Yes, the guide, with the tagline “A Healthier Planet Begins at Home,” does highlight IKEA’s line of sustainable products. But it also includes a number of useful tips for conserving energy in the home that do not require a purchase.

I shared some ideas of my own after the Paris Climate talks ended.

One of the easiest things you can do is eat your leftovers! Another is to leave your car at home and take a walk or a bike ride instead.

Mother’s Day is coming soon; the emails for sales and special offers are already hitting the inbox. While we make plans to honor the mothers in our lives, let’s not forget to honor the most important mother of all — Mother Earth. 

Happy Earth Day!

On My Radar 9.10.15

Upcoming September 2015 Events in New Haven (#GSCIA)

Get your Green on, New Haveners! You have no excuse for staying home with the plethora of mostly free events coming up. Some days are so event-full that it will take some planning on your part to hit them all. 

Here you go, in chronological order, starting with this Saturday. 

Saturday, September 12

8-10 am, Quinnipiac Meadows Nature Preserve

1040 Quinnipiac Avenue

HAWK WALK and TALK

Free Event. Sponsored by the New Haven Land Trust. 

According to the Land Trust, “It's a great time of year to observe hawks and other migrating birds! Bird expert and past president of the New Haven Bird Club Mike Horn will be giving a guided walk at our Quinnipiac Meadows Nature Preserve this Saturday. All are welcome (except out-of-control children). Rain or shine! If you have them, bring binoculars and see you there!”

Also this Saturday…

Saturday, September 12

GREEN EXPO (11 am -5 pm) 

CT FOLK FESTIVAL (11 am -10 pm) – 10 Years Young!

Edgerton Park, located off Whitney Avenue near the Hamden-New Haven town line. Free Admission!  The full program and list of participants is available here. 

Monday, Sept 14

7:30 PM, BAR, 254 Crown Street, New Haven

New Haven Green Drinks meets at a special day and time in order to participate in TRANSPORTATION on TAP, hosted by goNewHavengo, the group that asks you to “Think outside the car.” Eat pizza, drink beer, and learn about transportation in New Haven. Attendees must be 21 or over.

Tuesday, September 15 - Tuesday, December 1

(with a few exceptions)

5:30 - 7:30 PM

DIVERSE VOICES: Environmental Leaders on Climate Change and the Environment

Kroon Hall, 195 Prospect Street, New Haven

The public is invited and welcome to attend this series of lectures offered as FES810 at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. More here. FREE.

The event-full Saturday, September 19 kicks off with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to walk or bike across the soon to be opened new southbound Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge.

Saturday, September 19

10 am - 3 pm

GRAND OPENING CELEBRATION

on the new Southbound Q-Bridge

Access provided at the intersection of Hamilton Street and Ives Place.

Only pedestrians and bicycles will be allowed on the bridge. The event planners promise family-friendly activities, refreshments, stunning views, and great photo opportunities. More information here. 

From there it’s just a hop and a skip over to the 6th annual East Rock Festival…

Saturday, September 19

11 am - 7 pm

EAST ROCK FESTIVAL

Orange Street between Willow Street and Cottage Street

This free festival celebrates all the East Rock neighborhood has to offer with food vendors, live music, demos, kids’ activities, and information on area non-profits.

And, if you plan it right, you can quench your thirst for a good cause…

Saturday, September 19

4-7 pm

BEER and OYSTERS in the GARDEN

Fred Cervin Bioregional Garden

608 Whitney Avenue

A fundraiser for the New Haven Land Trust. Standard ticket is $30.00 in advance. Support community gardening, environmental education, and nature preserves. More information is available here. 

Friday, September 25

5:30 pm (ish) at the flagpole on the New Haven Green

CRITICAL MASS

Critical Mass is a cycling event held on the last Friday of every month. Part of the worldwide Critical Mass movement, New Haven's “Kinder and Less-Critical Mass” is a monthly celebration of bicycling. The ride is generally slow; length may vary. The size of the group can reach 200 in the summer months! 

There ought to be something in here for just about everybody. Get up. Get out. Go New Haveners, Go!

On My Radar 3.1.14

Recent News. Happenings. Discoveries…Here are some of the items on my radar.

METEOROLOGICAL NEWS:

The West has finally gotten some rain, but too much, too fast, with some devastating results. All that rain did little to mitigate the multi-year drought. One official opined that it would have to rain every other day until May just to reach average precipitation levels.

Storm Titan is now making its way across the country.  The Northeast, once again in the grip of the Polar Vortex, is waiting to see how much snow Titan will deposit during its visit here. 

The smog that blanketed much of northern China, including the city of Beijing, last week has dissipated somewhat, but a report in Mashable predicts such problems will continue until dramatic steps are taken to reduce pollutants. In early December, Shanghai, on the coast of central China, was shrouded in smog. You can see the dramatic images here. Time claims that China’s smog is being called a “Nuclear Winter.”  

NEWS from NEW HAVEN:

In advance of Thursday’s public hearing on United Illuminating’s Vegetation Management Plan, Urban Resources Initiative (URI) has issued its position. You can read it in its entirety here. In summary, URI calls for:  

• A balanced approach to securing electrical power reliability by removing hazardous trees and branches while retaining healthy trees
• A comprehensive review of all trees
• Development of a detailed plan for removal or pruning
• Replacement planting
• Undergrounding of distribution wires as a long-term solution

The public is invited to sign up to make brief comments at this meeting. URI urges all lovers of trees to turn out; a large audience will send a strong message. Details on the time and place are below.

The Rock to Rock Earth Day Ride, a fundraiser for environmental causes in New Haven, is less than two months away. The snow should be gone by then, and organizers are urging all past and future riders to commit — now! Join a team and start collecting pledges!

Justin Elicker, former Ward 10 Alder and Mayoral Candidate, was recently named Executive Director of the New Haven Land Trust. The Land Trust cares for and manages 80 acres of property and oversees 50 community vegetable gardens across the City. “I am thrilled to take on this challenge as executive director,” Elicker said. “As the state’s first urban land trust and one of New Haven’s pioneers of urban agriculture, the Land Trust has a history of being visionary while delivering a direct and positive impact on the daily lives of our city’s residents. I look forward to building upon the Land Trust’s strong relationships with communities throughout the city to increase access to healthy food, foster environmental stewardship and facilitate strengthening connections within and across all of New Haven’s neighborhoods.”

Rachel Ziesk, Community Garden Manager at the Land Trust, is thinking ahead to Spring. In her blog Organic Gardening she has been posting tips for garden planning. Her latest post discusses what to consider as you flip through those beautiful seed catalogs.

FOOD NEWS:

The nutrition label on food packages may get its first makeover in 20 years. If the recommendations are approved, a consumer will no longer need to do mental math to calculate calories and nutrition information. The two most dramatic changes proposed are updates to serving sizes and a larger, bolder type face for the calories in the product.

Chipotle is rolling out Braised Tofu Sofritos, the first item to become a permanent addition to the menu since salads were added in 2005. The organic tofu experiment began in 2013 with seven locations in the Bay Area. This item is not available in Connecticut yet, but Chipotle advises “stay tuned.” According to Bloomberg Business Week, Tofu Sofritos should be an option in all 1,572 U.S. stores by the end of 2014.

RELATIVE NEWS:

My niece Sophie, college sophomore and blogger at Philo-Sophie is planning a summer service trip to Haiti. You can read more about it here. 

UPCOMING EVENTS:

Thursday, March 6th

6:30 pm

Hamden Middle School, 2623 Dixwell Avenue

Technical Meeting and Public Info Session

hosted by PURA with a presentation by United Illuminating (UI)

In response to public objections to the UI plan adopting Enhanced Tree Trimming or Tree Removal (ETT/ETR) 

March 19th

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Chipotle, 910 Chapel Street, New Haven

New Haven Green Drinks 

Chris Schweitzer (New Haven/León Sister City Project) and 

Joel Tolman (Common Ground High School) will speak on 

the Rock to Rock Earth Day Ride

Chipotle will donate half of all sales, including Margaritas and beer purchases, between 5 pm and 9 pm to support Rock to Rock.

Meatless Monday: Celebrating Gardens on Earth Day and Every Day

Yesterday was Earth Day.  Throughout the weekend, citizens of the world honored the earth in a variety of ways — with fundraisers for the environment, clean-ups, tree planting, festivals…

Google marked the occasion by celebrating “Gardening.” The doodling Googlers grew a special Google Doodle and wrote a very special post with an assortment of resources for gardeners, including an interactive guide to finding CSAs and community gardens across the US, a compendium of YouTube videos on various gardening subjects, and a Street View tour of gardens around the world. The High Line, a favorite destination of mine, is one of the gardens featured.

I’ve been thinking about gardens a lot during 2012. I am a step closer to becoming a certified Master Gardener. I’ve been in the classroom since January, I just passed the written exam, and I’ve started fulfilling my outreach hours. I am looking forward to working in the New Haven County Extension Office with my mentor who’s active in the New Haven Land Trust (NHLT).

Here is the link to the Google Map of the community gardens in New Haven, all made possible with the assistance of the NHLT. The NHLT has helped with the development of approximately 50 gardens throughout the city. More are on the way. This is in addition to their conservation activities and maintaining close to 80 acres in six nature preserves. New Haven is so lucky to have them.

Happy Monday, everyone. Have a great week.

I often blog on food, food issues, or topics related to growing things on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.”

Meatless Monday: Slow Food Arrives in New Haven

Slow Food International is a global grassroots organization founded to “counter the rise of fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.” Its origins can be traced back to a protest in response to the arrival of McDonald’s near Rome’s Spanish Steps in 1986. Today there are over 100,000 members in 1300 local chapters.  One of the newest is right here in the New Haven area — Slow Food Shoreline, founded in the late summer of 2011.

The chapter’s board has been very busy over the past few months, making their presence known up and down the Connecticut shoreline. The board members were the invited guests at New Haven Green Drinks on January 18. Chapter chair Michael Cook presented a summary of the group’s history and goals with his talk: “What is the Opposite of Fast Food?” In New Haven, everyone is connected. Chris Randall, executive director of the New Haven Land Trust, was in attendance, camera in hand. You can see his photos from the evening here.

The next scheduled event is Slow Food Shoreline’s first monthly Food Swap, this coming Saturday, February 4th at Woodland Coffee. What is a food swap? According to information on the group’s website, “A Slow Food Swap is part silent auction/part village marketplace/part fun-loving open house where your homemade, homegrown, and foraged creations become your own personal currency for use in swapping with other participants.” Read more about it here. 

What else is on the calendar? On February 11, Slow Food Shoreline will be tabling at the opening of “Big Food: Health, Culture and the Evolution of Eating,” a hands-on exhibition at Yale’s Peabody Museum. And, Slow Food Happy Hour returns at New Haven’s Soul de Cuba on Monday, February 13 from 5- 7 pm. 

On December 11, I attended my first event as a chapter member — an Art Tour at the Yale University Art Gallery, led by board member Vanessa Lamers who is also a graduate student at Yale and a Wurtele Gallery Teacher at the museum. Our guide took us on a tour of food-themed pieces in the gallery’s collection — from an Assyrian tablet dating from 900 BC to a modern-day sculpture by the artist Marisol. At each piece, after listening to  a short description of the artwork and its historical context, we were asked a couple of questions to guide us in our thinking. Why did the man in the Assyrian tablet have wings? Was he plucking dates or watering them? Why are there oranges on the floor in Manet’s painting of the woman reclining in Spanish costume? What was Marisol trying to tell us in her self-portrait “Dinner Date,” where the meal before her is a TV dinner? [A particularly interesting question for s Slow Food group to consider.] This afternoon of guided reflection was a welcome break in the busyness of the holiday season and a good way to meet chapter members.

The group contemplates “Dinner Date”

Such study has been proven to increase one’s observational skills. In fact, we in the Slow Food group were being guided in our observation of works of art in much the same way new medical students are taught to observe. All first-year students at the Yale School of Medicine are required to spend time looking at paintings in a visual tutorial which has been a part of the school’s curriculum since 1999. According to a 2009 article in Yale News, Dr. Irwin Braverman had been trying to find a way to increase observational skills of medical students. Linda Friedlaender, a curator at the Yale Center for British Art, was frustrated by the misdiagnosis of her close friend’s illness. A chance meeting brought the two together, and the class was born. The program was proven so successful that by the time the article was written, a decade later, over 20 medical schools were including a similar program in their curriculums.

Have a great week. I hope to see some of you locals at one of the next Slow Food events in and around New Haven. I’ll “see” the rest of you back here next Monday.

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal  health and the health of our planet.”