New Views Greenway Party Tonight

Despite the rain, New Views 2009, a benefit for the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway, hosted by the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, will take place as scheduled tonight starting at 6 p.m. It will be at IKEA Brooklyn's Erie Basin Park (under a tent).

Online ticket sales have closed, but if you still want to go, $60 tickets can be purchased with cash or check at the door.

Manhattan-dwellers interested in going need not worry about getting home: a NY Water Taxi shuttle will depart from IKEA at 8:15 p.m. to take guests back to Pier 11 in Manhattan.

Recycle-a-Bicycle has donated a mint BMX bike for a special raffle, and the Transportation Alternatives Brooklyn Committee will be providing valet bike parking.

Should be a great night!

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Boro Hall Greenmarket: Highly Sustainable

Reaches Quarter-Century Milestone

Sure, greenmarkets and local eating are all the rage now, but they’ve been around longer than you might think. The Council on the Environment of New York City (CENYC), which was started in 1970, has been opening and maintaining greenmarkets for more than 30 years.

“The first market opened under the 59th Street Bridge in 1976,” said CENYC assistant director Julie Walsh. Today, CENYC operates 49 greenmarkets in the city, with 11 in Brooklyn. The newest is in Bay Ridge, which opened in October of 2008.

This month the Borough Hall Greenmarket, one of the city’s oldest, will celebrate its 25th anniversary. Monthlong festivities will culminate in a celebration on June 27, which will include a seafood cook-off, pizza baking with Bread Alone Bakery, and a solar panel demonstration from environmental education group Solar One. Sustainable food advocates Just Food will have a table at the event, as will CENYC’s Office of Recycling Outreach and Education (OROE).

On Cadman Plaza at the intersection of Court and Montague streets, the Borough Hall Greenmarket is held on Tuesdays and Saturdays year-round and Thursdays from April 2 through Dec. 24.

Fred Wilklow, head farmer of Wilklow Orchards, has been selling at the Borough Hall Greenmarket since it started. Back then, he said, customers came from all over because it was the only one in the area. Even now, some of those same people shop at the greenmarket.

“I’m looking forward to [the party], I’ll see a lot of people who have been customers since the first day,” Wilklow said. “I’ve seen families grow up, my family has grown up. It’s become my second hometown.”

Wilklow Orchards, along with Phillips Farms, provides fresh picked fruits and vegetables, plants and flowers, and grass-fed meat to the market. Also available are fresh fish, eggs, buffalo yogurt, cheese and meat. New this year are Long Island wine producers Paumanok Vineyards, along with organic vegetables, chicken and eggs from Fishkill Farms.

Michael Hurwitz, CENYC Greenmarket program director, said the Borough Hall Greenmarket “demonstrates the strength of the market, the farmers that are there and the community around the market.” He added, “You can go there on a Saturday and buy anything you want that’s edible. There’s a diverse array of products.”

CENYC Executive Director Marcel Van Ooyen says the greenmarket “is an example of all that we’ve been able to accomplish,” and that it’s one of the organization’s most popular greenmarkets.

Helping the City Live Better

CENYC’s mission is to “give people the tools and the education and the resources to make New York City a more sustainable environment,” Walsh said. “It’s by the people, of the people, and for the people.”

In addition to greenmarkets, CENYC brings fresh food and produce to underpriveleged areas with its Youthmarket program.

“Communities that are food deserts, that really need access to fresh healthy food, they can’t support a traditional farmer’s market model, so what we do is we buy wholesale from the farmers in our Greenmarket program and set up a farm stand that’s staffed, operated and managed by community youth,” Walsh explained.

In some cases, the presence of a youthmarket has helped make neighborhoods safer. Walsh told about one particular youthmarket in a south Bronx neighborhood near a police surveillance tower. “Within two weeks of the market operating, [the police] were able to leave,” she said.
With CENYC’s Open Spaces Greening program, 57 community gardens have opened in New York City since 1978, 26 of them in Brooklyn.

“We want people to engage in behaviors that will make a more sustainable city — behaviors that they will carry with them,” Walsh noted. “People can see the link. When you go to a community garden you see the importance of preserving nature.”

CENYC also has a presence in 13 city schools with its environmental education program, one of those being Madison High School in Midwood. Through Training Student Organizers (TSO), students have built and demonstrated solar ovens, planted trees, removed invasive species and learned about New York City’s watershed.

In 2006, the Office of Recycling Outreach Education (OROE) was created by CENYC. This part of the organization is specific to the five boroughs, each having its own recycling outreach coordinator. These coordinators target specific neighborhoods that have low recycling diversion rates.

“[OROE] teaches people how to properly recycle,” said CENYC development and communications specialist Amanda Gentile. She said that in the past, OROE has set up a table at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket and conducted a “recycling challenge.” Its purpose is “to make recycling as easy as possible,” she added. OROE will hold the recycling challenge at the Borough Hall Greenmarket’s anniversary celebration.

But no matter what CENYC does, it’s always with a positive outlook. “There’s not so much talking about negativity,” Gentile said. “We’re simply doing things that are directly making improvements, and trying to get people involved in doing that with us.”

Photo above, by Don Evans, is Eva Skillicorn from Wilklow Orchards

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Sustainable Lectures at Governors Island

As I was checking out the Governors Island web site, I happened upon an event listing for this summer: CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities Summer Lecture Series. Every Saturday starting June 27 and ending September 5, there will be a lecture relating to sustainable urban practices.

Here are details for the first few lectures:

June 27, Saturday, at 12:30 p.m. in Pershing Hall
Projjal Dutta, Director of MTA Sustainability
“How Transit Riders Are Saving The Earth”
Learn what we’re doing right in New York City and how we can make mass transit work better for cities nationwide.

July 11, Saturday, at 12:30 p.m. in Pershing Hall
Carey Pulverman, LES Ecology Center
“Composting in the City? Yes We Can!”
New Yorkers discard more than a million tons of organic material a year. Learn how to curb waste and compost—it’s easy, and you can even do it in your apartment!

July 18, Saturday, at 12:30 p.m. in Pershing Hall
Dylan Gauthier, Mare Liberum & TheFreeSeas.org
“How To Build a Boat from Recycled Materials in a Day”
Join us as we build a true water-ready 15-foot boat from scratch in an afternoon—made from discarded plywood!—and learn how you can build one yourself.

July 25, Saturday, at 12:30 p.m. in Pershing Hall
Andy Padian, Community Preservation Corp.
“How To Curb Catastrophic Waste in Your Home or Condo”
Learn 10 things that you can do in your apartment, building, and office to dramatically reduce energy waste and make your cash flow increase. Money is the real green!

For the full list, along with listings of other events throughout the summer, click here.

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Red Hook Renewable Energy Developer Gets First 100% Electric MINI E in New York

Renewable energy developer Beautiful Earth Group, based on Brooklyn’s Columbia Waterfront, has received New York’s first MINI E — MINI Cooper’s fully electric zero emissions vehicle — as part of a year-long field study of the new plug-in car (left). Eagle writer Caitlin McNamara reports here.

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Planting Trees on Atlantic Ave

The Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association and the Teen Tree Corps of Project ReGeneration teamed up in a beautification project of two blocks on Atlantic Avenue: one block between Bond and Hoyt streets, and another between Court and Clinton streets. This photo shows Teddy Francis, program director of Project ReGeneration, with Curtis Cruz and Trish Holt.

Photo courtesy of Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association

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DUMBO Photo Exhibit Grapples With How to Portray Climate Change

The term “climate change” is used often these days, in conjunction with “global warming” and “extreme weather.” Sure, we know that the earth is hotter today than it has been in the past four hundred years, the polar ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising. But what does it all actually look like? Most of us don’t have the means or ability to see the effects of climate change, we usually just hear about it.

The current photography exhibition at the Henry Gregg Gallery in DUMBO, entitled “Visualizing Climate Change,” brings powerful images from around the world to Brooklyn. Work of photographers Gary Braasch, Ashley Cooper, Benjamin Drummond, Peter Essick, Steve Kazlowski and Joshua Wolfe is on display, with subjects ranging from polar bears, to glaciers, to forest fires.

Brooklyn-based photographer Wolfe explained that, as members of GHG (which stands for greenhouse gas) Photos, these photographers deal with the basic question of: “How do you portray something that’s happening as gradually as climate change?”

“For me, a lot of it is trying to explain through images not just that climate change is all extreme weather all the time and a polar bear,” Wolfe explained. “There’s more depth to it, the issue is more complex, there are a lot of factors going into it.

“Any of us working individually can’t create such a complete or such a nuanced picture of climate change,” he continued. “Our goal is to present people with what’s going on, to give a more complete picture.”

On one wall of the gallery is a photo by Wolfe of an oil pump in the foreground and a group of wind turbines in the background (above). Another by Kazlowski — whom Wolfe calls “the best polar bear photographer in the world” — is a member of the threatened species swimming in the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean. Yet another by Cooper shows a man knee deep in water in his South Yorkshire kitchen, searching for food after floods in the summer of 2007.

Hanging on another wall of the gallery is a series of before and after photos of glaciers, taken by Wolfe and Braasch, portraying the stark decrease in glacier size over the years.

Using photography as the medium to portray climate change was challenging, says Wolfe. “If you look at photojournalism, we really thrive on an event. We thrive on a conflict. We know how to do wars, we know how to do protests, to a lesser extent, we know how to do celebrities,” he said. “Gradual, decade-long, century-long, year long changes aren’t things that photojournalism is necessarily comfortable with.”

Adding to the difficulty, Wolfe says, is that in some cases it’s hard to tell if something like extreme weather is climate change or not. “With hurricanes or forest fires or droughts, is this just noise in the system or is this definitively climate change?” he asked, which is the reason for pairing before and after photos of glaciers, or juxtaposing a picture of a forest fire in Greece with a satellite image of more fires ravaging the country.

Collaboration with Henry Gregg Gallery director André Martinez-Reed gives the show a different perspective: “He’s relating to the images in a different way than I do,” Wolfe said. “André mixed them up to make a layered and more nuanced story.”

“Each individual show has its own spirit, its own energy,” said Martinez-Reed. “With Visualizing Climate Change, it gives people a chance to experience something that’s going on in the world that probably they wouldn’t normally have an opportunity to experience.”

“We have this unique experience to view a lot of the things going on with climate change that the average person can’t see,” Wolfe said. “We’re changing the way people look at things around them.”

Visualizing Climate Change will be on view at the Henry Gregg Gallery at 111 Front St., Suite 226, in DUMBO through June 21. The exhibit is also on view at the Port Authority building at the corner of 42nd St and 8th Ave in Manhattan. Wolfe will be speaking at this Thursday’s Nerd Nite at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO about climate change.

Photo above by Joshua Wolfe, courtesy of GHG Photos

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Rethinking Urban Space: Mini-Golf in a Vacant Lot

Vacant lots are a common sight in this city, so common that many don't give them a second thought. But this summer one previously empty and trash-filled space will be transformed into a 9-hole miniature golf course. And it's opening on Saturday.

Dubbed the Putting Lot, it's in Bushwick at 12 Wyckoff Avenue. Each hole was designed by a different group of artists or architects, chosen by an open call for submissions conducted in April. With a budget of $500, the teams got to work on creations with the theme of "urban sustainability."

The materials are reclaimed and repurposed, just like the lot, and are used in non-conventional ways.

Sustainability was the main focus and drive for the project. According to the Putting Lot's web site: "We think vacant spaces can be used in ways to help build neighborhood sustainability, as much as they can diminish it. We believe neighborhood sustainability is one of the most important aspects of urban sustainability."

Starting this Saturday, June 6, the Putting Lot will be open Wednesday through Friday from 12 - 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. - 8 p.m. It's super affordable at $5 for adults and $3 for children 12 and under.

For more information, visit www.theputtinglot.org.

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