A couple of months ago we looked at an idea for urban structures designed to provide habitats for wild animals. That proposal came from England. And from that same little island now comes a related suggestion that has gotten a lot of play over the past week: That city dwellers ought to keep rooftop apiaries.

We haven’t been keeping close tabs on the Great Global Bee Die-Off recently, but a quick check on Google News suggests things haven’t gotten a whole lot better, either in Britain or the US.

So a British conservation group has made the sensible recommendation that urban residents install rooftop bee hives which “would make the insects more resistant to their biggest killers - disease and pests, such as the varroa mite.” The principle: “There’s no reason why our towns and cities should exist as wildlife deserts.”

Here in New York, this recalls a long line of local stories about beekeepers (in this recent NY Times item, it was a hipsterish couple in Brooklyn). But the thing is, here they are outlaws. Criminals. Desperadoes. Ironically enough, in a city whose nicknamed for an oversized bee-pollinated fruit, setting up a beehive is illegal under “dangerous animal” statutes. Honeybees are consigned to the same shameful category as ferrets, the creatures so mocked by Rudy Giuliani (on this point, please–seriously, please–see video at bottom).

Chicago, by contrast, is a much better model on the issue. There’s a beehive on the roof of city hall, in fact. As far as we are aware, NYC is the only US city that currently bans the practice (though that’s not based on much knowledge — please speak up in comments if you’re aware of others).

What’s appealing about this broader story is that it’s moving us in the right direction both in terms of rethinking a city’s role on the natural landscape and what sorts of activities and structures are potentially part of urban living. Might it include domestic animals or agricultural activities? Why not.

A lot of that fancy “high-rise urban farming” talk is silly and useless. But that’s only because it takes a healthy concept much too far. The idea that city dwellers might be expect–and want–to be involved in some the basic processes of food growing has gained so much cultural currency so quickly that it now feels almost unnecessary to endorse it. But, what the hell, we endorse it.

Highly amusing video after the jump.

(more…)

In America, we aren’t thinking about climate change in any remotely serious way. Fortunately, some other people are. Specifically, those people over in Europe. Part of the process of thinking about it seriously is to acknowledge that we are facing catastrophe, and that we need to think in appropriately aggressive terms. To move the conversation in that direction, the Guardian has partnered with the Manchester International Festival to come up with a list of 20 ideas–ranging from a little crazy to forehead-slappingly simple–that “could save the world,” in the parlance of the contest. Many of them involve rethinking our energy or transportation infrastructure.

Under normal circumstances, we’d just link to the Guardian’s story and be done it with it. But, we’ll respectfully observe that the pages they’ve set up are a navigational nightmare, and it’s nearly impossible to figure out what the twenty ideas are without devoting a half hour to task. So, in order to help disseminate the ideas, we compiled an overview of humanity’s 20 best hopes of living out the 21st century without getting roasted alive.

Vaguely in order of how interesting/noteworthy we find them (not necessarily to confused with pure merit):

1. Dump Billions of Tons of Limestone Into The Ocean
Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve probably heard that CO2 is making the oceans more acidic (or, strictly speaking, less alkaline). This threatens the viability of many of the creatures–including krill–that form the base of the oceanic food chain. Dumping (or, sprinkling, let’s say) a profoundly enormous quantity of lime into the ocean would in theory restore the water’s chemistry and allow the seas to absorb even more CO2 from the atmosphere.

2. A Giant Artificial Stomach That Eats Seaweed
Step One: Grow lots of kelp near the surface of the ocean. Step Two: Harvest it and “digest” it in a giant plastic “stomach.” The giant green mass gives off lots of gas — the CO2 could be siphoned off and put in some dark place and the methane could be used for powering humanity’s myriad doohickeys and gadgets. So it’s a twofer, removing carbon from the atmosphere and creating an energy source.

(more…)

Most Americans can get their head around the fact that we drive too much–that for about six or seven reasons, it would be better if we spent less time in the car. Our top political leaders even speak about openly this goal now, which is a remarkable development.

But the question always looms: How? American life is structured around nothing so much as the automobile.

An organization called TransForm has sponsored a “Car-Free Challenge” this month wherein they goad regular people like you and me to do the unthinkable and stop driving, or at least cut back substantially, and then write about it the experience on their site. The stories from the volunteers are fascinating and affecting. You can see people immediately run up against the various structural challenges we face as a country in reducing our automobile dependence, including spotty transit service and a widespread lack of sidewalks. But you can also see these volunteers start to think hard about things they hadn’t thought about before and find some new pleasures through the limitations they encounter.

Here are three sample cases:

(more…)

“Intriguing,” you muse, upon reading this headline. “But what the hell is a standpipe–and is it safe for workplace viewing?” Allow us to explain. (It’s G-rated.)

A standpipe is like a fire hydrant for an individual building. It often entails an extensive parallel plumbing system that comes into use only in case of a fire. The most familiar elements are the nubby fixtures that stick out of the facade or sidewalk–you probably use them to tie your shoe sometimes. For observant and knowledgeable urban pedestrians though, they are also like decoder rings that reveal how well a given structure is protected against fire.

(more…)

Modern greenhouses, such as those that cover large portions of southern Spain, produce an increasingly significant percentage of the food that we eat every day. That’s because these “farms” are far more productive than traditional planted fields, using advanced technologies like hydroponics and aeroponics. They also create less pollution because they don’t rely on tractors or plows, which emit a lot of carbon dioxide. Producing food in non-”natural” environments such as these decreases living costs and increases the variety of food available to people around the world.

But some climate change advocates would argue that relying on greenhouses in the world’s sunniest areas to produce our food isn’t good policy because food transportation produces pollution. On average, food found in American supermarkets has traveled 1,500 miles to get there. One solution proposed by the locavore movement, is to encourage people to consume food produced by farms located near their homes. But in big metropolises like New York or Los Angeles, with inhabitants spread out over thousands of square miles and few farms particularly close, would this ever be possible?

That’s where the buzzy idea of vertical farming–entertained by Time, the BBC and New York Times, among many other media outlets–comes in. Think of a vertical farm as a skyscraper of greenhouses, stacked one on top of the other. Though no such farm exists today, the idea is to produce fruit and vegetables in the center of our cities to minimize transportation costs and pollution.

The Vertical Farm Project suggests that New York City, for instance, could be outfitted with dozens of 30-story farms, costing hundreds of millions of dollars each.

The real question is not whether a vertical farm could be built - someone with an unlimited supply of funds would surely be able to - but whether such a farm makes any sense economically.

(more…)

Not surprisingly, Gotham uses a lot of electricty each year–around 50 million megawatt-hours. But on a per person basis it is one of the nation’s most environmentally-friendly cities. New Yorkers consume only about 5,000 kilowatt-hours per capita per year, compared to 7,000 in San Francisco or 16,000 in Dallas.

So if any American city is capable of making the switch entirely to green power sources, New York is a prime candidate. But how realistic is the goal of having a large city get all of its power from sustainable sources?

Wind power might be a good option for powering New York City, considering the quick gusts that blow down the town’s wide avenues and along its major waterways. Indeed, last year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg even floated a plan to encourage the construction of turbines atop skyscrapers and implanted in the surrounding bay.

Also under discussion is the Long Island Offshore Wind Park, a complex of 40 large turbines in an 8 square mile area located four miles off the southern shore of Jones Beach, a few miles east of Queens. Together, those windmills would produce 435,000 megawatt-hours a year–meaning you’d need 115 such parks with 4,600 turbines to fulfill all of New York’s existing power needs. Those windmills would consume an area of 920 square miles, more than three times the city’s land area.

(more…)