PUBLIC PARKING CHANGES ANNOUNCED

A portion of the State Street public parking lot will be reserved for valet parking effective Mon., March 17, 2008. The west side of the lot, containing 68 spaces, will be reserved for valet parking and available to the public for $3 a day. The east side of the lot, 71 spaces, will be available to the general public and downtown employee permit holders.

Native Landscape

To Feed the Birds, First Feed the Bugs - This is the headline from a recent NY Times article. The article points out that birds evolved along with native vegetation. When the landscape is replaced with exotic vegetation, habitat and food for the birds disappears. Habitat for the bugs and the rest of the "eco-chain" also disappears.

The article is interesting a worth a read.

Raptor Rapture

Big gator. Bigger than my boat, and definitely faster. Like a nightmare troll stretching across the narrow entrance of the estuary, he watches as I edge past in a rented tub-toy masquerading as a kayak. God he has a lot of teeth.

ACCESS SARASOTA TO AIR SARASOTA’S FIRST PUBLIC HOUSING CONFERENCE

Access Sarasota, the government access channel for the City of Sarasota and Sarasota County, will provide live coverage of Sarasota’s first Public Housing Conference on Friday, March 14, 2008 beginning at 2:00pm. The event is sponsored by the resident councils of Sarasota’s subsidized housing complexes.

Adult Tutors Needed

Dear Sarasota FWA Members -

I received the following email from Kristin Szafraniec, Executive Director of the Sarasota Literacy Council in response to a query I made concerning volunteering after seeing an ad in "Betty Says". Since the FWA takes an active role in Literacy, I thought this may sound interesting to our members or as a group project. I'll bring handouts of the information I receive from Kristin to the next meeting on March 26th. Look forward to seeing you then.

Dear Susan

Adult and family literacy is an extremely important need in our community and I’m hoping to join forces with area organizations like FWA to work on literacy initiatives.

We are celebrating our 30th year anniversary this year, and the need for our programs is growing. We have three programs with over 150 tutor/student pairs and need additional help. Although we do have students from other counties/areas, our organization services learners in the City of Sarasota and the northern half of Sarasota County. LCS is a not for profit 501c3 and we are supported by volunteers, members and donors/small foundations.

I will send you a sheet via email that will provide you with more information about who we are and what we do. In the meantime, feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I look forward to meeting you and collaborating together.

Warm Regards,
Kristin Szafraniec

Executive Director
The Literacy Council of Sarasota, Inc.
Tel: 941.955.0421
www.sarasotaliteracy.org

Changing Sarasota

Below are two pictures of the Payne Park area of Sarasota. The first picture shows what the park and surrounding area looks like today. The second is a postcard picture of the same area when the baseball field and trailer park were still there (about 1970?).

The area just east of Payne Park has been the subject of a proposed development for the last two years. Concerns about height, density and traffic have resulted in a number of changes to the original plan.

More recently a design charette was conducted to find "community consensus" concerning these issues. A description of the charette and the result can be found at School Avenue Charette website.

Going Green

From the NY Times

February 7, 2008
In Many Communities, It’s Not Easy Going Green
By FELICITY BARRINGER

ARLINGTON, Va. — This urban suburb of Washington seems well-prepared for a leading role in the green revolution embraced by hundreds of the nation’s cities, counties and towns.

For decades, Arlington County’s development has been consciously clustered around its subway line. There is abundant open space to plant thousands of trees. Residents also seem eager to cut back on their own energy use.

Jose R. Fernandez, who moved here last year and works at the nearby national headquarters of the National Guard, chose to settle in Arlington because he does not need a car. “I can go anywhere on the bus,” Mr. Fernandez said, “or I can ride my bike anywhere.”

But even in Arlington, county officials are reckoning with the fact that though green is the dream, the shade of civic achievement is closer to olive drab. Constraints on budgets, legal restrictions by states, and people’s unwillingness to change sometimes put brakes on ambitious plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Emissions are stubborn things. In Arlington, emissions per capita are now 15 tons annually and rising. In Sonoma County, Calif., the figure is close to nine tons. Arlington is not alone in bumping up against obstacles.

“We have been doing things like filling potholes and reducing crime since cities began,” said David N. Cicilline, the mayor of Providence, R.I., but energy efficiency requires “a whole new infrastructure to evaluate and measure.”

When Providence offcials pushed for new police cars with four cylinders instead of six, to save gasoline, there was pushback — unsuccessful — from police officers who preferred more powerful engines to pursue speeders or criminals. Cleveland’s plans to retrofit a local hot-water plant, produce new electricity and save tons of greenhouse gas emissions, molder in a file. It would cost $200 million, and there is no money — the tax base, left ragged by the loss of population and industry over the last two decades, has been hit hard again by the subprime mortgage crisis.

Nearly 1,200 miles away, in Austin, Tex., — a city that ranks high on any list of green strivers — some residents want to help but do not feel they can afford it. DeVonna Garcia’s family won an award for its beautiful outdoor display of Christmas lights — but she stayed with her old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, hearing that a friend paid $600 for energy-efficient lights.

Ann Hancock, the executive director of the Climate Protection Campaign, a nonprofit based in Sonoma County, a wine-growing area north of San Francisco, said that the county and its nine municipalities signed climate-protection agreements with enthusiasm more than five years ago, committing to bringing down greenhouse-gas emissions. Then they tried to figure out how.

“It’s really hard,” Ms. Hancock said. “It’s like the dark night of the soul.” All the big items in the inventory of emissions — from tailpipes, from the energy needed to supply drinking water and treat waste water, from heating and cooling buildings — are the product of residents’ and businesses’ individual decisions about how and where to live and drive and shop.

“They’ve seen the Al Gore movie, but they still have their lifestyle to contend with,” she said.

“We need to get people out of their cars, and we can’t under the present circumstances,” because of the limited alternative in public transportation, Ms. Hancock said. And the county’s many older homes are not very good at keeping in the cool air in the summer or the warm air in winter. “How do you go back and retrofit all of those?” she asked.

County governments are also finding that homeowners’ associations can be troublesome. Carbondale, Colo., would welcome people like Adam and Rachel Connor, who bought a lot in a subdivision outside town and made plans for a house with solar panels. But the homeowners’ association vetoed the proposal on aesthetic grounds. Such associations have rejected solar projects from Southern California to the Chicago suburbs to Phoenix, prompting at least two states to pass laws prohibiting such vetoes.

“Unrealistic and unreasonable expectations,” Ms. Connor said, “should not stand in the way of us taking climate change seriously and taking control of energy security with our own hands.”

Arlington, Providence and more than 300 other communities in the United States are members of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, which has developed software to help them determine the quantity of greenhouse gases their municipalities emit. They are still trying to figure it all out. Reductions and remedies are harder still.

Regional politics render ideas that are embraced in some cities unthinkable in others. In Burlington, Vt., and Berkeley, Calif., there are local laws requiring that people who are selling their homes upgrade the energy efficiency to meet current standards, whether by adding thicker insulation to the pipes, replacing the windows or putting in an energy-saving water heater. (The maximum amount to be spent is determined by the selling price of the house.)

Would the idea fly in, say, Cleveland? On a statewide level, “politically, it would be a non-starter,” said Andrew Watterson, the program director of Cleveland’s office of sustainability. “Legally, I’m not sure if we could do it” because of state limits on local taxing powers, Mr. Watterson said.

But Cleveland’s mayor, Frank G. Jackson, has backed the redevelopment of three old city neighborhoods in accordance with blueprints established by the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program (for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.) Mr. Watterson said he hoped this sort of project would encourage a reverse migration of families who seek livable, walkable communities.

Arlington County is not having a problem attracting residents who are partial to the idea of a green revolution. But in the outer sections of Arlington, the problem is aging houses with inadequate insulation and inefficient appliances.

“We have an old house,” said Kevin Clark, who is 41 and a professor of instructional technology at George Mason University. “We got double-paned glass. We could feel the air coming in through those nice wood frames.”

Between the $13,000 cost of that repair and the money for a new refrigerator and other appliances, energy efficiencies have cost Mr. Clark and his family about $18,000. Though they have cut monthly electric bills, he is not sure how much he is saving.

Among the county’s biggest roadblocks in its effort to reduce emissions are the strict legal limits on Arlington officials. The state government in Richmond has the final authority in setting building codes, for instance. Like Cleveland, Arlington cannot require a house’s energy systems be upgraded when the house is sold. And Arlington cannot require commercial builders to install more insulation and more efficient heating, cooling and lighting systems than the state does.

As J. Walter Tejada, the chairman of Arlington County’s governing board, said, “Sometimes I think that even when you’re sneezing you need to ask the Legislature for permission.”

Laura Fiffick, the director of the office of environmental quality in Dallas — one vehicle in four is a pickup truck in Texas — said, “How do you reach an individual citizen and tell them: Everybody makes a difference.”

She added: “A lot of cities have said, ‘We’re going to be carbon-neutral by 2020.’ To me, the idea is to figure out what emissions we are going to go after and what we can do and then set the goal. When you set the bar too high, it becomes demotivating.”
-----

As Sarasota moves toward a greener community, it is good to reflect on what is appening in other areas.

Great Cities

What kind of cities do we want to have?

Over half the world population now lives in cities, and while these cities are changing and growing at an unprecedented rate, there seems to be little discussion about what we want our cities to be like, or what the public realm can do to make cities great places to live. After all, it is the public spaces-squares, parks, streets, markets and public buildings-that define people's experience of any city. It is in these destinations where we most authentically experience a city, where we feel most connected to something larger, and where we participate most directly in the creation and preservation of culture.

Inevitably, these public spaces shape the stories we tell about cities; they reflect the character and personality of a city’s people; and they determine a city’s ultimate creativity and resilience. Increasingly, however, the growth of many cities is haphazard, and ignores the public realm, which is so important in people's lives. Many cities today, both rich and poor, old and new, are failing to reflect the needs, values, and aspirations of the people they are meant to serve.

This may be one root cause of the world's current social, environmental and economic woes. When people do not feel ownership over their community's public spaces, it affects how they view broader global concerns. For example, when the public realm of a city is challenged by problems like pollution, traffic, privatization, gentrification, and soulless monoculture, it sends a clear message that we are not in charge of our own communities. Efforts to reclaim and revitalize public spaces show that we can make a difference in our neighborhoods—and in the wider world.

Places all around the world—from Paris to Bogota to Hong Kong—are proving that improving public spaces can be a powerful way of creating cities. These cities realize that one of the major reasons people are attracted to a city is the simple desire to be around a wide range of people and communities. There are countless things that draw people to cities, from the desire to live in a neighborhood that fosters walking to a commitment to live in a more environmentally-friendly way.

The world’s great cities didn't happen overnight. They did not materialize because of any one visionary project or inspirational person. They are the cumulative result of people taking bold actions to make improvements. These actions, both large and small, helped cities evolve over time to become more desirable and livable. Throughout the upcoming year, PPS is initiating dialogue about what makes public spaces and cities themselves great - paying particular attention to the people who have taken bold actions to make good things happen. This Great Cities edition of the Making Places newsletter showcases the bold moves that are occurring in many cities today.

[From Project for Public Places - an excellent organization]

SMR Headquarters Building Certified Green; Crist Sees

SMR’s Building Certified Green – Schroeder-Manatee Ranch, the parent company of the developer of Lakewood Ranch, announces that its corporate headquarters is the first commercial building to be certified Green by the Florida Green Building Coalition. The two-story, 32,000-square-foot building is located on Covenant Way, just north of University Parkway on the east side of Lorraine Road. SMR has a history of practicing wise stewardship of their land and resources, and building Green is an extension of their commitment to quality building practices. The Green building features for the SMR corporate headquarters includes energy-efficient and healthful building construction, environmental responsibility, sustainability, and economic viability. Features include the use of drought-tolerant plants in the outdoor landscaping, the use of recycled building materials, the recycling of more than 75 percent of the construction waste, the use of efficient systems for heating, cooling and water resources, solar powered sprinkler systems, the use of iSynergy software from iDaix to reduce the use of paper, friction track flooring to eliminate the use of toxic glues, energy-efficient windows, low VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) paints, low flow faucets and dual flush toilets, and a daily recycling program at individual desks. Lakewood Ranch recently received the Green Homes Marketing of the Year award at the National Association of Home Builders’ eighth annual National Green Building Conference.


Crist Sees Florida as Green Leader – Governor
Charlie Crist wants to follow California’s lead and turn Florida into a green state by
capping greenhouse gas emissions, requiring environmentally friendly building codes, and turning state government into a model of energy efficiency. He is pushing to require dirty power plants to dramatically reduce emissions while converting 20 percent of their production to renewable energy. Greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles would also be cut.

Many of his proposals were presented at the recent Summit on Global Change in Miami July 12–13, 2007. The summit featured scientists, alternative energy experts, policy makers, academics, media, and environmental officials from around the globe. More than 600 people participated at the Summit.

Crist is pushing to set caps on emissions by electric utilities. The caps will come in stages, with the first reduction goals coming in 2017 when power plant emissions would be capped at 2000 levels. By 2050, emissions couldn’t exceed 20 percent of the 1990 levels. Utilities could also be asked to produce 20 percent of their power with renewable sources, such as solar and wind energy.

“Florida is providing the moral leadership needed to preserve our state’s beautiful natural environment, and state government is leading by example by taking immediate action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,” Governor Crist said. “However, our actions do not stop here. During the next few months, Florida’s Action Team on Energy and Climate Change will develop further recommendations for our state’s long-term climate-friendly efforts.

“Global climate change is one of the most important issues we face this century, and we must take action. We must make every effort to boldly do our best to do what is right – for our environment, for our economy, and for future generations. We have a responsibility to be good stewards of Florida’s natural resources and beautiful surroundings.”

Governor Crist called for Florida to become a leader in renewable and alternative energies such as ethanol and biofuels, solar and wind energy. Florida has the greatest capacity in the nation to produce ethanol because of a year-long growing season and robust agricultural lands. Florida’s sugar cane and citrus industries have great potential to become a statewide asset when converted to ethanol. In this way, energy diversification can be vital to Florida’s economic development and security.

Governor Crist also signed agreements with the governments of Germany and the United Kingdom calling for a post- Kyoto Protocol that protects the planet’s climate systems by reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses beyond 2012.

Moore Attends Builders Conference – Bryan Moore, a partner with Positive Change Media and the site coordinator for Efest 2007, recently attended the Southeast Builders Conference in Orlando. The event featured more than 800 exhibitors. Moore visited all the companies offering green products and services to build relationships and to make owners aware of the opportunity to exhibit at Efest. He also connected with some of the Efest 2007 sponsors and registered exhibitors such as Two Trails Green Consulting, Solar Direct, and Tankless Water Heater Systems.

Efest 2008 will expand to two days to accommodate as many as 200 exhibitors. It will be the largest green living music and arts festival in the history of Florida. Efest 2009 is expected to attract innovative green businesses from throughout the U.S. and other nations.

Submit suggested Regional Green News listings to randy@efest.us.

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Energy Obesity and Cutting Calories

They are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing. – William Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice)

In an interview he gave in 1973, Ivan Illich compared human energy overconsumption, particularly that of oil, with overeating. Both, he said, could lead to a kind of obesity, which could threaten the health of the organism. “High quanta of energy,” he claimed, “degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu.” What does that mean? It means that we can’t keep consuming huge amounts of energy (or overeating meal after meal) and not pay a high price, as individuals and as a society. When we continually overeat, we can become obese. When we continually overindulge in the earth’s energy resources, society can become obese, with all the attendant social-health challenges one might expect: fear of scarcity as demand outstrips supply, hoarding of resources by those who can do so, and a rising cost of living that threatens the stability of society as a whole. Illich said, “A people can be just as dangerously overpowered by the wattage of its tools as by the caloric content of its foods,” noting that, whether they realize it or not, both the under-consumer and over-consumer alike suffer. Calories are only healthy, Illich reminds us, “as long as they stay within the range that separates enough from too much.”

And I guess, for many of us, this is where it gets tricky. What is enough, and how much is too much? That’s not always easy to discern, especially in a society that presents over-consumption as the norm (and even a patriotic ideal). Given that, it’s up to each of us to begin to question our own energy consumption patterns within a much broader context: How healthy do we want our society and world to be? What is the real cost to each of us as individuals, beyond our monthly budget, of our energy consumption choices? And how can we begin to make healthier choices? For most of us, the first step is usually becoming aware: Noticing the tighter belt in the case of undesired weight gain; recognizing the symptoms of, say, global warming, in the case of energy consumption. The second step is doing something about it: reducing consumption. Whether we’re talking about food or energy, too many calories are too many calories, and we all know what to do about it. But knowing same. Doing is hard. Or so we think. The fact is even small changes in our energy “diet” can make a big difference when we all make a concerted effort to reduce consumption.

For instance, switching to compact fluorescent bulbs, which use up to 75 percent less energy than conventional incandescent bulbs (and last 10 times longer), is an easy, simple change we all can make. Other energy reduction choices include upgrading home insulation and appliances to be more energy efficient, switching to solar hot water heating, driving less and walking and biking more, and using public transportation when possible. Food, it turns out, plays an important role not only in our regular diet but also our energy diet. Because food can travel between 1500 and 2500 miles, farm to plate, transportation energy can be greatly reduced by growing our own food or buying it from local (preferably organic) sources. (This has the added benefit of helping the local economy.) There are, of course, many other changes that can be made to reduce energy consumption – some easy, some not so easy. In the end, greater measures may need to be taken to reduce our energy diet and overcome “social obesity.” But as anyone who cares for their physical health knows, positive change often has a way of creating more positive change, and what seemed like a daunting task turns out to be not so difficult after all.

Linda Maree is a freelance writer with a passion for the environment.
Please write to etainwrites@aol.com.

Please let us know what you think about this article by writing your comments in our Green Blog.

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