A couple reasons from the recent Regional Plan Association newsletter online you should buy food produced locally:

Fourthly, by buying the local apple I not only supported a farm with likely more sustainable practices, I probably helped to reduce other environmental impacts. The apple I purchased at the Greenmarket was grown on a farm located in Milton, New York in Ulster County, about 80 miles away. The Washington apple traveled 2,800 miles. Various academics have been studying what are known as “food miles.” Researchers at Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture found that on average local produce traveled about 56 miles to reach its destination while conventional produce averaged about 1,494 miles.

By definition, transporting food greater distances increases traffic congestion, road wear, and accidents, and uses more fossil fuels leading to air pollution and climate change. In an ideal world, these costs would be reflected in the price of the apple, but that’s not necessarily the case. While comprehensive evaluation is difficult, it’s probably the case that buying local places less of a demand on our finite natural resources.

Finally, by buying local I may contribute to a safer, more stable food system. The recent slew of E. coli deaths and illnesses attributed to tainted spinach and perhaps other vegetables help shed light on a serious flaw in industrial agriculture: it is vulnerable. Growing monoculture crops at such a large scale means that food infected at a relatively low number of sources can impact the entire country’s food supply. During the height of the spinach scare, I bought spinach from a local farmer without worry.

Posted by Chris at 04:20 PM in Food, Sustainability | Comments (0)

New York Magazine has an interesting article on (nominally) Jersey City, but it is really about the fast pace of gentrification in the New York metro area within different neighborhoods. About our search for the next neighborhood that is interesting, but not yet expensive. Still has the feel like we are moving into a place with real neighborhood character and home grown shops, but has the more refined and big time amenities that we like and may have lived with in other neighborhoods. Basically, we all want the best of both worlds, we want it all to be very convenient, and we don't want to pay that much for it.

Toronto, where I came from, is a metropolitan, multicultural, dynamic city in which people are notorious for talking wistfully of living somewhere else. I assumed that by moving to New York I’d escape that wistful longing, and I did, sort of. But what I found is that in New York, people don’t fantasize so much about other cities—London, Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin—as they do about other eras. A friend of mine recently moved to Bushwick, the next frontier in gentrified Brooklyn, and he always sells it by saying, “It’s like Soho in the eighties or Williamsburg in the nineties.” You need only to flip through On the Street, Amy Arbus’s new book of photos taken in the East Village in the early eighties, or read reviews of Up Is Up But So Is Down, an anthology of writing from the same era, to be reminded of a time when, as one reviewer put it, the city was “infused with the energy and violence of a city where blackouts and social protests were routine, the East Village was still filled with tenements, and the subway was covered with graffiti”—and then, oddly, to feel nostalgic for that time. And yet we regard this nostalgia with a self-mocking irony. Gawker, for a time, reported gruesome murders under the snarky catchall heading “NYC Is EDGY!”—the joke being that we’re glad it really isn’t while simultaneously kind of wishing it still was.

Posted by Chris at 07:12 PM in Planning | Comments (0)

If you feel like buying some music online, here are two great sites. Both sell their music without any DRM (Digital Rights Management) that restricts what you can do with the digital files. This way you can support artists you like without having to submit to some overbearing corporate profit center.

track it down - the complete source for electronic/dance music. Singles, remixes, All the latest the things you would find on vinyl. And you can get very high quality/high bit rate encodings.

amie street - independent music, songs start out all priced at the same rate (very low, around $.10 or so), and become more expensive as they get more popular. You can earn credits for referring people.

Posted by Chris at 09:51 PM in Music | Comments (0)

The Energy Information Administration released its far forward looking report on energy sources and consumption in the country. Alternative and biomass sources play a smaller part in our country's future then the current amount of news about them might lead one to believe, leaving our fossil fuel friend coal to do most of the heavy lifting. The report doesn't talk directly about any possible reduction in energy consumption, although I guess it might be implied in reduced rates of energy demand increase.

I guess we are a growing country, so we can't expect energy saving technologies and our better instincts to overcome our growing needs for power, right? I suppose to a large degree, much of the energy in this country is used by long lived assets such as buildings which cannot normally just be replaced when the latest technology comes out. It is highly unlikely that our transportation infrastructure will be scaled down, we can hope that the deficiency of the most common modes of our transportation increase, but again we run into the problem of long lived assets.

I guess we will all just have to be happy with chipping away at the margins of energy consumption, and maybe wait for the next big breakthrough in fusion power.

Posted by Chris at 06:19 PM in Environment, Politics, Sustainability | Comments (0)

Learn a little bit about energy consumption, and take a pledge to do your part and reduce your energy consumption at the Six Degrees of Energy Efficiency web site.

It's interesting though, that this organization - which is largely funded by the many companies that are its "partners" - promote saving energy through products substitution. You can reduce your energy use, if you buy a new product that uses less energy - preferably one of the products made by one of the partner companies. This web site deals with home/residential energy consumption so the fact that increased industrial energy used to create these new products that use less energy is not part of the equation. But then, Americans are inveterate consumers, so I suppose promoting the consumption of energy saving products is better than nothing.

Posted by Chris at 07:01 PM in Environment, Sustainability | Comments (0)

More and more nightclubs are using scanners to check ID on people who are entering. While it is a great way to automate the process and much more easily find fakes, it also allows them to capture all the information on the license - your name, address, birthday, license number, eye color , and other miscellaneous information. Generally they just want it for marketing information. But do you really want your average nightclub owner (even if he or she claims they are doing it securely and privately) keeping your information and the thousands of others on a CD or computer in their office or laptop just waiting to be e-mailed or given to someone to be used for annoying marketing or slightly less innocuous purposes?

Posted by Chris at 03:27 PM in Security | Comments (0)