Pragerblog

This is also posted at my other blog, Sustainably.

The facet I like most about Charlie Radoslovich’s Rad Urban Farmers business model is that he is a farmer without any land. From the top, you know he’s either a wacko or on to something significant. I’m thinking it’s the latter.

He told me he didn’t devise the ideas, but he’s certainly on the front edge of the wave. If he’s successful, think how much land under lawn-grass cultivation could be converted to productive use.

Anyway, a key component for him is finding OPL (other people’s land), so here’s a bit of perspective from Christine Zendeh of Lexington, whom I interviewed for my Globe story but whose comments I wasn’t able to use.

Zendeh and her husband, Soheil, have given over a 20×25-foot plot of land with excellent sun to Radoslovich. They can expect to get up to 10 pounds of fresh, locally grown produce a week, all for the initial investment of about $100. It’s cheap, but they’re the landlords, after all. Radoslovich, meanwhile, will sell what doesn’t go to landowers at the Lexington Farmers Market.

It’s interesting to note that they won’t reap produce only from their yard. Radoslovich said each plot varies not only in size but in soil and light conditions as well. That means each site will yield different crops, and he’ll consolidate before handing out shares.

Zendeh said they were admirers from the start.
“We thought this was just a brilliant, creative, wonderful idea. We’d been looking into sustainability and being connected, providing for what you need, locally, so we don’t use all the fossil fuels, etc.”

Zendeh said the family has purchases CSA shares before, wanting to support local farmers, whose skills she admires. “I’m not much of a farmer, and Charlie has made that portion of our yard productive and fertile.”

She described her food outlook as “the whole Alice Waters thing.”

“I know when you get something fresh, and it hasn’t been sprayed with pesticides, you can actually eat it. Like eating a real tomato, instead of a plastic tomato.”

In a story for the Boston Globe food section, I introduce three green-thumbed green thinkers who are raising produce on former lawns. Costs and yields vary, but community building, sustainability, and locavorism are common to all three approaches.

If you want to shop at a farmers’ market instead of in a grocery story, you have options 6 days a week in Mass. For a full list of market sites, times, and opening dates, go to massfarmersmarkets.org. Below is a subset centered on Arlington, mostly for myself but also for my neighbors. Please note, the season opens gradually; until mid-June, you should check the list before making a trek.

MONDAY
Cambridge-Central Square, Parking Lot #5, Bishop Allen Dr. & Norfolk Street, 11:30-6
TUESDAY
Cambridge-Harvard, Intersection of Oxford and Kirkland Streets in Cambridge, 12:30-6
Lexington Center, corner of Mass. Ave. and Fletcher Ave., 2-6:30
WEDNESDAY
Arlington, Russell Common Parking Lot, Arlington Center, 1-6:30 p.m.
Somerville-Davis, Day & Herbert Streets, noon-6
THURSDAY
Belmont, Belmont Center Municipal Parking Lot, Cross St. and Channing Rd., 1:30-7
Cambridge-Kendall, 500 Kendall Street, 11-2
Malden, Heritage Apartments, 195 Pleasant Street Parking Lot, 10-6
Medford, River Street and Riverside Ave, Medford Square, noon-7
FRIDAY
Cambridge, Charles Hotel Courtyard, 1 Bennet Street in Harvard Square, noon-6
SATURDAY
Cambridgeport, Morse School Parking Lot, Magazine Street at Memorial Drive, 10-2
Somerville, Union Square Plaza, 9-1
Waltham, Sovereign Bank Parking Lot, Main & Moody Street, across from Waltham Common, 9:30-2:30
Winchester, Town Common, Laraway Road, 9:30-1:30

[Cross-posted at “Sustainably,” my other blog.]

I’ve been writing about business ideas to bring better food to your home for quite some time. The first one was Jeff Barry’s Boston Organics, years ago, when I was still at the Globe; I had a feature for a while called “A Click Away,” I think. More recently, I’ve written about Gabriel Erde-Cohen’s urban/personal CSAs.

Now we can add Laurel Friel, the “queen bean” behind The Green Bean, a start-up whose idea is to do the shopping for you at the region’s farmer’s markets and deliver your order to your door. I met her Saturday at the Somerville Climate Action Network’s event I wrote about on Thursday.

The company will deliver to Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, Arlington, Lexington, and Brookline. The fee for most customers in those areas is $200 for the five-month season, up front, though Friel said some of the farther reaches may be face an added distance fee. She put the cost of her service at about $10 per week, on top of the cost of the food.

Her value proposition, she said, is that many people who might want to patronize farmers markets, to foster community, to support local farmers, and to have a stronger connection between provider and eater, can’t shop on the markets’ timetables, have family or work obligations, or can’t find parking. She said she intends to provide weekly updates on farm news and events, to try to build those connections.

Her expectation, she said, was to appeal most to young families in which both parents work, but she has found strong interest among younger people. She said her research suggests she needs about 50 households to make a go of her idea, and she has about 20 after only two weeks of promotion.

Her website is greenbeanboston.com, but when I checked, it was still under construction. You can e-mail the company here, or call 617-417-8943.

Another in a series of miniprofiles of sustainability-minded people who are working to reduce humankind’s footprint on the planet. They’re “mini” not only because they’re short, but because all the questions are 10 words or less, and the answers are requested to match. (Please, no counting.)

ADDIE CRANSTOUN, 29, Waltham
Manager, Green Depot, Stoneham

Green Depot sells building materials focused on environmentally friendly products. Stoneham is one of five locations for the company, which is headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Green epiphany: “In elementary school, one of the first major issues I tackled was concern about our ozone layer.”

Green hero: “Jane Goodall. Not only for the work she’s done, but recently, she’s doing more speaking and trying to educate children that they can have sustainability at the forefront of their future.”

A sustainability practice you recently took on: “We added composting and rain barrels to our house.”

An example of greenwashing that really bothers you: “Paint. Manufacturers change chemicals to say they’re low VOC, but no one knows if the products are cleaner or healthier.”

What don’t people understand? “That green doesn’t have to be more expensive.”

A neat product you wish you’d thought of: “Ultratouch. Recycled cotton denim jeans insulation.”

The one thing you wish everyone would just get right: “Recycling.”

Can we spend our way into sustainability? “No.”

Writing at offgrid.com, Nick Rosen discusses micro-nuclear plants, which, the story says, could power 20,000 homes for 10 years or more.

The devices, said to be only a few feet across, would be buried well underground, have no moving parts, and be powered by low-energy uranium that would be difficult to enrich into nuclear weapons. All the steam, to run turbines, and waste would be contained underground.

The idea was developed at Los Alamos. Hyperion Power, which has leased the technology, says its first unit will be installed in 2013. The devices will go for about $25 million each.

I’m not a scientist, so I don’t immediately understand the implications. Proliferation and storage of the waste long term are two of my greatest concerns, and this technology seems to address both. But if we can’t agree on a safe large-scale burial site, I don’t know how storing waste in dozens of little burial sites will be better.

Still, worth learning more about.

On the NYT’s Greenbiz blog, an entry says that pro-nuclear interests are trying to rebrand the industry, in part by seeking ways to make the plants more good looking.

I kid you not.

So let’s take a poll. How many of you would be more pro nuclear if it was painted green? Never mind all that poisonous-for-practically-ever waste, or the massive subsidies that would be needed to build the plants. You just want them to look nicer.

I’m not a scientist, so I have no standing to question scientific assertions. But still.

Carbon Sciences, based in Santa Barbara and Cambridge, England, says it is developing “… a breakthrough technology to transform carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into the basic fuel building blocks required to produce gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and other portable fuels.”

Though, of course, I can’t expect they’d publish their formuli on their homepage, and if they did, I probably wouldn’t understand them, but even so, their website seems fairly shy on details.

Also, if anyone were on the verge of transforming one of our greatest scourges — CO2 — into two of our biggest solutions — for global climate and declining fossil fuels, wouldn’t that be super-big news?

For now, it seems worth pointing out either way: It could be big, or it could be a big joke.

My default position on corporations is pretty lefty, that they are not unlike stiff dicks — driven to get what they want, not caring about anything else. Pretty much of all them are chartered for self-preservation with blinders to social interests or social costs.

But I’ve been opening to a more nuanced position, based on the experiences of Adam Werbach and Wal Mart, and to a lesser extent, the writings of Joel Makower.

But when ABC takes the advertising dollars of petroleum pushers and refuses to run this ad by the Alliance for Climate Protection, they make it very hard to envision a time when corporations will be anything but bloodsucking blights that need to be forced by law to act like responsible entities. (We establish plenty of laws for the public good; a more open discussion is definitely in the public interest. And, of course, they’re using the public airwaves; they just think they own them.)

ABC has no defensible ground here. Go here to urge ABC to reverse itself.

Another in a series of miniprofiles of sustainability-minded people who are working to reduce humankind’s footprint on the planet. To recap, they’re “mini” not only because they’re short, but because all the questions are 10 words or less, and the answers are requested to match. Please, no counting.

GABRIEL ERDE-COHEN, 24, Jamaica Plain
Green City Growers

I usually synopsize what the subject does, but this time, I thought Gabriel said it so well, I’d just let him speak:

“We build and maintain backyard farms on people’s private land for the benefit of them and their family. It’s like having a personal CSA. [CSA, as in “community supported agriculture.” Generally, farms sell shares of their output before the growing season to lessen their market risk.]

“We also acquire and do bioremediation on brownfields [land tainted by past industrial activity] in the city of Boston for the purpose of turning them into city farms and educational centers.

“Our newest program is consulting, designing, and building urban homesteads, which are completely sustainable homes and communities within the city. That’s the dream.”

Green epiphany: “Seeing what farms really look like and seeing what nature can really look like.”

Green hero: “Bill McDonough, who is revolutionizing the way we think about design.”

Why did you choose this pursuit? “If we can find a way to make cities sustainable, we can ease our way into a sustainable world in a peaceful and joyful way.”

A sustainability practice you’ve recently added: “Vermicomposting [using worms to break down organic waste]. I like it because it’s urban-scaled.”

An example of greenwashing that really bothers you: “The lightbulbs. Changing the lightbulbs will not change the world.”

A technology you’re most hopeful about: “Bicycles.”

The one thing you wish people would just get right: “Community. Relationships.”

What’s a question I should have asked you? “What do you consider truly sustainable?”

And your answer? “The world being more vital every year.”

Are we going to make it? “Yes. ‘We’ being a very large sense of ‘we.’”

… and I decide to buy a soda. I see an Au Bon Pain and grab a bottle of Diet Pepsi.

“Probably be, like, $1.69 or something,” I think to myself. “Frickin’ robbers.”

But no. It was $2.30. Nothing gold-plated about it that I could tell. Just a bottle o’ pop.

If I thought $1.69 was greedy, I sure wasn’t going to pay 36 percent more. For a frickin’ bottle of bubble-infused chemical water!

As I left in a huff of miff, I spied a Coke machine 10 steps away.

Buck and a quarter.

Yeah, it was still just bubble-infused chemical water, but at least I wasn’t getting it for a more expected price — and I was getting over on the usurious faux Frenchies.

Serves ‘em right.

The auction last Thursday brought in more than $38 million altogether, and the state intends to spend its portion on energy-saving efforts.

Here’s more from the Globe’s Erin Ailworth.

Nature showed a bit of ingratitude this weekend, washing out the two planned days of Greenfest and dampening the make-up day Sunday. Though the tables were protected top and sides by tenting, there were still plenty of opportunities to get wet, and I watched an informative presentation by architect Bill Boehm with my shoes in puddles of rainwater.

Still, I learned a few things…

* In 2009, New Generation Energy will offer Renewable Energy Investment Notes. People and/or groups that buy them will be guaranteed term and interest rate. The proceeds will fund loans to support renewable energy projects, at rates as low as 3 percent, for nonprofits, municipalities, and community-based for-profit organizations. New Generation, a nonprofit started two years ago, intends to sell notes worth $50 million altogether, in denominations as low as $1,000.
* A not particularly new UN report says that cattle-raising generates more global warming gases (in CO2 equivalents) than transportation does (18 percent to 13 percent). I knew it produced a lot, but not that much.
*Powervote.org is trying to enlist young people (oops, they let me sign, too) to sign a pledge to promote a pro-renewable energy agenda, including by registering to vote and then voting for candidates who have the same values.
* The local affiliate of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is offering energy-saving workshops on Oct. 6 and 20, Nov. 17, and Dec. 1 and 15. Call 617-436-7100 for information.
* A couple of green-eyed partisans, Andree Zaleska and Ken Ward, along with their three boys, are engaged in a low-carbon demonstration rehab project in Jamaica Plain. You can follow their progress at jpgreenhouse.blogspot.com.
* Trecia and Phil Reavis Jr. have just opened earthtees.com, a business selling Phil’s clever, environmentally themed slogans and designs on organic-cotton T-shirts. The couple is from Somerville, and they drive a Prius with the vanity plate “FREEUS,” so they might actually be walking what they’re talking.

Lubber is president of Ceres, a national coalition of investors and public-interest groups focused on environmental issues. Yesterday she was one of the Globe magazine’s “earth angels,” briefly profiled with five others as part of the issue’s green focus.

Today, she’s an op-ed contributor, making excellent points that will one day seem so obvious that everyone will wonder why, and rue, that they weren’t conventional wisdom.

She says it better than I will, since, like, it’s her idea, but essentially she contrasts Wall Street’s behavior that necessitated today’s proposed bailout with its broad-based ignorance of the hidden carbon risks in its investment strategies.

A recent Ceres/RiskMetrics report that evaluated climate governance practices found that 14 of 40 banks had adopted risk management policies or lending procedures that address climate change in a systematic way. Only six were formally calculating carbon risk in their lending portfolios. And no bank had a policy to avoid investments in carbon-intensive projects such as new coal-fired power plants. [edited to tighten.]

Unquestionably, climate change has costs — even the semi-deniers (Sarah Palin comes to mind), who concede there is warming but not that humans are responsible, would grant that. So far, we’ve just been letting those costs run up on a public tab, but eventually they’re going to come due in several ways.

The way I see it most affecting Wall Street is when, because of their environmental liabilities, coal-fired power plants are no longer considered prime assets, and once again, an island of bad paper appears from “nowhere.”

No nuclear power plants have been built since Three Mile Island, and one of the foremost reasons is that financing the plants has become so difficult. By implication, Lubber suggests that the same fate should befall coal plants, and I agree.

If you want the Prager who knows and values the outdoors, you want my brother, Richard: National Outdoor Leadership School, Outward Bound Minnesota, solo Appalachian Trail hiker from Georgia to Maine, scaler of all the 4,000-plus-feet peaks in New Hampshire, New York State School of Forestry graduate degree, all before age 25, and 10 years (maybe it was only 5) as president of the Simsbury (Conn.) Land Trust.

Me, I got nothin’, as JS would say. But two disparate sources this week made a strong case for the need to reconnect with nature, as if life depends on it. Like all of us, I’m a work in progress, but I’m starting to believe.

The more trusted source was a Ph.D. biologist I met this week, Dayna Baumeister, a cofounder of the Biomimicry Guild in Montana; she gave a speech Wednesday night at the Boston Public Library, and a two-day workshop with colleague Tim McGee through the BSA on Thursday and Friday.

Biomimicry is the practice of looking to nature for solutions to engineering and design problems, and I’ve now been exposed to the idea several times this year, beginning with the keynote at this year’s ResDesign trade show by George M. Beylerian and Richard Lombard of Material Connexion, in which they described the property of lotus leaves that can be mimicked on building skins to make them self-cleaning.

Then I heard about Janine Benyus, also a cofounder, because she’s joining with E.O. Wilson to give the closing talk of GreenBuild, the USGBC’s national convention, which comes to Boston in November. They I saw her TED Talk. And then Dayna came to town.

As she closed her presentation Wednesday night, her first keystone prescription was simply to go outside. Clearly, mimicking nature begins with observing it, but her message was broader than that: “There is a disconnect of 25-year-olds and under. They haven’t been raised by just going out and exploring. We’ve created habitats that have separated us from nature.”

OK, fine, what else is a biologist gonna say, right? I heard it, I listened, but I sure wasn’t struck by the need to sit down and write about it.

On the way home, though, I was listening to a Commonwealth Club podcast featuring Raj Patel, food activist and author of “Stuffed and Starved”, and made essentially the same point, though through his own prism, of course. Supermarkets, he said, also separate us from nature, from the seasons, from weather, by implying that everything is available all the time, that nature doesn’t really have any role in what shows up on the shelves.

A couple of different times during the workshop, someone commented that “humans do [fill in the blank] too,” prompting Baumeister to dryly observe that humans are also part of nature too. Even with all the Michael Pollan-izing I’ve (happily) undergone, I absolutely still need to be reminded of that, too.

So, food/health and industrial design, both improved by a stronger connection to nature. And then there’s the gulf of disconnection of how food production relates to climate change (cows fart methane, a highly dangerous greenhouse gas, among other connections) and to our energy woes (Patel noted how much energy does down on the farm in fertilizers: “Fertilizer bombs [think Oklahoma City] exist because fertilizer is so energy-dense.”) And then, of course, is all the fossil fuel expended to bring, say, kiwis from New Zealand.

When you talk energy, of course, you come back around to industrial design, since buildings use 70 percent of the electricity and are responsibility for 39 percent of all CO2 emissions (according to the US Green Building Council), and better design could cut that substantially. Consider the Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe: Despite its tropical locale, it relies on passive cooling, save for some fans that suck cool air in at night. Architect Mick Pearce got the idea by observing termite mounds, which, of course, is a prime example of biomimicry.

Another in a series of miniprofiles of sustainability-minded people who are working to reduce humankind’s footprint on the planet.

BRIAN BUTLER, 40, Somerville
Owner, Boston Green Building
BGB is a general contractor specializing in sustainable building. “Our focus is making general contracting as green as it can be, given the scope of a given client’s resource and projects,” said Butler, who is married with a son.

Green epiphany: I was working on a very high-end project and asked the general contractor if they had incorporated any green features. This was a $4 million project, and he hadn’t done anything! And it really pissed me off.”

Green hero: Canadian “John Larsen, creator of the Larsen truss, an advanced framing and insulation technique. Robert Riversong in Vermont is starting to popularize it in the states.”

A recent addition to your green living practices: “I took all the vampire devices in my office and plugged them into a power strip, and I turn them off at night.”

What don’t people understand? “Where it all goes, that place called ‘away.’”

An example of greenwashing that really bothers you: “Just the use of the word green. I prefer the word sustainable now. The word green is kind of bullshit, but can you sustain it?”

Best way to save the planet? Divert at least 90 percent of our defense budget to building the world’s largest renewable energy structure.”

What’s the one thing you wish everyone would just get right: “The power behind their vote.”

Are we going to make it? You know, Mike, I have a 10-year-old little boy, so I have to remain an optimist. Yeah, we’re going to be OK.”

It’s not ready yet, so this is premature, but at least I can say you heard about it here first…

Asknature.org is a database being prepared by the Biomimicry Institute of Montana that will allow users to explore the natural world for solutions to problems that people are trying to solve. That’s what biomimicry is.

For example, Columbia Forest Products is using an adhesive in plywood that it learned about from the blue mussel. In experiments, they’ve boiled the wood for two hours, which warped the wood but good but the bond didn’t break.

Another one: The Japanese company Teijin Fibers makes Morphotex, a textile that has color but no dyes. The structure of its fibers allows color to appear. They got the idea from peacocks,

There are, actually, a lot of examples of natural-world solutions being applied in products and buildings, but that’s a different post, I think.

For now, go check out the beginnings of asknature.org — you can enroll as a beta tester, if you want — and when it goes live next month, during GreenBuild in Boston, you’ll be able to ask it how nature gathers water from fog, or how energy can be stored in proteins.

As a practical matter, this might be a tool most of use to architects, designers, and engineers, but c’mon, isn’t this stuff just wicked interesting?

(Source for this info: Dayna Baumeister of the Biomimicry Guild.)

Everyone knew that Dick Cheney and Still President Bush were in bed with the oil industry, but some of their underlings took the phrase — and their oil industry contacts — much closer to their bosom.

You can’t make up this sort of stuff.

Using Swedish technology, a utility plant in Spremberg, Germany, near the Polish border, has begun capturing the carbon released by the burning of coal for electricity.

First, the lignite coal is being burned in pure oxygen, which makes the effluent cleaner — still carbon-laden but with less sulphur, mercury, and other elements typical to coal burning.

The effluent is then compressed until it is liquid, and injected underground into naturally occurring caverns.

My question — not buttressed by scientific expertise — has always been whether the holes deep in the ground can accommodate the huge volumes of CO2 produced by continuous coal burning. There are other questions, too, of course: What about plants that aren’t located near underground caverns — do you truck the liquid CO2 to where they are? Would the process work with dirtier coal? How much energy is required to produce the pure oxygen, to compress the CO2, and to pump it underground?

I remain skeptical, but am glad that the trial is going forward. The political pressure exerted by the coal industry is enormous — certainly stout enough to compress CO2 — and if there is a safe way to burn their wares, that would be better for all.

‘Course, then we have to address the energy to extract the coal, and to transport it to the plants. And the destruction of mountains and the soiling of streams and the ruined health of the miners.

By AFP, via CNet green news and Yahoo News.

For several years, LEDs were supposed to be the next big thing in consumer lighting, and they’re still coming.

But a post this week at GreenDaily touts Electron Stimulated Luminescence as a quicker comer. They are supposed to be equivalent to CFLs in cost and lifespan, but to overcome two of their shortcomings: They use no mercury, and are dimmable.

Rigel Gregg writes that ESLs have a coating of phosphor on the inside of the glass that is excited by electrons accelerated against it. CFLs send current through mercury vapor to get the same effect. The company behind it, VU1, says the light created is far more like incandescents than CFLs. It also boasts that it doesn’t need the twisty shape.

I have never seen one of these bulbs, and I don’t know if they work. The news of this product surprised me, and triggered at least some skepticism about whether it’s real. Until they’re on the market, it’ll be impossible to tell, but it sounds promising.