Archive for Environment
Strive Not To Drive This Week
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Beginning today and going through Friday, people across the city are choosing to drive less and try different ways of moving from Point A to Point B.
Asheville Transit rolls out its new routes and schedules. You can find yours at ridetheart.com – includes fancy Google Map that tells you the route designation, times of arrival, estimated time of travel, and what it would cost for you to drive your car there. Don’t forget you can put your bike on the front of the bus if you’d like to use both modes. It’s really easy. Here’s an instructional video. You can ride the bus for the next three weeks for free. F-R-E-E.
You can check out our newest Greenway sections along Reed Creek on your bicycle. Or head downtown to see the fancy green striped bike lanes. Please follow all traffic rules, wear a helmet, and be visible at night! Riding a bike around Asheville is an incredible way to relate to your city, not to mention the fact that it’ll give you nice legs. Here’s a map with bike routes (it’s a big .pdf).
We’ve got more sidewalks than ever in Asheville, so take a stroll.
If none of the above are options for you, then organize a car pool.
Grab your skateboard, segway, roller blades, unicycle, or jetpack and do something different this week in regard to your transportation habits.
Lastly, be aware that this is a week when there are some less experienced cyclists out there. If you are driving, show extra caution and patience to the bikes. Thanks to everyone who’s participating!
Designing Healthy Communities
Posted by: | CommentsThis landed in my email inbox. Please share it with your networks, and attend if you can!
In recognition of National Public Health Month join the Asheville Design Center and Buncombe County Department of Health in a free screening of Retrofitting Suburbia, the opening episode of a provocative new PBS series, Designing Healthy Communities.
The film will be followed by a short question and answer session with public health and design professionals.
When: Wednesday, April 25th 5:30-7:00
Where: Lord Auditorium at Pack Place Library, 67 Haywood Street in downtown Asheville
Public health is traditionally associated with issues such as poor sanitation, disease control, and health services for women and children. We now realize that how we design our communities may hold tremendous potential for improving many of the nation’s current public health concerns.
Narrator Richard Jackson, MD, MPH, looks at the impact our built environment has on key public health indices – obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, cancer and depression. Dr. Jackson connects bad community design with growing health costs, then analyzes and illustrates what architects, planners and citizens are doing about this urgent crisis by looking upstream for innovative solutions.
The Asheville Design Center engages Western North Carolina in creative community based design to promote healthy, thriving and equitable communities.
Seafood Business as Unusual
Posted by: | CommentsNothin’ to see here, folks. Move along. By way of David Atkins at Hullabaloo:
New Orleans, LA – “The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”
[...]
Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.
Bon appétit.
Energy Independence – Brownie’s #1 Priority
Posted by: | CommentsFrom a Brownie Newman newsletter:
Asheville and Buncombe County have a history of leadership when it comes to clean energy.It was just over ten years ago that Senator Steve Metcalf and Senator Martin Nesbitt, who was a member of the state House at the time, sponsored a bill called the NC Clean Smokestacks Act. This bill required the utility companies in North Carolina to install modern pollution controls on their coal-fired power plants which generate most of the state’s electricity and also generated a majority of the emissions that create haze, smog and ground level ozone pollution.
When local environmental groups put forward the concept of the Clean Smokestacks Act, most people didn’t give it much of a chance and few politicians were willing to consider it. Fortunately, two of Buncombe County’s state legislators championed the effort. It took more than three years to get it done, but thanks to hard work from hundreds of citizens from western North Carolina and across the state, the bill was passed, and North Carolina’s air is a lot cleaner today as a result.
I was the Director of the Western North Carolina Alliance at the time the Clean Smokestacks Act campaign was carried out, and was able to see first-hand how people working together around a common purpose could make a real and positive change.
As a member of the Asheville City Council over the past eight years, I am proud how our community has continued to be a leader for clean energy. In 2007, Asheville adopted a policy committing the City to reduce its use of fossil fuels and carbon pollution levels by 80%, which is the level that the scientific community believes is necessary to avoid the most severe and irreversible impacts of global warming on our children’s generation.
Asheville has aggressively followed through on this commitment:
Organic & Hydroponic vegetables grown to commercial scale
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I’m acquainted with Robert and Deborah Tornello and family through online connections, but had never seen this impressive video about their farm.
Obama Features Walnut Street
Posted by: | CommentsIn addition to this being a hard hitting ad from the Obama campaign, it features Asheville’s Walnut Street. Thanks to Jon Ostendorff’s Politics Now blog for pointing it out!
Party Green
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(Click the pic to embiggen)
If you want to rub elbows with the people in this community who are working their green hind-ends off to create a more sustainable future, then you’ll want to bring your green self down to Pack Place on Wednesday night for this event.
Support Community Agriculture
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Thanks to Asheville Foodie for posting about this! Read the whole thing here.
Spring is just around the corner, meaning it’s time to celebrate and support local food and farms by signing up for a CSA. To help those who are interested find the right farm share for them, ASAP is hosting their second CSA Fair on Thursday, March 29. The free family-friendly event, to be held from 3-6 pm at the Grove Arcade in Asheville, is an opportunity to meet farmers, learn about their CSA programs, sample their products, and purchase a share or shares.
CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. CSA farm share members pay a farmer in advance for “shares” of their season’s bounty. They then receive a steady supply of fresh foods straight from the farm every week.
See the list of farms at Asheville Foodie.
I’ve been getting CSAs for years now, and I love them. The food is fresh and delicious, and you get to know that your dollars are supporting a sustainable economy.
Hunger Here at Home
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In February, 2011 a report came out describing food hardship in places across the United States. The Asheville Metropolitan Statistical Area was listed as the 7th worst place for hunger in the nation. This year the news got worse, with the Asheville MSA listed in 3rd.
These are the facts that led to the creation of the Asheville-Buncombe Food Policy Council, which seeks to formulate policy solutions to the problems of food security. That group is working diligently, and you can expect to see a lot of proposals come forward in the near future.
Excerpts from the report after the jump:
Your Traditions Are More Important Than Theirs. Aren’t They?
Posted by: | CommentsSomething I ran across last night…
