The 13 STEPS OF RECYCLING

You might think that Recycling is “old news”.

So why are our landfills getting fuller and why are so many recyclables thrown out into the trash and float in our rivers and oceans?

If you are doing all the recycling you can at home, it’s time to tackle your house of worship (or any other community you belong to) including publishing these eco tips in your group’s newsletter, and then move on to your workplace.

If you live in Philadelphia and would like to get rewarded for your Recycling efforts join the city’s program at: www.PhillyRecyclingPAYS.com or call 1-888-769-7960

Read more on the FIRST PRECEPT OF BUDDHISM by Thich Nhat Hanh

Please watch the short video The Story of Stuff by Anne Leonard on youtube or at her website: www.storyofstuff.org

Set up your recycling bins and participate in the City’s program:

1. Paper:

Newspapers, magazines, junk mail, phone books, food boxes (remove plastic lining),
computer paper, flyers, etc.
Remember to use both sides of your paper wherever possible.

2. Cardboard

Cartons and boxes empty and flattened.

3. Plastic

All household plastic containers marked # 1 through #7
Many supermarkets collect plastic bags. Cut down on plastic bags by taking reusable bags on your shopping trips.

4. Glass

Jars and bottles

5. Metal

Tin and aluminum cans, empty paint cans, empty aerosol cans

6. Household hazardous waste

The city does several events during the year at various locations, starting on Aril 28.
Please check the dates and locations at: www.phila.gov/streets/HHW.html

Items to recycle that the City’s Recycling Program will not pick up

7. Used Batteries:

Used or “dead” batteries contain heavy metals that are toxic to humans and animals. They have to be disposed of properly. Whole Foods, Best Buy, Radio Shack, Office Depot, Staples, Home Depot, and the Big Green Earth Store at 934 South St.  Collect your dead batteries.

8. Cork:

Whole Foods collects this precious material. There is serious shortage on cork oak trees. Please collect your wine corks!!

9. Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs:

IKEA, Lowe’s and Home Depot collect them

10. Cell Phones:

 Whole Foods and many charities (like shelters for battered women) collect old cell phones.

11. Electronics – a.k.a. Toxic E-Waste

It is totally inappropriate and unethical to put old computers, old TVs or old electronic gears on the curve on garbage pick-up days. Why?
Because your old electronic gear contains significant amounts of toxic materials.
Watch the Story of Electronics at the Movies Section of www.storyofstuff.org
Donate your older models to schools or non-profits, or put them on www.freecycle.org
or on Craigslist.
Another great option is to participate in the many ethical E-Waste Recycling events organized by community groups in collaboration with companies like eForce Recycling or GigaBiter.
THE NEXT E-WASTE REYCLING WILL BE AT SEVERAL WHOLE FOODS STORES ON SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 9 A.M. – 2 P.M.

12. Unlitter Philadelphia

Make it a habit to pick up one piece of trash every day and join the De-LITTER PHILADELPHIA CAMPAIGN. It will create good karma or brownie points in heaven.

13. Have FUN

Of course RECYCLING is no silver bullet to end the environmental pollution & waste, but one part of REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE.
How about a Recycling Party every full moon or at least every change of season?

We are VERY pleased to announce that Eastern PA Permaculture Guild will be hosting Teaching Permaculture Creatively: A Professional Permaculture Teacher Training Course (3/23 – 4/1/12) with Dave Jacke, Chris Jackson and Kim Almeida!

Teaching Permaculture Creatively 2012: Eastern PA
A Nine-Day Intensive Professional Permaculture Teacher Training Course
March 23 through April 1, 2012, Kimberton Waldorf School, Phoenixville, PA

Consider this proposition: Events make the best teachers.  The most significant learnings of our lives mostly come from situations we have experienced, and even when people lecture well, they make their presentation an event from which we learn.  If events make the best teachers, it would follow that effective educators focus their energy on designing effective learning events.  How does this apply to teaching permaculture?

This nine-day intensive Permaculture Teacher Training explores how to create permaculture learning events, applying ecological principles and processes to the design of permaculture workshops, courses, and other experiences.  Learn how to quickly assess students’ learning modalities, eight intelligences, and other niche characteristics; create effective learning environments; design multifunctional, functionally interconnected courses where the whole experience is far greater than the sum of the sessions!

Each trainee in this course will design and run short classes and exercises, speak in public, plan and budget an event, and coteach a public one-day permaculture workshop at course end.  What do whole learning systems look, feel and sound like?  Come find out!  The best way to learn is to do, and to have fun doing it!  Join us!

Limited to 27 certified permaculture design course graduates; pre-course preparation required.

Course Staff:

Dave Jacke, primary author of Edible Forest Gardens, has taught innumerable workshops and courses across the country using the principles you will learn in this training.  This is the fifth teacher training he will lead.

Farmer, educator, and designer Chris Jackson works with at-risk youth and livestock at a school in Plainfield, VT, and homesteads there.  He took this training with Dave and Jono Neiger in 2007, and has taught three trainings with Dave since. 

Kim Almeida hails from the south shore of Boston, where she farms organic annual and perennial vegetables, workshops, and social systems.  This will be her second time assisting with this training, which she took in 2009.

Costs:

• A $25 nonrefundable application fee applies to course cost if accepted.  You may register and pay the application fee at: http://permacultureteachertraining.eventbrite.com

• Cost for tuition, meals, lodging: $1,300-$1,700 sliding scale.  Early application discount: $1,250 if completed applications are received before February 1!  Commuters (no breakfast or lodging included): $1,050-$1,450 sliding scale, $1,000 if completed application received by February 1.

• An additional nonrefundable deposit of $275 is required to hold your place once accepted into the program.  Full payment is required by March 9, 2010.

• Partial scholarships will be available—and your completed scholarship application will help us raise funds!

For more information, download the brochure, Student Outcomes, and the course application (includes scholarship application) at http://www.meetup.com/permie/files/.

Full Details:

http://www.meetup.com/permie/events/41466442/

Here is a link to the full article: Is a “nudge” in the right direction all we need to be greener“?

Below are a few examples of the Nudge approach to becoming greener:

1. The Eco Reminders

2. Green footsteps

3. Take the Steps

4. The Shower Monitor

5. The Conscious Electrical Plug

This article was just published by the Post Carbon Institute Energy Bulletin. It was written by Bill McKibben who is the founder of the global climate campaign 350.org.
In my opinion, Bill McKibben is the only public figure in the United States who connects the dots between day to day weather events,  weather disasters, Climate Change and the myopic discourse of Republican presidential candidates to the disastrous  course the fossil fuel industry is hell bent on taking. We are driving straight to the edge of the cliff and the car has no brakes. Read on….

If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet — as we shall see — it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.

In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology.  Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.”

Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history – 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, last year alone the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”

In the face of such data — statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet — you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to… deny there’s a problem.

Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”

Coverage of Climate Change by 5 main US Daily Newspapers from 2000 to 2011

Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Media coverage of global warming has dipped 40% over the last two years.
When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.

And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.

It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.

Why doesn’t the fossil fuel industry fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did?

Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy?

As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.

• Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.

Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same.

• As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.

When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.

If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

Put another way:

• In ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves.
• In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).

If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything — including fund an endless campaigns of lies — to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead.  To take just one example, last month the boss of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas, and oil — believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from our nation alone.

What he and the rest of the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain — pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.

Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself — not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt — and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.

Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. That’s why the fight is so pitched. That’s why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game. And it’s why that view from the satellites, however beautiful from a distance, is likely to become ever harder to recognize as our home planet.

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

For many years, Philadelphia has been known as a meds-and-eds town, with a massive life sciences presence, especially in healthcare, pharmaceuticals and research, and a host of top-flight institutions of higher education with varied specialties and points of pride.

Meds and eds are very much alive and well. One random, crossover indicator is the University of Pennsylvania ranked fourth in the nation in National Institute of Health funding last year with $463.5 million.

However, through the course of our coverage during our own infancy, it is very clear that the city and region are on the verge of a paradigm shift. We have identified four sectors – technology, sustainability, food and the arts – that appear ripe to vault past meds and eds as that which best represents Philadelphia. All four sectors have major assets, growth, talent and recent developments that promise to help create a new tagline for Philly.

The intersection of these sectors provide the greatest opportunity for growth throughout Greater Philadelphia. Flying Kite asked leaders in those respective fields to chime in on why technology, sustainability, food, or the arts will be Philadelphia’s next calling card.

TECHNOLOGY
As a project manager, chief of staff and now department manager, Jeff Friedman has played a large role in shaping Philadelphia’s reputation for technology, transparency and efficiency in city government. Now as Mayor Michael Nutter’s manager of civic innovation and partnership, the Temple University grad is a vital cog in the city’s technology machine.
Friedman’s work on OpenAccessPhilly, the city’s strategic plan for connecting citizens with each other and government involves both digital inclusion and economic development in the tech sector. The kind of collaboration that has garnered OpenAccessPhilly such positive attention is opening the door to opportunity.

“Government, higher education institutions, K-12 schools, businesses and non-profits in the tech-using and tech-consuming sectors are working together to move toward a shared vision, including advancing strategic initiatives and removing roadblocks and obstacles,” says Friedman.

ASSETS: OpenAccessPhilly and OpenDataPhilly are largely why Philly was represented at No. 1 or 2 in nearly half of the categories included in the 2011 GovFresh awards, which highlight tech innovators and innovations that nurture collaboration between government and citizens. …. The tech sector is on the rise, as Philly ranked third nationally  in tech jobs growth, and our population of young professionals is growing, too. …. Coworking leader Indy Hall is a hub for tech freelancers and has paved the way for other similar spaces and related initiatives. …. New president Bob Moul has been lauded as just whatPhilly Startup Leaders needed to solidify its mission of making Philly a hub for startups. …. Philly Tech Meetup’s arrival on the scene last year has proven to be the preferred spot for local tech launches. …. Local companies Azavea and Monetate have garnered major headlines with its civic engagement and tremendous growth trajectory, respectively. …. Technically Philly, a tireless cheerleader and emerging thought leader for the city’s tech users, provides a voice for the entire community. …. It never hurts to have the nation’sfastest broadband provider in your backyard, either.

DEVELOPMENTS:  Code For America’s return engagement in Philly. …. Nutter and IBM announced earlier this month a partnered effort to support workforce development by increasing accessibility and functionality of the citywide Digital On-Ramps initiative as part of IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge grant to Philly. ….SeedPhilly launched early this year to better organize the region’s early tech startup community. …. The launch of the Project Liberty Digital Incubator, an effort involving Philadelphia Media Network, the Knight Foundation, Ben Franklin Technology Partners, DreamIt Ventures and Drexel University, aims to stimulate the growth of digital media startups in the region. …. Explosion of female-focused tech groups can only help the sector.

CHALLENGES: Reducing digital divide in underserved areas across the city. … Doing more with less funding from Harrisburg. …. Overcoming stigma of not enough tech talent and not enough investment activity for technology startups. …. Attracting more regional/local offices of major technology companies. …. Keeping the brightest tech students in Philly after graduation.

Friedman believes continued collaboration will help elevate technology to an even loftier perch in the city: “Job growth and economic activity in this sector will increase and the hacker culture will spread, spawning new tech apps and solutions that improve our lives in the commercial and public space,” he says.

SUSTAINABILITY
Unless you’re staring at a bill, it’s hard to appreciate energy efficiency. So for the millions of visitors that come to Philadelphia every year, the city’s growing reputation for sustainability isn’t as visible. But make no mistake, it’s going down all over town and is only one small part of an entire platform of greening initiatives.

“What Philadelphia is doing to improve water and air quality is highly visible and not only makes Philadelphia a beautiful place to visit, it also improves property values,” says Kate Houstoun, managing director for the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, which has built a network of 500 members, a Green Economy Task Force and wide-ranging interest and support for a number of related projects.

Sustainability’s reach here extends from small business to large institutions, like SEPTA (creating energy from its subway braking system) and the Philadelphia Water Department (which created the first porous green street). One thing they all share, Houstoun believes, is economic vitality.

“Every project creates jobs for residents and businesses small and large,” she says.

ASSETS: The Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster is easily the most funded and high-profile effort that pulls the best from the private sector, higher education and government to develop innovative energy efficient building technologies, designs and systems. …. Mayor Nutter’s signature initiative, Greenworks Philadelphia, aims to transform the city into the greenest in the country, setting 15 targets for improving the city’s environment, reducing energy use, creating jobs and enhancing quality of life. …. Energy efficiency starts at home, which makes the guys at Postgreen Homes important leaders in homebuilding and design. …. Entrepreneurs like Sara Van Aken (SaVa Fashion) and Gabriel Mandujano (Wash Cycle Laundry) who make sustainability the driving forces of their business are fast becoming role models. …. Philadelphia rates as the fifth-most walkable city in the country according to WalkScore. …. Our new e-waste recycling center in the Northeast provides a much-needed safe haven for our growing collection of electronic devices.

DEVELOPMENTS: Green Village will be the city’s first sustainability focused incubator. .…Drew Becher’s first year at the helm of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society has been a boon for greening a much-too-gray city, as the organization’s Plant One Million Trees campaign, a tri-state initiative, aims toincrease the city’s tree canopy from 5 to 30 percent. …. Rob Smith at the Carpenter’s Joint Apprenticeship Committee raised funds to incorporate demolition waste recovery into its curriculum years after the IBEW Local 98′s training center put a solar array on its building. ….Philadelphia was chosen as one of eight cities to participate in the 2012 Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program, which will evaluate and recommend infrastructure and policy changes that will help enhance sustainability.

CHALLENGES: The national discussion on energy and climate change needs to eventually produce significant demand for infrastructure improvements and related innovations. …. Investing in homeowners, which could pave the way for incentivizing improvements like green roofs or rain gardens. …. Funding, as stimulus funds become a distant memory and yield to expensive price tags on related technology, consulting and retrofits, will be a constant concern.

“Patrick Starr and Spencer Finch at Pennsylvania Environmental Council are always reminding us to think about multiple uses for any infrastructure improvement – let’s not just consider parking spaces, but bike lanes, tree pits and stormwater management before we dig,” says Houstoun. “They are leveraging ideas and resources from across multiple agencies and organizations to green our city.

“It’s going to take that kind of collaboration, focus and nudging to keep us moving forward thoughtfully.”

FOOD
If anyone would know about the explosion of farmer’s market culture in Greater Philadelphia, it’s Nem Ngo. The longtime food pro is half of the dynamic duo behind Market Day Canele, the incredible French pastry that is as tempting as it is complex.  As Market Day’s artisanal approach has grown so has its national attention, like in Food & Wine in October. Ngo spends much of her week working the farmer’s market circuit and selling caneles, tarts and a host of other goodies from Headhouse to Bryn Mawr.

“”There are no negatives to buying your food there,” she says of the dozens of farmer’s markets in Greater Philadelphia. “It supports local business. It’s fresher and riper and often grown or raised sustainably and/or organically. The variety is amazing.”

Beyond the food, Ngo adds, is a growing community of like-minded chefs, farmers, bakers and food entrepreneurs that is tight-knit and ever creative. This scene is representative of food’s ascent at-large, from the early days of Georges Perrier to the embarrassment of riches that is Philly’s dining culture. On the flip side, never has there been more alignment of advocacy organizations fighting for healthy, fresh and affordable food in our city’s food deserts.

ASSETS: Our chefs, iron or not. Garces, Solomonov, O’Shea, DiRienzo, and many more. …. But it’s not just the big names with big ideas. It’s the little guys with the quirky, new ideas, like the recent cohabitation of Pizza Brain and Little Baby’s Ice Cream. …. Every major city should have an organization like The Food Trust, which celebrates 20 years of ensuring access to affordable and nutritious food. …. Common Market, which we profiled earlier this year, is working to bring fresh, healthy and local food to our city’s institutional food operations, like schools and hospitals. …. Efforts by city and regional planning agencies to eliminate food deserts. …. Specialty, high-end food retailers, like the chocolate at John & Kira’s, the cheese at DiBruno Brothers, the bread at Agiato, the gelato at Capogiro (voted best in the world).

DEVELOPMENTS: Incredibly interesting and dynamic restaurants continue to open regularly in every corner of the city. …. Food trucks are stronger in numbers. Nearly 60 people showed up for the first meeting of the Philadelphia Food Truck Association in December. …. Last spring’s opening of the new, $218 million regional produce warehouse in Southwest Philly was long overdue. …. In West Philly, theCenter for Culinary Enterprises is expected to be completed by summer as one of the nation’s most comprehensive commercial kitchen centers, creating food-related jobs and businesses. …. Milkboy’s expansion into Center City proved coffee, table service and full menus do indeed mix with live music. …. Food co-ops are on the rise and changing.

CHALLENGES: Providing healthier food options in schools and underserved neighborhoods, especially where corner stores are where the bulk of family shopping gets done. …. Connecting healthy food grown in the suburbs, and the associated resources, to the city. …. Increasing capacity of existing and new urban farms and gardens. …. Liquor licensing is still a bugaboo for the restaurant community, and the state’s revision or elimination of existing standards would promote smaller, indie culinary efforts.

All the other pieces appear to be in place.”Boosting local economies, using sustainable farming practices, making your citizens healthier by giving them access to better food, fostering a sense of community, you can’t go wrong,” Ngo says.

THE ARTS
No matter where he is, when Perry “Vision” DiVirgilio turns on the radio or watches a movie or is moved by a poem, he hears, sees and imagines Philadelphia.

“People tend to forget that a lot of America’s trends and visions come from Philly. And why wouldn’t they?” says the 6-foot-7 North Philly native who is known for a melodic delivery and passion as part of spoken word collective Spoken Soul 215and is a mentor for the award-winning Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement.

“We were the first capital of this country. The first major city. The heart of the country. Today you can’t go anywhere and not feel it.”

For DiVirgilio, though, there is much work to be done to restore that feeling to its fullest, and that will happen only when cultures cross and collaborations occur. “It’s great to walk into an open mic and see artists live painting and dancers finding inspiration from lyrics,” he says.

ASSETS: The Art Museum of Philadelphia for many obvious reasons. …. TheMural Arts Program attracts worldwide talent, attention and respect in addition to making every corner of the city a little brighter and more original. …. Other arts institutions, like Moore College of Art and University of the Arts, nurture future visionaries. …. The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance is one of the leading agencies of its kind in the country. …. The Knight Arts Challenge is in year two of its three-year, $9 million commitment and PNC Arts Alive is in year four of its five-year, $5 million effort to fund the most innovative and engaging projects the region has to offer. …. First Person Arts just celebrated 10 years of promoting storytelling. …. Cultureworks promises to be the next-generation resource-provider for arts and heritage organizations.

DEVELOPMENTS: The much anticipated and debated move of The Barnes Foundation collection from the Main Line to the Parkway has inspired many articles, movies and opposition. It finally happens in March and it is hoped the new location will help solidify the Parkway as a full-on arts and culture destination. …. The Cultural Alliance’s Portfolio report revealed in November that the median ticket price for arts and culture events throughout the region was only $15, meaning the arts are more accessible here than ever. …. The Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival is finally close to obtaining a home befitting its mighty mission of pushing boundaries and expanding minds and is in fund-raising mode for its agreement of sale with the city to purchase a historic former firehouse at the corner of Race Street and Columbus Blvd. …. The Greater Philadelphia Tourism and Marketing Corporation earlier this month launched With Art Philadelphia, a $2 million, first-of-its-kind partnership led by the City and GPTMC that is the region’s first coordinated and sustained visual arts marketing campaign to position Philly as one of the world’s great arts destinations.

CHALLENGES: Addressing very real problems through the arts in a meaningful way is never as easy as it sounds. It costs money and it requires much planning. …. Re-emphasizing the Avenue of the Arts with serious funding and extending it north in a meaningful way. …. Funding, funding, funding – and of course, doing more with less through collaboration and shared resources.

When PYPM was in California winning an international competition more than a year ago, people in Philly (and everywhere else) were talking about the flash mob epidemic here instead. Indeed, as DiVirgilio points out, people “can’t wait to talk down on Philadelphia.”

“There is a market for showing negativity, but showing the positivity is the revolution we all seek,” DiVirgilio says.

In the fall of 2011, Nic Esposito sent out an email to the Philadelphia Urban Farming Communityannouncing his project to build an Earthship greenhouse at the Emerald Street Urban Farm and calling for materials for the project and  people to contribute their work to building the structure while learning some of the basic skills required. I have been curious about Earthship structures ever since I first heard of them in the late 1970s. I could not resist the invitation, so I showed up to one of the workdays.

Over a 10 days period in October 2011, a bunch of people showed up at the Emerald Street Urban Farm to build a self heating and cooling greenhouse using Earthship techniques. Workdays events are a great way to build community.

What is really cool about workdays is that once you put a call out for people to come help, you have no idea who is going to show up and who you are going to meet. You will find more pictures of the workday and of the completed Earthship Greenhouse structure in the Photo Gallery Case in point, on that work day I ran into:

• The two Earthship structure experts who were directing the efforts of the volunteers who showed up that day.
• The son of an long time friend that I had not seen for several years.
  

  Making new friends

• Paul Glover, the man who inspired Philly Orchards, GreenJobs Philly and the Philly Patch Adams Clinic Project.
• Jason Pemberton who is an accomplished carpenter and green structure project manager.
• Dylan who just moved to Philadelphia from Oklahoma and works in Consulting.
• Josh who works at the UPenn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and who is passionate about Sustainability.
• Neighbors and some of the teenagers who live in Nic Esposito’s neighborhood.

What is an Earthship?

Construction Process

Please use this link –>to the  Photo Gallery that contains pictures of the steps of the building process and of finished Emerald Street Earthship Greenhouse.

For more details on Earthship structure:

• Introduction of Earthships – Radically Sustainable Buildings Made of Recycled Materials

• Wikipedia entry on Earthship structures.
• A 2011 Overview video of Earthship Biotecture
• For more pictures of the workday and of the completed Earthship Greenhouse structure visit the Photo Gallery

This article was published by Fox News. Yes, you read this correctly. This article was originally published by Fox News.

In announcing his decision to not grant permission for the Keystone pipeline extension, opponents of President Obama argue the president gave in to pressure from environmental activists.

In reality, the president was resisting an artificial deadline from Republicans trying to force his hand.

But the fact is, for the good of our country and our economy, rejecting the Keystone XL deal was the best decision possible.

Here are six facts about the proposed Keystone XL deal that make clear why the pipeline was a bad deal for America and why it deserved to be rejected:

1. Keystone XL Would Not Reduce Foreign Oil Dependency

The oil to be sent through Keystone XL pipeline was never destined for US markets. In its own presentation to investors about the proposed pipeline extension, TransCanada (the company behind Keystone XL) boasted that most if not all of the extracted and refined oil would be exported — sold in oversees markets where oil fetches a higher price (and thus turns a higher profit for the company).

2. Keystone XL Would Have Increased Domestic Oil Prices

Currently, Canadian oil reserves stored in the Midwest help suppress gas prices in the United States, particularly for farmers in our nation’s heartland.

In its permit application for the pipeline, TransCanada noted that the Keystone XL pipeline would allow the company to drain these reserves and export that fuel as well. According to TransCanada’s own statements, this would raise gas prices in the United States, especially in the Midwest.

3. Keystone XL Overstated Number of Jobs to be Created

In 2008, TransCanada’s original permit application to the State Department said the Keystone XL pipeline would create “a peak workforce of approximately 3,500 to 4,200 construction personnel” in temporary jobs building the pipeline.

By 2011, now facing growing opposition to the pipeline, TransCanada had inflated these numbers (using undisclosed formulas) to 20,000. Supporters of the proposal, backed by big oil, have since trumpeted these trumped up numbers.

4. Current Keystone Pipeline Leaked 12 Times in Last Year

The pipeline that the Obama administration has rejected the permit for would be an extension of a pipeline that has already leaked — not just once, but 12 times in the last year.

While TransCanada tried to dismiss these leaks as “minor” averaging “just five to 10 gallons of oil” each, the leak on May 7, 2011 near Millner, N.D., spilled about 21,000 gallons of oil in total.

5. The Environmental Concerns About Oil Leaks Are Justified

Nebraska’s Republican Governor Dave Heineman strongly opposed the Keystone XL project because the pipeline would run through a massive and vital aquifer in his state the supplies clean drinking water to over 2 million Americans plus water that fuels the region’s agriculture industry.

Building the pipeline might have created a few thousand temporary jobs but even a minor oil spill in or near the aquifer would have jeopardized hundreds of thousands of jobs, not to mention the health and safety of millions.

Meanwhile, in Michigan where a similar tar sands pipeline spilled over 840,000 gallons of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010, residents are still complaining of headaches, dizziness and nausea while studies continue to look at the long-term effects of just being near such an oil spill when it happens.

6. Mining Tar Sands Would Worsen Global Warming

Assuming you believe, like the vast majority of the world’s scientists, that climate change is both real and of concern, the Canadian tar sands are the second largest carbon reserve in the world.

Mining these reserves would release all of that carbon into the atmosphere, to detrimental effect on our environment. Sure, Canada might go ahead and mine the tar sands anyway, but the United States doesn’t have to help pollute the planet and our own states in the process.

No matter how you look at it, the Keystone XL proposal was a slimy, scam of a deal. America is better than that.

We can create good-paying jobs that build our families and our economy for the future without hurting our environment today.

We can invest in innovative energy technology that not only reduces our dependence on dirty fuel but also puts us in the lead in critical, emerging markets.

We can prioritize good jobs and a competitive economy of the future, with all the upsides of American energy production and innovation and far, far fewer of the downsides that Keystone carried.

Let’s focus on more of those deals going forward.

Sally Kohn is a Fox News Contributor and grassroots strategist. You can find her online at http://sallykohn.com.

Read the full article by Michael J. Coren on fastcoexist.com

Dr. Pierrehumbert is the Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago.  He was a lead author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report, and a co-author of the National Research Council study on abrupt climate change

The following quote is from Principles of Planetary Climate by Raymond T. Pierrehumbert ( http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/ ). This is a scientific proof, just take your time reading it.
“In the year 2005, over 8 gigatonnes (8·10^12kg) of carbon were released by fossil fuel burning, and annual emissions continue to grow rapidly.

There are several ways to see that this is a very big number – a major upset to the natural carbon cycle:

First, the pre-industrial atmosphere contained about 600 gigatonnes of carbon, so the 2005 annual emission is fully 1.3% of the undisturbed atmospheric content. If the same amount were released into the atmosphere each year, it would take only 75 years to double the atmospheric CO2 content, provided all the released CO2 stayed in the atmosphere.

Alternately, one could compare the fossil fuel emissions to the volcanic outgassing which in the long term balances silicate weathering and sustains the carbon cycle. Precise estimates of volcanic outgassing are hard to come by, but generally are on the order of 0.1 gigatonnes of carbon per year or less. Thus, fossil fuel carbon emissions are eighty times larger than background volcanic outgassing.In fact, the very largest carbon flux number involved in the whole carbon cycle is the net CO2 carbon fixed into organic carbon each year by worldwide photosynthesis, and fossil fuel emissions even look impressive when compared to this number.

Based on satellite chlorophyll observations, it has been estimated that photosynthesis fixes 100gigatonnes of carbon each year, about half on land and half in the oceans. The year 2005 fossil fuel emissions were fully 8% of this number. In other words, worldwide photosynthetic productivity would have to increase by 8% to take up the fossil fuel CO2 and 100% of that carbon would have to be buried as organic matter without being recycled by respiration. That, of course, would be a completely absurd situation, as virtually all of the photosynthetically fixed carbon is quickly respired back into the atmosphere, largely by bacteria who have had several billion years to become proficient at making use of organic carbon wherever they find it. As an example, land photosynthesis fixes about 50 gigatonnes of carbon each year, but the flux of organic carbon to the oceans in all the world’s rivers is a mere 0.4 gigatonnes per year (one twentieth of fossil fuel carbon emissions). And there is no evidence that much of the remainder of the photosynthetically fixed carbon is remaining on land as soil organic carbon.
To say that humans have become a force of geological proportions vastly understates the case, for by this measure human influences on the carbon cycle overwhelmingly dominate the natural sources.”

The website RealClimate offers a treasure trove of scientific information on Global Warming to anyone interested in Climate Change.

Sounds like a new brand of supplements?

Not quite.

Viridity Energy is a software firm based in Philadelphia which offers a sophisticated platform that optimizes energy demand from buildings, say a university campus or a hospital or a shopping center while maximizing the buildings own energy production resources.

Viridity Energy manages customers portfolio of buildings  via one centralized, user-friendly software platform. Viridity Energy software provides guidance to facility and energy managers to optimize their energy use by  shifting and balancing their load across  energy resources such as, distributed generation and energy storage devices, in response to usage, weather and market prices. Because of optimized energy usage and customers of Viridity Energy can  resell their excess energy capacity back to the wholesale energy markets, providing substantial, new sources of revenue

Here is a recent article from  BusinessWeek on Viridity Energy:

Audrey Zibelman spent two years in the Peace Corps in the late 1970s, working in a village in Chad which had no electricity. She was struck by how the lack of power exacerbated poverty.

“For these people I was living with, about 80 to 90 percent of their day was spent just on staying alive,” she said.

Today Zibelman, 54, heads a Philadelphia startup backed by $24 million in venture capital that she hopes will eventually help light up remote areas. For now, the 56 employees at Viridity Energy make software used by dozens of large facilities in the United States, including commercial buildings and factories, to manage their energy, which is usually their second- or third-largest expense, according to Zibelman.

She started the company in 2008 after persuading Alain Steven, an expert in utility IT systems, to help build the software. While other power-saving technologies exist, she says, Viridity is the first in the United States that also lets power guzzlers sell their energy back to the grid. That’s an important feature for institutions with solar panels or generators.

Viridity installs software that works with a building’s energy systems to monitor and control heating and cooling, appliances, generators and more. The software constantly checks the variables that affect how much a facility pays for energy. This includes the price of electricity, which for wholesale buyers like factories can change every few minutes.

The software also takes into account weather forecasts and how much it costs a building to produce its own energy. Viridity then alters electricity use to minimize costs.

At Drexel University in Philadelphia, a Viridity client, the software knows that certain rooms are better insulated than others. When electricity prices rise, it automatically reduces heat in the law library, where the books trap a lot of warmth. Drexel could make money during those hours by selling electricity from its diesel generators to the grid.

The software builds on Zibelman’s more than 25 years in the utility industry, including as general counsel to the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission. Viridity doesn’t charge for its software; it takes a cut of any revenue its customers make by selling to the grid.

Jeremy Rifkin, an adviser on energy policy to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other European heads of state, notes that similar technology has helped over 1 million buildings in Germany sell their power to the grid over the past four years.

“We’re beginning to democratize energy,” he says. “Within 25 years, everybody is going to be their own power plant.”

Zibelman expects Viridity’s software to be in hundreds of facilities, and she projects more than $10 million in revenue by the end of the year, possibly bringing the startup into the black by next year. She hopes that the same software used by Drexel could one day help rural areas wring as much value as possible from small wind or solar farms.

“Energy consumption, energy costs – it’s a big part of economic development,” she says.