1. A first sustainability conference for the Freeport Apollo Group (FLAG) near Pittsburgh:
   

   Notable speakers on historic preservation, outdoor recreational tourism, stormwater management, urban forestry, green building practices, and locally grown food and agriculture are at the crux of a “sustainability conference” being hosted by the Freeport Leechburg Apollo Group.

   Also interesting is that they’re including a panel on historic preservation, which I’ve always thought belongs in discussions of sustainability, because it helps people connect with their (cultural) environment better.

2. Professor John Sterman of MIT interviewed on sustainability:
   

   But the perspective of those of us at the S-Lab is that sustainability is much broader than just an ecological concept. We think of sustainability as encompassing not just ecological issues but economic issues, social issues, political and even personal issues. You can’t have a sustainable ecosystem if there’s extreme poverty, if there’s no opportunity for people to meet basic human needs and realize their potential. And of course you can’t have a healthy economy if the result of that economic activity is the degradation of the environment.

   Framing this as loggers versus spotted owls, growth versus green, economy versus environment—as opposition—doesn’t work and isn’t right. These things are fundamentally aligned. And I think people are hungry for that alignment.

3. Paul Krugman’s NY Times piece on building the green economy:
   

   Like the debate over climate change itself, the debate over climate economics looks very different from the inside than it often does in popular media. The casual reader might have the impression that there are real doubts about whether emissions can be reduced without inflicting severe damage on the economy. In fact, once you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change — one that limits carbon emissions by putting a price on them — can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost. There is, however, much less agreement on how fast we should move, whether major conservation efforts should start almost immediately or be gradually increased over the course of many decades.

   In what follows, I will offer a brief survey of the economics of climate change or, more precisely, the economics of lessening climate change. I’ll try to lay out the areas of broad agreement as well as those that remain in major dispute. First, though, a primer in the basic economics of environmental protection.

   It really is a good overview on the basics of the economics of climate change mitigation.

4. The American Society of Landscape Architecture (ASLA) notes the creation of the SEED standard from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design:
   

   A group of architects, designers, activists, and community leaders interested in “public interest design” came together in 2005 at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and conceived of a set of principles and tools that would feature a greater focus on the social and economic facets of buildings and neighborhoods. Five years later, a team has launched a new standard called SEED (Social Economic Environmental Design). SEED is designed to provide guidance, evaluation, and certification on the social, economic, and environmental aspects of buildings and neighborhoods.

   Engaging local stakeholders is critical in the SEED process:

   SEED maintains the belief that design can play a vital role in the most critical issues that face communities and individuals, in crisis and in every day challenges. To accomplish this, the SEED® process guides professionals to work alongside locals who know their community and its needs. This practice of ‘trusting the local’ is increasingly recognized as a highly effective way to sustain the health and longevity of a place or a community as it develops.

5. The ASLA’s Dirt blog also highlights Cuba’s big strides in sustainable agriculture following the collapse of the Soviet Union and their economic aid twenty years ago:
   

   Farmers and agronomists responded to economic isolation by localizing food production, which has now taken off across Cuba’s urban areas. In fact, urban farms in “vacant lots in the capital, Havana, and a network of producers across the country” now provide 80 percent of the country with local, organic produce and helped turn Cuba into an “unintentional leader of the green movement,” says Solutions. CBS News adds that most urban farms where organic produce is grown are walking distance from residents.

   The fall of the Soviet Union meant the end to external support, and green agricultural practices had to be scaled up quickly. In the early 1990’s, ”agricultural production in Cuba, dominated by sugar cane production for export, following Spanish colonial practice, shrank from 88.1 Million Metric Tonnes in 1990 to around 2.2 MMT in 1993. Supplies of corn, Cuba’s other main product and a staple of the Cuban diet, fell by 70 percent. In Havana, the average caloric intake over the same period fell from 3,052 calories per day to 2,099. Some reports suggest that many were surviving on only 1,500 calories a day.” To save Cubans from starvation, agronomists and farmers pushed for the decentralization of agriculture, an end to collective farms.

This is a short and wonderful book about the Allegheny Riverfront Park in downtown Pittsburgh.  It offers the reader a behind the scenes look at the entire process of the park from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s initial idea through its design, building, and into its present use.  The book provides this perspective through a series of recorded interviews with the landscape architects of the project.

As I began the book, I was turned off by Michael Van Valkenburgh’s seeming distaste for environmental concerns as well as his 1980s ethos of post-modern design.  However, as I read and reflected about the project and its result, the more I became convinced that this was the right landscape architectural firm for the job.  Indeed, I was so taken with the following paragraphs from pages 115-117 that I quote from them here:

Today Pittsburgh’s downtown is on its way back, so different from when we started there a decade ago, and ARP [Allegheny Riverfront Park] plays a big part in this vigo: It show how much more livable cities are with parks.  It makes me want to know more about the public discourse of the first half of the nineteenth century, in which great thinkers as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson Downing were having public conversations and writing essays about the role of parks in the lives of city dwellers in a democratic society.  Parks were being discussed in teh same conversations along with museums, concert halls, railroads, sanitation, and roadway systems.

…

As landscape urbanists, landscape architects are the only design professionals who fully understand the complexity of a park as an urban social organism.

…

The visceral nature of parks is the oppose of the virtual that so pervades our Information Age.  The trees on the lower level of the Allegheny are palpably close to you when you are there, and their rough bark and thickness play in extreme contrast to the soothing water sheet of the river nearby.  This kind of thing is impossible to photograph, and understandable only when it hits you in the gut as you are standing there.  Working in Pittsburgh extended my understanding that the significance of parks is their contribution to the daily life of urban dwellers.  They have the potential to unlock imaginations by offering up a million different versions of the kind of physical contrast I just described, bringing us back to Bachelard’s idea about psychological immensity and its relationship to the forest.  City dwellers don’t just want parks; they need them so they can be connected to time and place. [emphasis mine]

This is a wonderful book about a wonderful park.

The Cottage Garden by Christopher Lloyd  & Richard Bird provides a good overview of traditional English cottage gardens, complete with illustrations, sample design types, and practical advice.  Christopher Lloyd was a favorite garden writer in Britain for most of the twentieth century, and in this book he distills much of what he likes about traditional cottage gardens as well as what he dislikes about more contemporary attempts at historical reconstruction of them.

He is particularly bothered by the usual absence of vegetable gardening in contemporary planned cottage gardens.  In the traditional cottage garden, there was almost always an almost rigidly ordered vegetable garden at the back of the house, while most contemporary reconstructions stick basically to flower and shrub collections.  I think this is important to highlight as well, since the cottagers who both created and relied on cottage gardens used them as an important contributor to their diets.  This is why it would not have been surprising to find bees, chickens, and pigs in a historic cottage garden.

This is a good book for an overview of the authentic English cottage garden style with a decent discussion of its roots along with practical tips on how to recreate that familiar scene of a tidy mess.

The essence of a cottage garden as it has come down to us through the ages is a bountiful yet regulated informality.  It has evolved through common sense, combines need with enjoyment and is entirely unpretentious.  The layout could be said to be formal, as the front path invariably leads straight from the gate to the door.  Vegetables, of course, are planted in neat rows, as are currant and gooseberry bushes, strawberries, and raspberry canes.  But the flowers are a happy jumble.

What’s with Republicans and backdrops? First it was the “green monster” standing behind McCain and now at this convention it’s “old man powder blue”. In my book, this powder blue fairly screams polyester suit.

I watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull last night with my family, and it was great.  There were the usual thrills and adventures this time around, but with more comic relief.  I also appreciated the tying up of loose ends, and the boatload of inside-references to the earlier movies.  One that I picked up on was when Indy was lecturing to his students and told them to open to “Michaelson chapters 3 and 4.”  In Raiders, he assigns “Michaelson chapters 1 and 2″ “for next time.”

If you’ve been waiting 19 years for this film, you owe it to yourself to see it.  It’s better than the Star Wars prequels.