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Notes Public space: 'Downtown Vancouver street to be closed this summer for 'lunch meets''From The Vancouver Sun:
A 30-foot-long lunch table that pops up in the middle of a street just long enough for office workers to eat lunch is the newest idea for creating impromptu meeting places in Vancouver.
Starting in July and running once a week on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, volunteers will close a downtown city street, erect the table and put out chairs. For two hours, anyone can come down and brown-bag it at the Lunch Meet event. The city is also looking at encouraging street food vendors to set up near by.
And then, just as fast as it is put up, the whole thing will be taken down and the road opened to vehicle traffic again.
The idea is the newest project of Viva Vancouver, a $390,000 city-sponsored program that is behind a number of other summertime street closures and public-space activations.
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The project is being done in partnership with the Vancouver Public Spaces Network and will only run for the month of July. But other street activations, including a complete closure of Robson Street between Hornby and Howe will run the entire summer.
On Tuesday city council was notified Viva Vancouver will set up 10 projects, some of which will be roving events while others will be semi-permanent installations on side streets.
Starting June 23 and running until Labour Day, the Granville Mall will be closed to vehicles every Saturday and Sunday. The Robson Street closure covers the same period, and starts with the Vancouver International Jazz Festival in its new downtown home.
Additionally, the city plans to create a few more “parklets” similar to its Parallel Park installation on West 14th Avenue at Main Street.
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The Lunch Meet table was made last year by students in the CityStudio Vancouver program from a fir tree that fell in Killarney Park. The table, which is in three sections, has been used for other public events including as “a centrepiece of dialogue” for community information around the city’s Greenest City Action Plan.
Check out the rest of the article here.
(Photo credit: Vancouver Sun)
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NotesTools for Change | Communication: “Let me tell you a little story.”
From TEDxTalks:
Bill Harley, a Friend, storyteller, author, songwriter, teaching artist; two-time Grammy winning artist in the spoken word category; Lifetime Achievement awards from the Rhode Island Council on the Humanities, Children’s Music Network and the National Storytelling Network.
(H/T Climate Bites)
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NotesClimate change denial explained… in three short minutes
In this video clip science historian Naomi Oreskes talks with skeptic Nick Minchin about the driving force behind climate denial:
aversion to the political and economic implications of climate change leading to a rejection of the science.
Oreskes is co-author of the must-read book ‘Merchants of Doubt’ and recipient of the 2011 Climate Change Communicators Award.* Minchin served as a cabinet minister and senator in Australia from 1993 to 2011.
(*H/T Climate Adaptation)
(Source: Skeptical Science via YouTube)
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Notes Webinar Tonight: ‘Shaping Communities as if Sustainability Mattered’From The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions:
Join us for a discussion with two of Vancouver’s most influential planning academics, Professors Mark Roseland and Ron Kellett. Learn more from Mark Roseland about what’s happened at the community level in sustainable development since the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 1992. Find out about Ron Kellett’s work on engaging citizens through “measured visualizations” to explore and express the links of energy, GHG emissions and community planning.
When: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
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More here.
* Note that it starts at 5:00 PM Pacific time (8:00 PM on the East Coast)
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Notes Creating Awareness? 10+ Years of Climate Change Coverage in American Mainstream Media (Infographics).
Newspaper Coverage, 2000-2011:
(Source: Daily Climate, ‘Climate coverage down again in 2011’)
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TV Network News Coverage, 1996-2011:
(Source: Climate Progress, ‘Network News Coverage of Climate Change Collapsed in 2011’)
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* If you’re interested in exploring the role of media in creating climate awareness you might want to check out the Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media, “an online publication and forum to foster dialogue on climate change among scientists, journalists, policymakers, and the public.”
* If you’re interested in learning which writers and media sources provide the greatest coverage of climate issues check out the Daily Climate article referenced above.
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Notes"Multiple, concurrent steps need to be taken to prepare our cities, towns, and suburbs for the future. When analyzing the early adopters of sustainability planning, seven overall strategies stand out. These strategies can be expanded from sustainability planning to resilience planning:
1. Planning: Enable the development of vibrant mixed-use communities and higher-density regional centers that create a sense of place, allow for transportation choices (other than private automobiles), and protect regional agricultural, watershed, and wildlife-habitat lands.2. Mobility: Invest in high-quality pedestrian, bicycle, and public transit infrastructure with easy access, shared connectivity, and rich information sources, from signage to cell-phone alerts.
3. Built Environment: Design new buildings and associated landscaping—and retrofit existing buildings—for state-of-the-art energy efficiency (e.g., smart-grid applications) and resource efficiency, integrated with mobility options.
4. Economy: Support businesses to provide quality local jobs and meet the needs of the new economy with renewable energy and other green technologies and services. Support local and regional economic decision-makers in adapting to the new world of rising prices, volatile energy supplies, and national demographic shifts.
5. Food: Develop regional organic food-production, food-processing, and metro-area food-distribution networks.
6. Resources: Drastically cut the use of water, the production of waste, and the use of materials, reusing them whenever possible.
7. Management: Engage government, businesses, and citizens together in resilience planning and implementation; track and communicate the successes, failures, and opportunities of this community-wide effort.
"These strategies come from a chapter written by leading urban sustainability expert Warren Karlenzig for the Post Carbon Institute’s excellent ‘Post Carbon Reader’. You can check out his blog and work here.
(Photo credit: Seed Magazine via Urbanism.org)
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Notes Free Download: 'Shanghai Manual - 'A Guide for Sustainable Urban Development in the 21st Century'
From the UN Division for Sustainable Development:
The Shanghai Manual is a resource on sustainable urban development to mayors, urban planners and decision-makers of cities around the world. The chapters of the Manual are used as training modules in workshops that are organized by UN/DESA training centers, such as the UN Center for Regional Development, as well as other capacity building entities.The publication contains many examples of innovative leadership and distills the lessons of experiences in sustainable urban development, providing practical advice on policies and best practices. The Manual does not present theoretical discussions, but is based entirely on practical solutions to real world challenges. It provides innovative ideas, tactics and solutions that have been successfully applied at the city level.
While all cities have different development conditions, infrastructure, institutions, assets, challenges and levels of stakeholder engagement, city leaders are invited to choose from the menus of policy options those measures that may be most relevant to their respective cities. The Manual is a living document that is being updated over time to ensure its continuing relevance to the challenges of urban leadership.
Warren Karlenzig, one of the manual’s authors, provides some background here.
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Notes
Infographic: Communicating Climate Change… Language Matters!
(Source: The American Geophysical Union via Grist)
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Notes"There’s incredible potential for much better communication strategies and storytelling around what is already being done with regard to sustainability (for example, does the congregation or student body ever hear about the energy savings or why this building material was chosen over that building material during construction?). In most of the cases I’ve seen, and in terms of rallying the movement internally as well as inspiring others externally, it’s about identifying and celebrating the elements of sustainability that do exist, which will then inspire and build engagement for coming together as a community and pursuing more."
- A key paragraph from Andrea Learned’s article in the Huffington Post, ‘Plain Sight Sustainability, Mass Consumer Influence’. In it she explains the importance of highlighting examples of sustainability that already exist, particularly in the education and religious communities.
(Image: Taiga Company)
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Notes"The problem is that the policy makers the world over are paying more attention to the fossil fuel lobbyists than they are to the well being of young people and nature, as my colleagues and I have described in the paper “The Case for Young People and Nature”.
Until the public demands otherwise, the policy makers will continue to serve their financiers.
That’s the point of the present action — to draw attention to the inter-generational injustice of current policies — our children and grandchildren are getting shafted by our well-oiled coal-fired politicians who do not look beyond their next election.
The tar sands verdict will show whether he really intends to move us to clean energy or whether he will instead support going after dirtier and dirtier fuels (tar sands, oil shale, mountaintop removal, long-wall coal mining, hydro-fracking, deep ocean and Arctic exploration, etc.).
"Top American climate scientist, James Hansen, in an interview on the Alberta tar sands pipeline protest, the Obama Administration and intergenerational justice. You can read his paper, ‘The Case for Young People and Nature’, here.
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Awesome
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Stephen Colbert salutes UVA’s Class of 2013 Followed by this.
FUCKING THANK YOU.
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“We are told “no,” we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. “Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.” And then you’re a player, you don’t want to...”
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Plant a Garden: Reason #9
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Third Year of Drought Threatens Southwestern Oklahoma! Meanwhile … O.K. Sen. Inhofe still says global warming’s a hoax @ State Impact
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Young Monk! by Mardy Photography
Siem Reap, Cambodia
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The New York rapper’s political and layered rhymes have been pegged as “conscious rap,” a label that has now become pejorative. His latest album...
