Category: Students

Posts written by students

“The Urban Street Stormwater Guide”—Communication & Teamwork is Key

IE Radio 088- Green Stormwater Management http://infiniteearthacademy.com/podcast/green-stormwater-management/ …

Corinne Kisner, Director of Programs at the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), considers many aspects of urban living and communities in a podcast with Infinite Earth Academy. She advocates strongly for collaboration of various industries that keep the city itself running. Kisner mentions an example in which the Transportation and Water & Utility agency collaborated to setup the Metroline Green, connecting the two cities Minneapolis and St. Paul, while also keeping stormwater and runoff in check via trees and bioswales (9:25–10:00). In fact, Kisner believes that the lack of communication or the ill-timing of communication can be the root of many of the challenges urban areas face in creating green spaces. Not only does she discuss the implications of interagency collaboration, but also the importance of communication with the community. To reduce the lack of equity in the placement of green infrastructure, Kisner suggests reaching out to community groups, especially in underserved populations. Doing so may also prove to be an economic asset since the community would be able to create jobs for its members through street maintenance (17:00–17:14).

I thought that Kisner’s podcast covered a wide range of topics/ issues that come up when an urban area is considering the application of green infrastructure. Yet, when she talked about the idea of interagency collaboration, the large towering green buildings and structures we looked at in class came to mind. The structures are so beautiful yet functional, and present globally—London, Singapore, etc.—but it’s often difficult to fathom how much effort and good timing actually went into the creation of them. This podcast really helped put these colossals into perspective. I can appreciate now, the water & utility, the landscaping, the community, the transportation agencies and groups that have gone into making these incredible structures.

Money is of the essence for the future of Texas

Texas has come to the conclusion that something needs to be done about the so called infrastructure that hasn’t done much protecting in the case of Hurricane Harvey. Texans are terrified that if improvements to infrastructure aren’t made, they might suffer much bigger losses in the future when other natural disasters, such as hurricanes, occur. Therefore, they are demanding $61 billion dollars from the federal government to ensure that they have “proof” that infrastructure is being worked on and bettered. However, no one is aware if the government is willing to comply. Flooding has been at an all time high in Texas but Congress may be unwilling to oblige to the demands of Texas. This is because Congress is already demanding large donations to other areas that have suffered from natural disasters such as Puerto Rico, California, and etc. “”We all know it’s going to happen again. There’s going to be another storm,” said Billy Hamilton, No. 2 to the state’s Harvey “recovery czar,” John Sharp. “So, instead of paying us over and over to fix these houses every three years, give us enough money to fix the problem. (The Associated Press)” However, Texas is not giving up. Texas has come up with a plan outlining the needs to repair the current damaged system and have addressed the need for more money to make improvements. However, their wish may never come true as large sums of money have already been donated.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/11/09/us/ap-harvey-future-proofing-funding.html

Protecting AND Purifying

$300 Billion War Beneath the Street: Fighting to Replace America’s Water Pipes

In the past we have discussed how we can take the water that goes down the drain after we use it and find another purpose for it, such as black and grey water. However, we also have to evaluate and act upon what comes out of our pipes, before we use it. Places like Flint, Michigan have felt the destructive effects of faulty pipes. We might have learned from the mistakes of the passed, “though Congress banned lead water pipes three decades ago, more than 10 million older ones remain.” Although it seems that plastic might be a safe solution for our water pipes, there are some “toxic pollutants like benzene and toluene from spills and contaminated soil [that] can permeate certain types of plastic pipes as they age.” There is still the search for the best way to transport our water. This is a crucial because when water is not protected going in and not purified going out, we are contaminating ourselves and our environment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/climate/water-pipes-plastic-lead.html?smid=tw-share

 

It’s Time to Get Dirty

Trash as art — a concept. And Dirty Watercolor embraces that concept. The 22-piece art project uses the medium of water to raise awareness for environmental degradation. Riverbed soil samples collected from a variety of waterways in the Philippines served as the basis of the pigments used in the watercolor paintings. Falling on the darker end of the color spectrum, the pigments reflect the silt, crude oil, heavy metals, and biological waste that have increasingly contaminated the rivers. Some artists have described the painting process as “dirty” and “stinky,” indicating that the sterilization of the pigments was not quite enough to full mask their toxicity.

But for countless families in the Philippines, toxic water is a part of everyday reality. With limited access to running water or sewage facilities, the slums that emerge along these rivers have no way of acquiring safe water sources. So they rely on what they have in front of them. Dirty Watercolor took inspiration from the daily scenes along the Pasig river — children splashing around, people bathing, men boating with the hopes of catching a meal. In 2004, five of Manila’s rivers were declared biologically dead, including the Pasig.

The contamination of these waterways not only poses a public health threat to the people in these communities, but it also partially destroys the history and culture on which their lives (and their ancestors’ lives) were built. Dirty Watercolor aims to counteract the implications of this environmental catastrophe. The revenue from the art pieces has been allocated toward rehabilitation efforts in the communities that have been directly afflicted. But perhaps more importantly, this project has raised the bar of social consciousness. In order to effectively halt the disasters of climate change, society as whole must recognize the issue first. And then act ambitiously.

Unsustainable Practices and Their Consequences

Most people do not realize the detrimental consequences of using unsustainable practices to obtain resources, nor do people view water as a resource to be protected and reused with care. Benoit Aquin’s photography series named “The Chinese Dust Bowl” emphasizes the importance of employing sustainable practices as well as to the scarcity of water as a resource. The pictures revolve around the widespread desertification in China, man-made deserts that are slowly expanding from over use of arable land, overgrazing, and increased drilling for water. Aquin presents shocking pictures of dry, cracked, and dusty land that highlight a lack of water through the haze and overall tan color present in all of the dusty, sandy pictures, especially since one of the reasons that the deserts were created was to find water by drilling into the ground. The dirt and heat of each picture can almost be felt by the viewer as they see the conditions that people are forced to walk, travel, and live in every day. People walk around with face masks, showing that the air itself is saturated with the dust from these man-made deserts that make it difficult to breathe normally. The desertification continues to spread and diffuse outward through wind and giant sandstorms, and it represents the most massive and rapid conversion of arable land into barren deserts.

The pictures that Aquin took push the viewers to focus on the importance of implementing sustainable practices into society, especially taking care of the environment as a necessary factor in the decisions made. They expose water as an important and scarce resource to certain places in the world, and implies the need to protect and preserve it. His pictures won the Prix Pictet, a global award dedicated to photography and sustainability, in 2008, a well-deserved reward for his presentation of the ecological damage humans inflict on nature through lack of sustainability and improper mindsets.

Stockholm’s Green Wedges

The Scandanavian city of Stockholm has developed a rather interesting means of incorporating green space into an urban environment. Areas in the city that have been restricted to the public in previous decades (royal gardens, military academies) have been transformed into agricultural and forestry areas which they call green wedges. They extend from the center of the city to the rural area outside Stockholm and support many functions. The green wedges act as the link between the city’s greenery and the surrounding countryside which is important for the potential for maintaining a functioning ecosystem and natural biological diversity in rural and urban areas alike. The forestry improves the air quality and storm runoff water from built-up areas can be infiltrated in these areas. The City of Stockholm is developing a ”Green map” to plan its land use. It consists of three parts: biotope map, recycling map and sociotope map. The biotopes map makes it possible to valuate biodiversity. The recycling map identifies areas for recycling of nutrients from composting, storm runoff water treatment, energy forestry and so on. The sociotope map introduces the concept sociotope in planning, and is a way of managing sociocultural aspects.

 

IWA Water and Development Congress(Repost)

The Water and Development Congress is a global event that provides a platform for national, regional and international cooperation on water. It bridges the gap between the science and practice of water management, connecting it with industry, financial institutions, civil society and policy makers, to deliver practical solutions that help achieve the globally agreed 2030 Sustainable Development Goal vision for water. Over four days the Water and Development Congress & Exhibition has brought together over 3,000 professionals from 82 countries of the global water community. New ideas were discussed and shared, new collaborations fostered, and new solutions to some of the greatest water, wastewater and sanitation challenges were identified.

Guangzhe Chen, from the World Bank, argued that business as usual was not an option if we were to achieve universal access to water and sanitation and established the scale of what lies ahead – we need to find US$114 billion per year to reach those goals; Eleanor Allen from Water for All, asked us to explore innovative financing mechanisms to meet the huge investment needed to reach the SDGs, and to seek out non-traditional ways of funding water and sanitation for all; The renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs introduced 3Ts: Trade Resources; Transform Water for Safe Use; and Traits of crops resistant to drought; and 3Fs Finance, Fairness and Funding; And from South Africa, Dhesigen Naidoo highlighted that dealing with climate change and global water risks requires us to relate the SDGs to the global economy, and introduced us to the Climate Change Grief Cycle. We saw a shared vision of the future from three Young Water Leaders who proposed new ways of achieving business and governance resilience: we need forward looking solutions but should also get inspiration from traditional methods, from public-private partnership models to thinking a hundred years ahead our infrastructure finance models. Its always interestng to see what representatives from the United States say about our sustainability practices in global conferences.

A Sustainable New York City

What stood out to me about this article, even though it was an opinion piece was that these are viable suggestions that are made that could be implemented.

“But it’s my belief that the future of public transportation is in systems like bus rapid transit, which some think of as a “surface subway.” BRT systems make use of existing infrastructure — changes often involve designating dedicated lanes, making adjustments to right-of-way rules, and targeted technological upgrades to eliminate the delays associated with urban buses. Because of their good performance, cost effectiveness (it’s cheaper than building a subway) and flexibility in implementation, BRT systems, which started in the Brazilian city of Curitiba in 1974, are now in place in almost 200 cities worldwide including Bogotá, Seoul, Istanbul, Beijing and Rio de Janeiro, and many more could follow. I see the BRT as evolving to one day become a system of light electric vehicles with rubber tires running on exclusive tracks, re-charging at each stop.”

Despite that this was two years ago, the changes proposed in the above paragraph are still fairly far from being integrated into the structure of New York. On the other hand there have been

On the other hand “Some simple ways to get started are within everyone’s reach: Use your car less; live closer to work; recycle and compost.” Recently (this past year), the city has commissioned small compost garbage cans for the population that lives in residential suburban housing, which though it’s taken a while to finally make some sort of movements to actively encourage environmentally friendly actions.

What this article has really shown me is that though steps may be small, every change matters despite how daunting and slow it may be. Hopefully in the next 2 years there will be bigger policy adjustments to address the arising issues (such as adding the United States to the Paris Agreement).

 

 

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Green City Design

“Liuzhou Forest City will be the first urban settlement in China that will be able to generate its own renewable energy, increase biodiversity, and effectively reduce urban air pollution—which is a major challenge for present-day China.”

Not only is this a major challenge for present-day China, it is also a concern for most other developed nations are facing. We need to start looking at sustainability on a global scale and working together to live in an environmentally friendly manner together by sharing innovations and ideas. There has been a lot of pushback on green design due to people not understanding the severe deleterious climate impact our current way of life is exerting on the Earth. People are also worried about the way change will impact their current way of life and accessibility to priorly expected comforts.

Here are the facts:

“Covering an area of approximately 175 hectares along the Liuzhou River, Forest City will have offices, houses, hotels, hospitals, and schools that will be entirely covered by a total of 40,000 trees and close to a million plants, including over 100 species. It will be connected to the main city of Liuzhou by a rail line with electrical train cars.”

We can still lead our ordinary lives in an environment that is designed to both serve us as well as our planet. This new city that China is planning to develop proves that a functioning metropolitan city can also compromise some space for nature and biodiversity. But can they truly hold a large amount of people while covering up every single persons environmental footprint?

“The new city will be able to accommodate an estimated 30,000 people, and its plant-covered buildings are expected to absorb close to 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide and 57 tons of pollutants, while producing approximately 900 tons of oxygen per year.”

Not only have they figured out a way to absorb the toxins we release into our environment, but found a solution to plant enough plants to supply us and our areas with excessive oxygen. It is time for us to learn from each other and start initiative cities like this world wide!

Construction is expected to begin in 2020. Can’t wait to watch the progress!!

Alaska’s Permafrost is in Danger

We all know that a huge consequence of climate change is the fact that our water supply would be in danger and our sea waters would rise. This is especially true for The Arctic.

According to scientists from Woods Hole Research Center,”the most urgent is the fate of permafrost, the always-frozen ground that underlies much of the state.”

This permafrost contains twice as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere, from plants that took carbon dioxide from the environment centuries ago. Scarily, once this permafrost thaws, microbes can convert some of it into carbon dioxide and methane, causing even more warming to our already endangered planet. Not to mention, the wildlife and residents who live around the area would experience harmful, drastic changes. 

Out negligence to fix the issue of climate change with urgency is creating much more damage to our earth than raising its temperature. It is affecting our water supply, and directly melting structures of ice vital to keeping homeostasis to our environment. We must conserve not only the water that we drink, but the water that gives structure and protection to places such as the arctic. With a combination of green and grey infrastructure and governments coming together to set a clear path to a sustainable world, we can stop Alaska’s permafrost from thawing completely and preserve the Earth for many future generations to come.