Tag: sustainability

Amsterdam’s “Green” Light Festival

Art has always been a medium to spread a message, raise awareness, express your inner thoughts, and make a statement. The medium is diverse, ranging from traditional paintings and sculptures, to cinematographic interpretive videos. From late 2015 to early 2016, Amsterdam held a large scale light festival, with bright artworks made on the theme of “Friendship.” The event is held annually, with a different theme each year, and the whole city participates in it. The artworks are visible wherever you go, especially enthralling when taking the famous boat ride on the city’s canals. During this particular event, 35 site-specific artworks were displayed throughout the city and featured work from both local and international artists. Most importantly, the entire project ran entirely on renewable energy and 95% of the lights were low-energy LED lights (Lisa).

This event not only lit up the city and promoted the theme of unity and integration throughout the world, but also helped shed light to the importance of sustainability and “being green” in all the work we do, even in creating artwork. Through art, even if the light festival is not based on the theme of sustainability, it utilized sustainable practices to create these masterpieces. This allows for the artwork to raise awareness on the importance of protecting the environment and incorporating the idea of environmental protection into our daily living and infrastructure projects in the future.

Battery Park City

Battery Park City on New York’s Downtown is leading the way in integrated water solutions.  Not only does it have LEED certified environmentally friendly  Solaire building, but abundant green space including Teardrop Park, which surrounds The Solaire as well as Rockefeller Park, which is across the street from The Solaire.  Plentiful green spaces make it easier to manage water because instead of rain running off along impervious concrete, as is the case in much of the city, the water can be absorbed into the earth, benefiting the plant life there obviously but also helping people by preventing combined sewer overflows due to the lessened runoff.

The Solaire has done a lot to be a forerunner in green real estate development and there is much to learn from its developers.  The building as a water reuse system onsite which allows for the collection and treatment of grey and black water for drinking and plumbing.  It also has solar panels on some parts of the walls and windows, creating a more sustainable, and likely cheaper, power source for the building. Although it may be difficult to install water treatments in all basements in New York’s apartment buildings, especially considering the age of some of them, but theres still much to be learned from The Solaire’s efforts that can be applied to New York as a whole.  For example, water treatment can be spread across a few buildings where each building does its part.  This would also help to make it more equitable as the equipment is likely expensive and the cost could be spread across multiple buildings.

Another thing New York can learn from Battery Park City’s dedication to sustainability is the abundant green spaces.  So much of the area is dedicated to public parks like Rockefeller and Teardrop parks.  Although it may be hard to convert a lot of New York into parks, smaller parks, dotting the grey concrete landscape of New York with green, can still do a lot to help with water management.

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.

City Summit 2017

Next week in Charlotte, North Carolina City Summit 2017 will be held to discuss the future of America’s cities.  Although water and sustainability won’t be the only topic of discussion, it will most definitely be an important and resonant topic.  A portion of the summit’s activities will be dedicated to cities that have started to use  One Water’s strategies to accomplish reforms in the way cities handle water.  Some of these cities include Tucson, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles.  Many American major cities are coming together and collaborating in planning for a more sustainable future.

One Water presents a comprehensive plan for water management in our future cities.  With a mind for sustainability, equitability, and affordability as well as health, safety, aesthetics, among other qualities, One Water is becoming increasingly attractive to more and more cities across the country.  However, what really makes One Water stand out from other options cities have in water management is its dedication to community involvement and collaboration and integration with local politics.  Considering One Water has partnered with the National League of Cities, the organizers of City Summit 2017, for this summit is evidentiary of their dedication to being involved on a deeply local scale. Understanding that water management is likely to be different for many cities, crafting specific plans following the general ideas and principles of One Water for different cities becomes easier.  Hopefully the 2017 City Summit produces some important pathways for future development of many cities’ water management plans.

Using “Toxic Art” to Advocate Water Sustainability

Water sustainability can be carried out in multiple ways. John Sabraw is an artist that works with environmentalists and scientists to do research on streams polluted from abandoned coal mines in Ohio. He also works on making a fully sustainable art practice that produces eco-conscious art. His recent art pieces, called “Toxic Art”, were made from pigments created from the acid polluted mine runoff. These vibrant art pieces are not only beautiful to look at, but also brings awareness to the pollution of our world’s waters due to humans and industrialization.  Continue reading “Using “Toxic Art” to Advocate Water Sustainability”

The Importance of Technology for Sustainability and the Environment

Cities around the world, including our own New York City, have been referred to as “concrete jungles,” one of the only real associations to nature given to cities, along with having to battle with pigeons as you commute to school or work. Despite having small designated areas reserved for nature in parks, the city itself remains largely grey. Naziha Mestaoui, a light artist, has created a powerful statement through her creation of the “One Beat, One Tree,” a technological light art piece, in which she projects virtual trees onto cityscapes and a new virtual tree will bloom with every heartbeat of the viewer. In her statement regarding this magnificent art piece, she said, “‘I wanted to create an art piece using technologies to connect us to this immaterial value of nature… If we want technologies to reconnect us to nature, we just need to create it’” (Frank). Her statement represents the need to use innovations and technology to reconnect us to nature and to remind the world of the importance of our environment.

Continue reading “The Importance of Technology for Sustainability and the Environment”

Capitalism & Environmental Sustainability – inherently incompatible?

Inspired by today’s discussion about sustainability and capitalism,  here are some links to articles about corporate environmentalism:

Alternet: Will Big Business Help Fight Trump’s Anti-Environment Agenda? (December 25, 2016)

American Prospect: Volkswagon’s Big Lie (Spring 2016) – A recent example of one corporation’s attempts at getting around environmental regulations. 

USA Today: Impossible Environmentalism: Green groups promote utopian fantasies (September 7, 2017) – Particularly interested in reactions to the characterization of “utopian fantasies”? How and why are the ideas in the article considered “utopian”? Why or why not is this a fair description?

American Bar Association: The Business Case for Environmental Sustainability (January 2015)

The New Republic: The CEOs Won’t Save Us (August 22, 2017)

NYC is Looking Toward a Sustainable Future

Thanks to recent efforts by Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City is steadily progressing down the path of sustainability. His recent mandate calls for a drastic reduction in carbon emissions from existing buildings within the five boroughs. Building off of the city’s current sustainability plan (One City Built to Last), the mandate is intended to maximize energy efficiency by upgrading or retrofitting buildings with solar panels and improved heaters, boilers, and windows. The plan has the capacity to cut 7% of the city’s carbon emissions by 2035, and it is precisely this cultivation of urban technology that will help curb climate change in the long run.

Although de Blasio has generated support from a variety of environmentalist groups, he has his share of critics – primarily advocates of the lower-income population. As beneficial as his proposal may prove to be, it fails to guarantee protection for rent regulated tenants against possible rent increases; the Major Capital Investment rule would allow landlords to jack up their rents due to the high initial costs of retrofitting. De Blasio’s mandate just may be the next step toward a sustainable future for the city and the world as a whole, but its shortcomings must be addressed in order to effectively and justly bring about change.

NYC Composts

In 2015, the New York City Department of Sanitation announced their goal to have zero landfill waste by 2030.  By limiting our landfill waste, the City of New York is able to cut down on waste transportation, processing , and storage costs.  Shipping NYC’s trash alone costs $400 million a year. This also reduces emissions and energy usage in addition to making New York City a better and cleaner place to live.  This mission encompasses the tripartite scope of sustainability: social, economic, and environmental.  Although, it may be a lofty goal to completely end landfill waste in 15 years, it is most definitely a step in the right direction towards a more sustainable New York.

Part of this 0x30 Campaign is to introduce composting as part of the garbage regime of New Yorkers.  Right now, most people recycle hard plastics, metals, and paper and then just throw out the rest.  However, much of what goes into landfill trash can actually be composted.  17% of all of NYC trash is food scraps that can be composted. Large composting buckets are being handed out by request to various apartment buildings and houses. However, the Department of Sanitation does not currently pick up compost everywhere.  For places not served by the DoS, people can drop their compost off at 60 locations throughout the five boroughs setup by GrowNYC.

<iframe src=”https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=1c2Dv882CW6Fosx5jj9u7fLQRJkg” width=”640″ height=”480″>

In addition to composting, food scraps are beginning to be used to generate energy for the city.  Anaerobic digesters use bacteria and other microorganisms that eat New Yorkers food scraps and, in turn, produce methane, which can be used as an energy source.  The Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant is one of the locations that have been multi-purposed to dual as an anaerobic digester.  Although its use is fairly minimal right now, as infrastructure is developed for it, anaerobic digestion will likely be used as a source of energy for New York City.

Sustainability

A Sustainable Future Powered by SeaThe blades of this five-blade turbine are made of a soft material and they rotate on their axis when influenced by ocean waves -- the diameter of the turbine is about 0.7 meters. The axis is attached to a permanent magnet electric generator, which is the part of the turbine that transforms the ocean wave energy into usable electricity. The ceramic mechanical seal protects the electrical components inside of the body from any saltwater leakage. This design allows the turbine to function for ten years before it need replacing. Credit: Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), Quantum Wave Microscopy Unit

This water turbine converts water currents and waves into energy. Professor Tsumoru Shintake at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University developed this turbine to create energy from the currents off the coast of Japan. Not only do these turbines improve life on land but they also protect the land by being used as wave breakers that prevent erosion of the shores. This is a new development is still in its beginning stages but are projected to be ready for installation.

This is a perfect example of sustainability.  This turbine can be a clean replacement for fossil fuels and their pollution into the environment. It can also protect the land form erosion. While they are still looking for a cheaper and easier method to maintain the turbine, the other pillars of sustainability are certainly there. The environment is enhanced and the society benefits for the energy that is created “Using just 1% of the seashore of mainland Japan can [generate] about 10 gigawats [of energy], which is equivalent to 10 nuclear power plants.” Using this alternative energy can mean making a difference in our lives and the lives of the next generation.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170922094047.htm