Category Archives: Green Urban Living

While it Lasts

Posted on by ninjanurse

It’s 10:10am, I’m cooking what was in the fridge. Everything still works, just a couple of tiny flickers in the lights. I’ve still got hot water and the basement was pretty dry last time I looked.

There’s a big branch down in my back yard but nothing was there to hit. In my neighbor’s parking lot the cars are huddled as far from the big tree as they can get. They look so pitiful and scared. My cat is oblivious to it all. ‘Brain the size of a walnut’, as my husband says. He was not kept late at work today, but will be braving the storm tonight because hospitals do not close, ever.

Home care is a different deal, we’re staying off the roads as much as possible.

I DON’T HAVE TO WORK TODAY!

It’s an ill wind blows nobody good.

They Dump, We Pay

Posted on by ninjanurse

I’m on the road today, taking a break at the Liberty Elm. Not much time, but I’ve been on the intertubes late at night when I’m too tired to write, and there’s a little item from the back pages of the ProJo that caught my eye, back on July 27.

This is in my visiting nurse territory. The two elderly high-rise buildings on the end of Smith Street (you will have trouble finding because it’s off the Centredale roundabout) are built on contaminated land. Although I have not seen any three-winged geese or giant mushrooms in the little green patch alongside the parking lots, I do think it’s a shame that un-named persons left behind something as nasty as dioxin. Look up Agent Orange to learn more about how dioxin persists in the soil and water, and what it does to people.

The agency’s investigation found the highest levels of contaminants at a location along the river, just off Smith Street, where two apartment complexes are now in operation. Those complexes are Centredale Manor and Brook Village.

The site was a hub of activity for a former chemical company and a drum recycler, which polluted the area with dioxins during a period from the early 1940s to the early 1970s.

Soil at the main site contained levels of dioxins, PCBs, pesticides, metals and other pollutants that were in excess of environmental standards, according to the EPA.

Most of the contamination was in soils just below paved or capped areas; soils at deeper depths contained less pollution, according to the EPA.

Go to ProJo.com to read
 and weep about the cost of the cleanup, and the pollution levels downstream from the little marsh behind the buildings. I have no idea how long that stuff persists if not remediated, but I have seen buildings come and go. A site for elderly housing today could be needed for families with children tomorrow. It would be a bright future if the grandkids could step on the grass.

This was just a little spot on the back pages of a slow news day. Citizen Pete in the comments asks why the Providence Journal doesn’t publish the names of the businesses that dumped all this stuff in the water. Good question.

And, oh yeah, I remember why I posted on this topic. Republican candidates are attacking the Environmental Protection Agency. Well, North Providence has this little remembrance from the good old days before regulation to clean up and pay for. Think of how much money we could have saved with prevention, and how careful the dumpers would have been if they had to pay for the mess.

Save RIPTA

Posted on by ninjanurse

For all my voting life I have been pulling the lever for transportation bonds that put big bucks into highways. I do it to authorize the pocket change for public transit included in the small print.

Being both a car owner and bus rider I say it’s time to balance the funding and build up RIPTA.

Fuel costs, congestion and a tough economy make convenient and accessible bus service a good choice for commuting to work. If drivers spend less time in traffic jams that’s a plus for our economy and air quality.

RIDE transports Rhode Islanders who use wheelchairs to essential doctor’s appointments. Without RIDE, private ambulances would have fill that need, at a much higher cost to taxpayers. We save a lot with wise use of public services.

Our aging citizens are afraid to give up driving– even when they don’t feel safe– because they have no good alternative. We need more public transit, and will continue to need an increase year by year.

I was downtown last week, waiting 40 minutes for the #42 Hope Street— a busy route. It reminded me that every cut to numbers of runs leaves people waiting longer. For someone who takes the bus every day to work that’s a bite of their time, an example of how cuts are a tax.

Advocates for RIPTA are meeting at the State House this Wednesday, 8/17. You can get details here…
Save RIPTA Blogspot

Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos

Posted on by ninjanurse

It was morning in America until Barack Obama was elected, right? Dave Johnson at Campaign for America’s Future addresses the collective amnesia.

But here is some reality anyway, even if we’re not supposed to see it. Just ten years ago we were paying off debt at a rate that would have completely paid it all off by now. But under George W. Bush we cut taxes for the rich and more than doubled military spending. We deregulated and stopped enforcing laws. We let the big corporations run rampant. Our federal budget turned from huge surpluses to massive deficits, and Bush said it was “incredibly positive news” because it would lead to a debt crisis they could use to shock people into letting the corporate right privatize and thereby profit.

And then, under and because of Bush, our economy collapsed.

I see the Republicans lacking a leader with the decency to stand against the most crazy superstitions of their right wing– the Birthers, the privatizing profiteers and the Ayn Rand disciples who claim that paying taxes to your own country and local government is the equivalent of rape and slavery– though they’ll keep the clean water, paved roads and Medicare, thank you. If the blinkered and callous statements about the uninsured is any indicator– ‘they can just go to the emergency room’- these people are not only ignorant but happy and complacent in their ignorance.

I see the Democrats lacking the vision and daring to bring a 21st Century New Deal to the American people. They, like the Republicans, are caught in a system where fundraising takes precedence over governing. The Supreme Court decision that money is a form of free speech was one of the worst setbacks to Democracy we have seen in our history. If you want to burn down a house, or level a playing field, or start fresh– look at campaign finance. Our politicians, most of them, are more to be pitied than censured. Save them from selling themselves on the streets!

Our President, Barack Obama, is a decent, smart, principled man. He is leading in a time of crisis. I think he is looking ahead, and what he sees is something neither party will find conducive to their political narratives.

We have seven billion people on this planet. In the developed nations, people are blessed to live to advanced age. This brings us a graying population and new challenges. Medicare is one of the best solutions we have, along with the Veterans Administration, and should not be cut, but strengthened and expanded. However, ‘hands off Medicare’ is not realistic. The salvation of health care is constant assessment of what works and what doesn’t. Barack Obama’s disclosure that his grandmother had a hip replacement that did not gain her health or comfort reflects the uncertainties and hard choices I see every day in elder care. But when I attended Town Hall meetings about health care reform, I found myself staring down some guys who were holding a sign that said, ‘Obama Lies-Grandma Dies’. This is not only a vicious slur against a politician who disclosed a real truth about his actual family–it was a slur against health professionals. I mean, we nurses are all supposedly jonesing for a seat on the ‘death panels’. I wish more of our politicians knew how much hard labor it takes to keep a totally disabled person in comfort and dignity. Many ordinary Americans know, because we are caring for our families.

Health care rationing? We have had it from day one. Health is rationed out to the rich, always has been. Look at the stats. Race being less a mark of heredity than a marker of caste in our very mixed nation– you see that health is distributed unequally. This matches unequal access.

But I think using ‘rationing’ as a scare word veils the truth. We have to decide how much of our national wealth will go to health care rather than other legitimate needs, such as education and infrastructure. Throwing money at Grandma will make some medical providers rich, but won’t necessarily make her healthier or happier. We have to fund research that will question accepted treatments and judge the outcomes so that we can avoid wasting money on dead ends– treatments that are painful and do more harm than good. A national health program like Medicare will always be ‘hands on’.

Another reality we are facing is peak oil. ‘Drill Baby, Drill’ gets harder when we run out of areas where rich people won’t be inconvenienced. Worldwide the demand for fossil fuels is getting harder to fill without political and environmental damage. George Bush famously said that history doesn’t matter, because we’ll all be dead. Others believe in The Rapture. The vast majority of us, though, do think about what we will leave to our children. We can’t honestly promise an endless future of increasing consumption because physics doesn’t work that way. So what do we do? This ‘austerity’ will be working its way up from the people who are ‘used to it’ sooner rather than later. If we care about the future we have to invest in damage control today.

I hope that President Obama will get out of the middle of the road. As a former presidential candidate, Fred Harris, said, ‘The middle of the road has nothing but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.’

If Barack Obama is, as I believe, a good president in bad times, he needs our vocal support for his best ideas. If he is, as some of his critics say, just another politician– then we have to hold his feet to the fire.

Some are saying that a President Romney would galvanize the opposition and swing the pendulum to a new resurgence of the left. As I recollect the Reagan years, it doesn’t necessarily work that way. And after eight years of George Bush we are darn tired of holding signs in the rain and snow.

The time to organize is now. I’m not surrendering, and I’m not staying home on election day. The Bush administration drilled holes in the ship of state before handing it over, disaster capitalism has salvage profiteers ready. This is a mess, but if you blame the last two years of President Obama, you have to forget the previous eight when George Bush turned peace and surplus into war and deficit. That being said, it’s President Obama’s watch now. Our president and party need to offer the American people a New Deal.

Air-Conditioned Hell

Posted on by ninjanurse

As I mentioned in a previous post on working as a motel maid, the shock of stepping from a hot concrete walkway into a stuffy, refrigerated room has put me off air-conditioning.

The good side of that is that I have the windows open and fans bringing in outside air. The bad part is that the outside air is humid and hot.

Everyone has a different tolerance. I’m glad that the elderly I visit universally have air conditioning. Especially those with respiratory disease. That wasn’t the case a few years ago. And some people really suffer from the heat, why be miserable?

If you can tolerate it, though, you can do a lot with window fans, ventilation and shades. One less box spewing hot air on a summer’s day, one less buzzing machine in the city. Many of us live in older houses that were built to take advantage of the seasons– sun in the winter, shade in the summer. One opportunity for conservation is simply to use the old, built-in natural heating and cooling in our houses.

Here’s a link to one of the many sites that show how to place fans for maximum comfort.

Summer Solstice

Posted on by ninjanurse

In the Park

Summer is here with bright, blue days. I went to the Farmer’s Market at Lippit Park, saw our beautiful fountain flowing for the first time in living memory, and I checked out a new business, Farmacy Herbs. They did not have what I wanted at their table. I wanted natural licorice as part of my weight loss scheme #527. Hope springs eternal.

And sometimes is rewarded, because I was able to buy licorice at their store on Cemetery Street, along with some nettle tea and catnip. If this works I’ll write a book and make some money. If not, it was cheap and it’s good to have an herb store in the neighborhood. The staff was pleasant, and the owner really does know where all the bodies are buried. Or at least most of them. She’s taken some walks through the historic North Main Street Cemetery.

You can visit the website for Farmacy Herbs here.

The Farmer’s Market is now open two days a week– Saturday mornings and Wednesday afternoons 3:30-6:30.

Farmacy Herbs

Update on Edgewood Community Garden from Steve Sycos

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

There is progress being made in finding a plot for the community garden, as it detailed below by Steve Stycos:

Friends,

Community garden plans are progressing. We are focusing on the southeastern corner of the Edgewood Highland parking lot.

Annemarie Bruun discussed the project with Rich Pederson, who runs Southside Community Land Trust’s City Farm. He recommends removing asphalt whenever possible. Southside’s community garden coordinator is moving to Boston, so she is not available to meet with us. Her replacement says she is too busy to meet, so Annemarie may just go to her office to briefly get some details on how they run their gardens.

This morning, I met with Joel Zisserson, the school department’s head of grounds, the city DPW director Dave Ventetuolo and highway supervisor John Corso. Joel is supportive of the project and the city may be able to remove the asphalt, if we want them to.

Water, however, is in limbo. To make a connection to a water line now requires “a hot box,” or a heated box with a back flow valve to prevent contamination of the water supply. Just recessing a faucet in a box in the ground is no longer permitted. Dave estimated a hot box could cost $10,000 to $15,000. They suggested, and I agreed, that the best option, at least until we establish the garden, is to talk with nearby homeowners about running a hose from their homes and paying them for water. I will go door to door this weekend to talk with them. If that fails, I will go back to the school department.

We also discussed starting small and then expanding. Joel suggested phase one go from the last telephone pole to the far eastern end of the lot, but nothing is set in stone. Joel is also going to talk with the superintendent about a multi-year lease and liability. He also agreed to let us drill through the asphalt to do soil tests, if we want.

Joel, John and Dave also questioned whether leaving the asphalt in place and putting raised beds on top (as some community gardens have done) would work. They thought it would be hot and worry about how the site slopes, encouraging erosion. The slope is more pronounced when you look at it from the downhill side.

So we have a few more details to work out before we meet as a group to make plans.

Watching the Sky

Posted on by ninjanurse

On February 18th I saw an especially vivid full moon coming up in the East, with brilliant ragged clouds in a sky so clear that through the city lights the stars shone like diamonds.

On February 19th I saw the same circle of the moon on the Western horizon just ahead of the dawn. Large and golden, and as the sun rose and the sky turned blue it started to snow. A snow shower from the patchy clouds and a thin layer of icy flakes that did not melt in the sudden arctic cold.

Ain’t life grand.

The Future Boom in Mixed-Use Housing

Posted on by Kiersten Marek

I began receiving a newsletter from David Stookey, who seems to ask a lot of the same questions that I find myself asking as I try to navigate the future for myself and my family. This article in particular, about the likely increase in value of mixed-use housing, appealed to me because (you guessed it) we live in a mixed-use neighborhood. From “People Will Pay to Walk”:

A housing boom?
Demand for one type of neighborhood is predicted to grow fast.

We’ve been looking at the long-term advantages of living where there are shops, schools, businesses, health clinics, residences all jumbled together. A “mixed-use neighborhood” planners call it.

Many of these advantages derive from the rising costs of energy, healthcare, and taxes forecast for this decade – the stuff I’ve been writing about. Others come from the retirement preferences of baby boomers.

–saving transportation costs as fuel prices rise
–walking and biking more as health costs rise
–commuting without traffic to nearby jobs
–getting to know more neighbors
–using nearby public transit for longer trips
–finding smaller homes, apartments, and yards
–enjoying libraries, art, music, theater close to home

I very much like that I can walk to my kids’ elementary school, the grocery store, my office, my church, the local pool (which BETTER open again this year!) and a host of other places. Also, this makes me think of some of the incredible houses in the Elmwood section of Providence, which will (in an optimistic vision of the future) become a strong middle-class mixed-use neighborhood. If David Stookey is right, there are some bargains to be had on houses in our many interesting mixed-use neighborhoods across Rhode Island.