The Front Range of Colorado (the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains) is a good place to be if you’re green.

I was just reading the August edition of the Denver Voice (the monthly newspaper sold by homeless people in the Denver Metro area) and found two initiatives worth mentioning on this blog. One involves restoration of the built environment, and the other involves helping the homeless.

Retrofitting Buildings as They Stand

Living City Block, founded by Llewelyn Wells, aims to take the Lower Downtown Denver block bounded by 15th, Wynkoop, 16th, and Blake and “retrofit this block, so that by 2014 the buildings and businesses on the block will be creating their own energy with no waste, and two years later will be creating more energy than they use.” The businesses on this block include Dixon’s restaurant and the Tattered Cover.

Wells has talked to business owners on the block, and they are cautiously interested. But LCB has yet to secure adequate funding for the entire project, although assessments of the buildings for energy efficiency are being conducted by Xcel and Green Building Services of Portland.

How Is This Restoration?

If we can manage to make old buildings more energy-efficient in a way that pays for itself, many businesses will be interested. The article claims that these retrofitted buildings will eventually add electricity to the grid.

Why can’t businesses do this on their own? Because it requires a large investment up front. Some cities in the country have been getting around this hurdle with residential properties by having homeowners make retrofits and then pay a monthly fee on their utility bill. I don’t know if that approach has been used with businesses. I would think the investments needed to make a business “energy-self-sufficient” would generally be greater than the investments needed to retrofit a home. Also, I think most of the residential customers are reducing their energy use, not going off the grid.

Go read the article: it has rich detail about how this project does not require business owners to “suffer” in order to be sustainable.

Source: “Living City Block,” Kristin Pazulski, Denver Voice, August 2010

Asking the Homeless What They Want

According to the Denver Voice, Colorado Springs is more progressive regarding the homeless than Boulder. Shocked, you say?

Colorado Springs and Boulder passed the same kind of law regarding sleeping in public, a law criminalizing camping in a city. But Colorado Springs suspended the law in 2009 after it was told that the law might be unconstitutional if the city didn’t provide enough shelter beds for people who need them. Apparently, Boulder and Colorado Springs have about the same number of homeless (600 or so) despite the fact that Colorado Springs is five times as big as Boulder.

What happened next south of Denver is so sensible I can hardly believe it. The police chief of the Springs formed a team of officers and instructed them to ask the homeless what they needed. This evolved into locating motels with empty rooms and getting grant funding to pay for those rooms so a few dozen homeless people could live in them, which was coordinated through Homeward Pikes Peak.

I couldn’t find this short article on the Denver Voice website, but I suggest you go to the Homeless Pikes Peak website and read the Urgent Appeal for funding for a case manager to help people get housing vouchers that HPP already knows are available. It’s all about how this kind of program saves taxpayers money. I didn’t realize that when I call the police about some person passed out on the street, it costs $2,000 for that person to be taken to the emergency room and dried out.

Source: “Tale of Two Cities,” Tom Demers, Denver Voice, August 2010

How Is This Restoration?

It’s restoration of people to some semblance of a normal life. They might even pay taxes at some point instead of costing the taxpayer money. How that will lead directly to restoration of the environment, I have no idea.

If you’re renovating a bathroom or other space that needs water-resistant/waterproof walls, PolyWall may be of interest to you.

It is a waterproof sheet made from recycled plastic resins that is 1/16 of an inch thick and can be glued to unfinished walls. Parkland Performance Walls and Ceilings recommends that it be installed with latex adhesive over a porous surface, but it may be possible to install PolyWall over ceramic tile and other nonporous surfaces. The website gives different instructions in the FAQ than it does on this Plas-Tex PolyWall page.

Go to the website and check out all the evils PolyWall claims to be “proof” against: termites and acid are two of them.

How Is This Restoration?

Anything that gets plastic out of the environment is a form of restoration in my book. If this limits the amount of new tile we need, or limits the amount of plastic bathtub liners we need, then it will limit the pollution caused by production and it may limit the need to extract oil and clay.

Most people probably don’t think that one environmental good can be used to greenwash in another area. But just that may be happening in a conflict between the 1987 Montreal Protocol (designed to repair the ozone layer) and the Kyoto climate treaty.

The Montreal Protocol authorizes chemical companies around the world to produce an ozone-friendly refrigerant, HCFC-22. A byproduct of that chemical is a potent greenhouse gas, HFC-23, which is nearly 12,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The same chemical companies that are paid to make HCFC-22 are also paid to destroy HFC-23. See the conflict? If they overproduce HCFC-22, then they can get lots of money for destroying its byproduct, HFC-23. They may get as much as $100,000 per ton.

Source: “UN Board Could Rein in $2.7 Billion Carbon Market,” John Heilprin, Associated Press, August 21, 2010

While reading back issues of Sustainable Industries, I came across an article titled “Land of the Free? Permitting Woes Create Longer Timelines and Bigger Headaches for Renewable Energy Developers” by Sara Stroud (October 2009). By “woes,” the author meant the difficult process of finding enough land to build a large solar or wind installation within the timeline set by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and other laws and regulations. Another problem is local and state government ignorance of how to establish a renewable energy facility. Wind turbine and solar farms have been popping up all over, but plenty of local and state governments have never gone through the process of setting one up.

The article made me wonder if installation of small wind turbines in yards and neighborhoods could help Americans meet renewable energy goals, so I searched online for “small-scale wind energy development” and found an FAQ published by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). I learned a few things, including the fact that a turbine’s blades need to sit 30 feet above anything within a 500-foot circle. So that means 30 feet above the top of a tree or building. And I learned that despite the prohibitive cost of a small turbine (as much as $70,000, before rebates, to power most of the energy needs of the average American home using 800 kilowatt-hours per month), wind energy is cheaper than solar (at least, according to the AWEA).

If you scroll down that page, you’ll find a Wisconsin Focus on Energy Fact Sheet on rooftop turbines. Near the end of the document, you’ll find a link to a PDF of Small Wind Turbine Success Stories. The typical wind turbine pays for itself in 6 to 15 years and lasts about 30 years. Wind turbines tend to raise property values, not decrease them.

It all sounds like a great argument for DIY wind energy, but the main point I plucked from my reading was that energy conservation is always cheaper than energy production. So if you are thinking of installing renewable energy on your property, get an energy audit first and reduce the kilowatts you use. It will be a lot more affordable to install solar and wind to provide 500 Kwh/month than to provide 800 Kwh/month.

I wonder if there is a way to install turbines on city rooftops, that is, to build a “wind roof” instead of a “green roof.”

How Is This Restoration?

It’s not restoration; it’s one of the methods Americans can use to reduce the need for restoration. The more we reduce our energy use, the less coal we need to extract from our lands (or someone else’s lands) to run our power plants. Installing renewable energy on top of that will reduce the need to extract fuel even more. If the coal remains in the ground, then chances are the land on top of it will remain in a more natural state.

One problem I do have with large-scale installations is their effect on ground-nesting birds. Wind farms have been shown to drive away grassland birds, one of the most threatened groups of birds in the United States.

To answer the question above differently, I could say that small-scale renewable energy installation is a return to the American value of self-sufficiency. If many Americans installed panels or turbines on their properties, we would be less subject to utility rate hikes and to attacks on power plants.

The spring 2010 issue of Cultural Survival has a thought-provoking article titled “Conservation Refugees.” It’s written by Mark Dowie, who wrote a book by the same title.

Conservation refugees are people who have been kicked out of areas designated as parks because the governments and environmental organizations that established the park think wilderness and people don’t mix. The article by Dowie challenges that view, mentioning such familiar groups as the Maasai as people who managed their lands in a way that enhanced diversity and now despise conservation.

Some sentences in the article made me really sad: “Banished Batwa in Central Africa sometimes sneak back into the forest to harvest medicinal plants and firewood at the risk of being legally killed by ecoguards hired by conservation agencies.”

Some I questioned: “The romantic goal of preserving nature as untrammeled wilderness casts humans as a destructive force because we ‘upset’ the natural balance, but this view belies the reality that ecosystems are constantly in flux and need some level of disturbance to make them viable.”

I question the word “need.” I question the idea that ecosystems, if not regularly disturbed, will become unproductive and undiverse. And for whom are they being made viable?

I think this article takes a romantic view of indigenous peoples as always being good stewards of the land. I’ve spent time on the Navajo reservation. I’ve heard about the decision early in the twentieth century to reduce the numbers of sheep and cattle on the reservation and how devastating it was to people’s livelihoods. I’ve also seen lands on the reservation that look really overgrazed. I think some people (indigenous or not) are good stewards of the lands, and some are not; I think all Americans could do a lot more to make their own lands healthy and diverse.

Maybe the problem conservationists have with the idea of indigenous peoples managing their own lands (and owning them, for that matter) is that those lands don’t look like a postcard. Areas around a settlement may look highly disturbed to an environmentalist’s eye, but like a meadow opening in a forest, that disturbance may increase diversity.

I also question the article’s assertion that wildlife conservationists reject rotational cattle grazing as a method to increase diversity. The Nature Conservancy, one of the organizations cited as a creator of conservation refugees in the article, has been doing just that for years. TNC grazes cattle in Phantom Canyon north of Fort Collins, Colorado, and has encouraged it in the Malpai Borderlands of Arizona. (One of the reasons I quit giving TNC money several years ago was this issue of tossing people out of park areas, but I still think the organization does good things. I just didn’t think it was in desperate need of my money anymore.)

How is any of this restoration?

If native peoples can continue to live on their lands, that’s a good thing. The fewer people we have migrating to slums in the cities, the better. In fact, I wish governments would start some “return to the countryside” programs that help people farm in a way that supports them and protects the countryside.

I’m more reluctant to say indigenous peoples should be returned to their lands because it would be so hypocritical for me to advocate that for other countries when my own is so guilty of ethnic cleansing. If some Arapahoe or Cheyenne family showed up on my doorstep and said they’d read my blog and wanted to be able to return to their lands via my house, I wouldn’t be too happy about it.

Source: “Conservation Refugees,” by Mark Dowie, Cultural Survival, Spring 2010

Colony collapse disorder (CCD) has been noted in beehives worldwide since 2006. In this disorder, the bees don’t simply die and fall out of the hives onto the ground. The entire colony disappears.

Thirty percent of all bees are lost each year nowadays; losses used to stay around 15 percent.

People are beginning to talk of a pollination crisis. In China, according to Heifer International’s magazine World Ark, farm workers pollinate apple and pear flowers by hand because most of the bees in those orchards have been wiped out.

Why are bees disappearing? Nobody really knows yet. But scientists think that CCD results from a number of factors growing stronger at once, such as the increase in factory farming, which means that smaller farms (typically more diverse) are folded into larger acreage that typically grows one crop. There are still flowers for bees to pollinate on those farms, but not as great a variety. Thus factory farms do not support as great a variety of bee species.

Another factor is pesticides. They kill insects that destroy crops, but they also kill beneficial insects as well.

Here’s where you come in. There are 2 things you can do: (1) Reduce your use of chemical pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers. All three can kill beneficial insects. Instead, try companion planting, natural insect and weed killers, and good old-fashioned weed pulling and bug plucking. (2) Plant a variety of grasses and flowers and even vegetables. (Broccoli, for example, has large clusters of yellow flowers that bees love. You can plant some in the back of your bed and let it flower.) That encourages a greater variety of insects and provides them with a better diet.

A third factor is that there are about half as many bee colonies as before World War II, but the acreage planted in the United States has doubled.

How Is This Restoration?

Planting natives, even one or two plants, is always good. Just as our mom-and-pop stores have been pushed out by chains, so diverse native landscapes have been bulldozed and replaced by lilac and zinnia and petunia and so on. I would love to see Americans turn all their yards into native plant havens, but I’m willing to settle for a little bed  in each yard. (Everybody got that?)

Also, trying to recreate a native landscape, as I did in a small corner of my yard, is a lot of work. I’m not sure it will ever be a viable restoration strategy for our patchwork of lawns. It would work only if we took out all our privacy fences and turned the larger areas between our houses into common areas and then planted them with native grasses and flowers. Do you see that happening anytime soon on a large scale? No, I don’t either.

On a larger scale, the last U.S. Farm Bill supposedly had incentives for farmers to turn small areas of their farms into pollinator-friendly areas. And the Xerces Society has developed a program “to teach farmers how to incorporate patches of bee and butterfly habitat into cropland and the surrounding areas.”

Source: “Beauty and the Bees,” by Sarah Schmidt, World Ark, Summer 2010

I just got a cool new catalog from Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI), which has several stores in the Denver Metro area. I found things I liked in it, such as the Vibram Five-Fingers Multisport Shoes. I’ve been thinking of trying to jog in them.

But I was put off by some of the camping gear. You can find everything for camping in this catalog except a modular house. There are easy-ups and pads and mattresses and rather ridiculous camping stoves. Whatever happened to roughing it? To adapting to nature? God forbid we get a sunburn or not have a gourmet meal for one weekend!

Plus just about everything in that store is imported. US jobs, REI?

Then I think, “I’m a grump.” That’s what the consumer society does to people like me who like nice things but don’t think we all need 2 houses and fabulously comfortable camping gear and our own yards and our own lawnmower and on and on and on. I just sound grumpy.

It makes me mad.

I know plastic travels that far because the trash exhibit I saw in 2004 at the Centro Ecologico Sian Ka’an (CESIAK) includes some plastic from Poland that had washed up on the beach in Mexico.

I hate trash. If it were up to me, everything would be recycled, whether we think it’s possible now or not. But that’s the eco-dictator in me speaking, which does not generally go over well.

If it’s any comfort to those of you who feel judged by recyclers and other environmentalists, I have to restrain myself from picking up recyclables wherever I go. When I was at the Toyota dealership the other day, I wanted so badly to pull the plastic bottles out of the trash and place them in the recycling container 15 feet away. People! Put the recycling and trash bins right next to each other! Don’t make us walk extra steps to recycle.

I was reminded of CESIAK recently after reading “When Garbage Doesn’t Die” in the Spring 2010 issue of Alert Diver (you’ll have to create an account to read it). This article lists several things people can do to reduce trash blowing into the oceans (stop using plastic bags; carry your own water bottle and coffee cup) but, most interesting to me, also names organizations working to prevent and clean up marine debris.

Algalita Marine Research Foundation was founded by Captain Charles Moore in 1994 to preserve and protect the marine environment. In 1997 he was sailing through the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (between Hawaii and California) and discovered the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. His foundation is currently planning to survey all 5 gyres worldwide.

Project Kaisei (“ocean planet” in Japanese) recently led an expedition that took pictures of plastic in the ocean and experimented with various cleanup efforts. (Much of the plastic in the world’s oceans has photo-degraded into pieces small enough to be eaten by sea creatures. How are we supposed to get rid of that? Pour the ocean through cheesecloth?)

Plastic Pollution Coalition: No, it’s not a nefarious plot to increase plastic pollution. It’s a website where people can get together to reduce the amount of plastic we throw away.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris page: self-explanatory.

How is this restoration?

Most of it is in the planning/research stages. Those steps are necessary: people could just go out in a boat and pick up trash. But it’s better to investigate the best methods.

There’s no getting around it: The Dirt is a great blog. I could spend all day reading it and learning about new contests and restoration projects. Here are the posts I selected from about 20.

Whitewashing Mountains to Save Glaciers

In an earlier post, I wrote about blankets for glaciers. Now the Peruvians are in on the act, but they’re whitewashing rocks near glaciers with funding from the World Bank, of all people. Who says geoengineering is crazy?

X Prize to Fund Oil Spill Cleanup Technologies

There’s a new X Challenge to develop better methods to clean up oil spills. The $1 million prize will be awarded in 2011.

And that’s only 1 competition/grant mentioned on The Dirt. Go check out the others.

Reusing Construction Waste

I was not aware that 40% of construction material is recycled or reused. Now people involved want that percentage to increase. They’re getting together at a conference in October.

A Park Grows in Brooklyn

Phase 2 of High Line park will open in Brooklyn, including the new flyover. Sounds cool to me.

That’s all for now, kids. Happy Monday!

Kenny Kirkland of Woolly Egg Ranch in the Tennessee Valley in California (yes, you read that right) is living the dream, as far as I’m concerned. Check it out at the Fibershed blog.

“An Afternoon at Woolly Egg Ranch” by Ecological Artist