Orica admits arsenic spill into river

 

Two women walk on the edge of the Hunter River at Stockton. Photo: Peter Stoop

Posted 20 August 2011, by Sean Nicholls and Rachel Olding, The Sydney Morning Herald, smh.com.au

 

THE company behind last week’s controversial chemical spill near Newcastle has revealed it also discharged arsenic into the Hunter River yesterday.

While the Premier, Barry O’Farrell, resisted calls to stand down his Environment Minister, Robyn Parker, over her handling of a leak from Orica’s Newcastle plant, the company yesterday reported a discharge of arsenic into the river higher than its allowable limit.

It discharged up to 1.2 megalitres of effluent containing traces of arsenic above its environmental protection licence cap yesterday afternoon. The discharge occurred at the Kooragang Island plant near Newcastle, but the increase in concentration was not expected to affect the health of the Hunter River.

The Herald revealed yesterday that the Office of Environment and Heritage emailed an ”early alert” to Ms Parker’s office at 4.23pm on August 10, two days after last week’s chemical leak. It warned that parts of Stockton had been covered by a residue ”characteristic of hexavalent chromium, which is a hazardous substance if inhaled”.

The office of the Newcastle MP, Tim Owen, said he was informed of the alert soon after via a phone message, but Ms Parker made no warning public until 3.27pm the next day. Shortly after, the Department of Health issued guidelines to residents who might have been affected, including advice to wash surfaces children might touch.

The guidelines said hexavalent chromium could cause cancer, but normally only after high levels of exposure over a long period. They said ”current available evidence suggests a low risk” from the Orica release.

The Opposition Leader, John Robertson, demanded Ms Parker be stood down pending the findings of an independent inquiry ordered by Mr O’Farrell. ”This minister has bungled her management of this situation from the moment she was advised,” he said. ”She has chosen to ring the member for Newcastle and tell him rather than tell the people of Stockton.” Ms Parker’s office did not return calls.

The Office of Environment and Heritage alert has focused attention on her initial statements about when the government learnt of the leak. At a news conference on the Friday after the incident, Ms Parker told Channel Seven: ”The Office of Environment and Heritage first heard about this incident on Tuesday, so they immediately talked to Orica and, at first, we were told it was an emission on site.”

But she has subsequently said she first learnt about the incident from the alert.

The alert raises questions about why the Health Minister, Jillian Skinner, did not tell the public about the dangers of exposure to the chemical. Ms Skinner told the Herald she was told about the leak on Wednesday at 5.50pm by Ms Parker’s office.

”I confirmed that, as this was potentially a public health issue, it was most appropriately dealt with by the chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant,” she said. “I have total confidence in Dr Chant and the way she has informed the public.”

The chief executive of the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, Pepe Clarke, called for an industry-wide public inquiry into industrial pollution regulation and safety laws. ”How long is it going to be before a really large scale toxic incident occurs?” he said. ”Orica aren’t amateurs. If these things can happen at Orica, they can happen elsewhere.”

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/orica-admits-arsenic-spill-into-river-20110819-1j2nz.html

Permaculture Club

Homesteading is a fancy term for going back to the earth

Posted 17 August 2011, by Staff, Syracuse New Times, syracusenewtimes.com

Green is the new black. Recycling bins, compostable product packaging and wind/solar energy are just a few of the new and hottest trends. But hidden within many American cities is a larger-than-you-think population of people who dub themselves urban homesteaders; they aren’t just going green, they’ve been green. Now others seem to be catching on.

Homesteading is a fancy term for going back to the earth.

Urban homesteaders live by basic rules centered on an idea called permaculture, a compound word suggesting a practice that sustains itself over time. That definition, and a whole lot more, can be found in a new book, Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living (Skyhorse Publishing, New York City; 292 pages/softcover; $16.95), by Rachel Kaplan and K.

Ruby Blume. Kaplan knows of what she speaks: She has been an urban gardener for more than 15 years.

Within this easy-to-understand, wellorganized guidebook to homesteading, defined on urbanhomestead.org as “transforming a city or suburban home into a property that produces some or all of its residents’ own food and other subsistence needs,” the authors have compiled projects, ideas and values on permaculture from a wide variety of sources. The two acknowledge that no one has a handle on every aspect of homegrown sustainability, so they have gathered an abundance of knowledge from fellow homesteaders, validating the importance of collaborative community within this way of living.

Throughout the book, Kaplan eloquently reminds readers, without being preachy, of why the earth is worth pre serving.

This how-to book suggests small changes readers can make to start homesteading themselves, no matter where you live: city, suburb or countryside.

Urban homesteading encompasses a large range of different green and sustainable ideas. Simply put, the practice is a return to the basics. Urban homesteading embodies skills and practices that many of us have forgotten while living our hectic lives. These homesteaders are resurrecting a simpler time by gardening, harnessing renewable energy sources, drying clothes on a line instead of in an appliance and many more ideas outlined in the book.

In Syracuse, an excellent example of urban homesteading exists on the Near West Side, at Alchemical Nursery. Frank Cetera, who works as a certified business adviser specializing in green business development for New York state, is a cofounder of the group whose mission is, in part, providing educational resources, dialogue space, networking tools and project development to develop equilibrium between humans and the environment.

Cetera is renovating a house at 717 Otisco St., looking forward to the day when the clay plaster walls, earthen floor and masonry stove will be completed. Not only does this work demonstrate the lifestyle choices Cetera has made, but it’s showing the neighborhood the importance of the environmental changes he believes we all need to make.

“The whole theory behind an urban homestead is for everything to work as one system: landscapes, agriculture and the residents all working as one unit to  thrive,” he says. Cetera hopes he can move in before winter so that he can start on the house’s interior. Meanwhile, he’s living at Bread and Roses collective, 162 Cambridge St., until the West Side home is habitable.

“My vision is that at least four homesteaders will share in the equity of the site and its production of food and energy,” Cetera says. Homesteaders believe there is no individual gain within permaculture living. Cetera is on board with Kaplan’s idea that the sharing of knowledge and education is the best way for growth within urban homesteads across the country. “It’s all about educating at this point.”

Cetera came to Syracuse about five years ago to earn a master’s degree in forestry from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. While studying there he met some likeminded people who inspired Alchemical Nursery and the decision to create an urban homestead. The nonprofit organization’s mission is to spread the idea of permaculture and to educate individuals to become more self-reliant and more closely connected to their ecological environment.

“It’s important to me that I interact with the environment, that I appreciate living in it,” he says, “instead of apart from it, taking social justice into our own hands. People are lost and craving to get back to their roots, and getting ready for a time when we might not have the luxuries we have now.”

In true green fashion, Cetera is using salvaged materials in this renovation. Windows discarded by others, found on curbsides all around town, and even as far as Quebec, Canada, while Cetera was on a bike tour, will encase the sunroom that will overlook the back yard. Just a few of Cetera’s eco-friendly, sustainable energy plans are for all of the appliances to be electric (until they can perfect a solar paneling system for energy), and the large masonry stove that will be built in a central location of the house to provide heat. He chose to exclude natural gas from the house and actually discourages its use  because he believes the hydrofracking methods used to extract the fuel source from the ground are threatening our water supply.

The reconstruction on the property is slowly taking shape, starting with the landscape and agriculture. The front and back yards are being tested for growth ability. This first season of planting will show Cetera which plants will grow best where, and what soil may need more attention than other parts of the yard. Cetera’s backyard permaculture was the site of a demolished home, so some parts of the yard are inhospitable to growth as of now, due to the rubble buried within. Cetera is remedying this by building raised beds for planting. The knowledge gained from this will assist the homesteaders in planning their growth space and landscapes appropriately, making the most from the available space for the next growing season.

The renovations to the home itself have begun with demolition to the interior; Cetera is tearing out the drywall, to be replaced by clay plaster on top of the original lath. Some electrical work will have to be done, which Cetera is leaving up to the professionals along with the plumbing.

“Sustainability means moving past current regenerative practices, which means not just using what you put into the system, but producing more,” he notes. “Reduce, reuse, recycle—recycle is the last step. First, we reduce, then we reuse and when we can’t reuse, we recycle.”

Since part of Alchemical Nursery’s mission is to educate, the collective holds workshops throughout the year, covering such topics as ecological design, creating synergy, even gardening. This past spring, Cetera conducted a workshop in the future homestead’s back yard, during which he and eight helpers built an herb spiral using urbanite, or recycled concrete, blocks. The spiral configuration was deliberate; it occupies vertical growing space to minimize the use of horizontal space.

Cetera attended the seventh annual Northeast Permaculture Convergence, July 22 to 24, held in High Falls, N.Y., where he met Kaplan, who was speaking there. Considering that the eighth version is in the works, urban homesteading is clearly more than just a passing fad. Rather, it is a well-supported, educated transformation of communities based on pure ideals, with the earth, its inhabitants and future generations in mind.

“Homesteading encompasses your life.” Cetera says. “If it doesn’t, there is a disconnect. It’s a way of life; not just a piece of it.”

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http://www.syracusenewtimes.com/newyork/article-5205-permaculture-club.html

Transition Town Totnes On BBC2 At 9pm Thursday 18th August

 

The Transition Town movement is set to receive a major boost when it is featured as part of the BBC2 TV mini-series Town With Nicholas Crane this Thursday, 18th August 2011.

Nicholas Crane during filming at Totnes Castle

 

Posted 15 August 2011, by Tony Rollinson, Permaculture Magazine, permaculture.co.uk

 

We live in one of the most urbanised countries on earth. By 2030 an estimated 92% of us will be living the urban life. Congested cities sprawl across our map, but they are not the only way to live. Smaller than a city, more intimate, more surprising: this series celebrates the perhaps forgotten world of the town.

In the series geographer and adventurer Nicholas Crane explores four iconic British towns Ludlow, Scarborough, Perth and, in the final programme to be aired this week, Totnes.

A Saxon river town in South Devon, Totnes is one of the UK’s oldest towns. It has seen tough times through its long history, but adversity has taught it to innovate.

For the programme the BBC bills Totnes as “one of the greatest social experiments of the 20th Century”, and uncovers how it is currently the test bed for an ambitious new idea that “aims to change our urban life forever”.

As the readers of Permaculture will be aware, Totnes is the birthplace of the Transition Town movement. In Thursday’s show Crane highlights what Totnes can teach us about the future of urban living.

We have been reliably informed that Transition Totnes makes up about 10-15% of the programme’s content. The programme was filmed in May this year and it includes Transition founder Rob Hopkins taking Crane around various initiatives which are up and running about the town. It also shows how the success of the Totnes pound currency has been adopted by other towns and communities.

Transition founder Rob Hopkins (at back) at the Totnes Pound launch

It looks like the programme is a timely reminder of what we can all do and how we can adapt. At a time when we are all tightening our belts it shows the importance of working together and communicating. Permaculture is one of the cornerstones of Transition thinking and, as Totnes illustrates, action.

Rob’s roots are in permaculture and he has written for Permaculture magazine for many years.

References:

Transition Network

Permaculture magazine issue 45 (autumn 2005) when Rob Hopkins’ permaculture students decided to build an eco-theatre, they created a dramatic community space.

Permaculture magazine issue 46 (winter 2005) Rob Hopkins recommends 10 simple steps to get ready for a post-carbon future.

Permaculture magazine issue 50 (winter 2006) featured an article by Rob Hopkins asks how permaculture can influence the mainstream and introduces Transition Town Totnes.

Permaculture magazine issue 62 (winter 2009) Rob Hopkins explores how permaculture principles can be applied to business and encourage a transition in economic resilience.

Help spread the permaculture word…

 

Related articles

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Dr Chris Johnstone

Living Democracy in London Central

Emma Stoner

How permaculture made a real difference in Rwanda

Maddy Harland

How To Make Your Transition Town More Effective

Graham Burnett

(Ed Note: Please visit the original site for videos and books associated with this article)

http://www.permaculture.co.uk/news/150811993/transition-town-totnes-bbc2-9pm-thursday-18th-august

Mystery Fossils Link Fungi to Ancient Mass Extinction

 

 

Posted 18 August 2011, by Scott K. Johnson (Ars Technica), Wired, wired.com

 

Of the five mass extinctions in the Earth’s past, one stands above the rest in magnitude: the Permian-Trassic extinction, known as the Great Dying. It saw the disappearance of almost 60 percent of all families, and over 80 percent of all genera — in the ocean, that added up to about 96 percent of all species. The cause of this event, 250 million years in the past, is still a matter of debate.

The most likely culprit is the prolific volcanism of the Siberian Traps— the erupted basalt still covers about 2 million square kilometers — but other events may have also played a role. Evidence for a massive destabilization of methane hydrates on the seafloor (a phenomenon described as “The Big Burp”), ocean anoxia and even contemporary asteroid impacts have all been found.

A couple of recent papers in the journal Geology have brought some new information to the discussion, and may help make the picture just a little bit clearer.

 

One source of significant mystery has been the nature of the organic microfossils that are common in rocks dated to the time of the extinction worldwide. The tiny fossils resemble filamentous colonies of cells, but have evaded positive identification.

Some researchers think they are the remains of fungi, while others argue that they are algae instead. There’s evidence on both sides, but the two scenarios represent very different conditions. The fungus indicates a widespread dying of woody vegetation, while algae suggest extensive swamps forming along river systems.

A paper published this month shows that the microfossils are almost identical morphologically to a group of pathogenic soil fungi that can infect trees. If its authors have identified these correctly, it fits in well with an overall picture showing loss of forests and topsoil. The demise of tree species is clear in pollen studies, and there is a lot of evidence for greatly accelerated soil erosion, including increased sediment deposition in deltas with lots of soil-derived organic debris.

Modern studies show that drought stress and UV damage, both of which could be caused by the massive releases of volcanic gases from the Siberian Traps, can make trees susceptible to fungal infection.

Connecting a fungus to a global mass extinction may seem tenuous, but the authors point out that processes down in the world of the very small are often overlooked in any extinction discussions. They summarize by saying, “There may have been a variety of other globally operating environmental stress factors, but whatever sequence of events triggered ecosystem destabilization on land, the aggressiveness of soil-borne pathogenic fungi must have been an integral factor involved in Late Permian forest decline worldwide.”

Separately, another recent paper has pinned down the timing of the extinction. It’s not considered to have been as sudden as the End Cretaceous extinction that killed off the dinosaurs, but the precise timeline has been tough to get a handle on, and estimates have varied.

The research group looked at some marine Permian-Triassic rocks in China that recorded cyclical global climate patterns. Climate controlled the amount of terrestrial sediment that was deposited in this area, which shows up as changes in grain size through the rock layers. Using a device that measures magnetic susceptibility, they were able to precisely quantify changes in grain size across the rock layers. Together with some uranium-lead isotopic ages, they were able to pick out the orbital cycles that control climate, including the prominent 400,000-year eccentricity cycle, and use them to precisely date the extinction interval.

A couple of interesting things show up in the data. For one, minima in several of the orbital cycles coincide shortly before the start of the extinction period. (Think of three sine waves with different wavelengths — at certain points in time, all three troughs will line up by chance.) That could have made for some unusual climatic conditions. Additionally, the effect of the 100,000-year orbital cycle on climate seems diminished for as long as 2 million years afterward.

It’s dangerous to extrapolate to the big picture from records like this, but there’s enough there to warrant further investigation of the orbital forcings.

In the end, they found that the extinction took 600,000 to 700,000 years to play out. This is consistent with the idea that several events acted in concert to destabilize ecosystems and cause the loss of so many species, meaning a significant length of time would be needed. It was simply a nasty time to be a living thing on planet Earth. Some advice for any time travelers out there — steer well clear of the Great Dying.

Image: Photomicrographic comparison of fossil and modern filamentous fungal structures. A: Sclerotium of modern Rhizoctonia aff. solani, aggregated monilioid hyphae (Paul Cannon/Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International, CABI). B: Modern R. solani, branched monilioid hyphae (Lane Tredway/American Phytopathological Society). C, D: Late Permian Reduviasporonites stoschianus, branched monilioid hyphae. E: R. stoschianus, aggregated hyphae with dominant narrow cells. F: R. stoschianus, aggregated monilioid hyphae. G: R. stoschianus, segment of small intact disk-like sclerotium. Scale bar for all images is 100 μm.

See Also:

• Mass Extinction Easier to Trigger Than Thought
• Mass Extinctions Change the Rules of Evolution
• Ancient Mass Extinctions Hint at Possible Ocean Future
• A New Explanation for Ancient Mass Extinction
• Marvelous Destroyers: The Fungus-Farming Beetles
• Oldest, Oddest Fungi Finally Photographed

Citation: Geology, 2011. DOI: 10.1130/G32126.1 and Geology, 2011. DOI: 10.1130/G32178.1

 

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/permian-triassic-fungus/

 

Six Billion Believers

 

Posted 17 August 2011, by Richard Reid, Hurriyet Daily News and Economic Review (Dogon Media Group (Hurriyet Gazetecilik A.S.)), hurriyetdailynews.com

 

Three months ago, when the Oslo mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik was reviewing his plan to save Christian Europe from Islam, news was emerging of the discovery of the world’s oldest-known worship site – possibly the birthplace of sacred ritual. The 12,000-year-old site is located in Turkey, near Şanlıurfa. All signs indicate that it was an important pilgrimage destination maintained by workers and priests, and thronged by hundreds of the faithful. The June issue of National Geographic and a recent Turkish radio and television documentary gave details of the discovery.

Because the rings of six-meter-tall limestones at Göbekli Tepe go back to hunter-gatherer times, and pre-date any other temple findings by seven millennia, we can guess that these pillars and their elaborately-carved, animal bas reliefs could mark the start of organized religion.

If that is the case – if communal worship was first practiced at Göbekli Tepe – was that beginning a good thing for the future of mankind, or a step in a darker direction? The question comes when we look back at the Oslo killings and countless other massacres provoked by religion. If those early rites did shape and set apart a first congregation of true believers, is it far-fetched to think that their carefully-tended collective rites might have begun to point the human race down the path of sectarian enmity that animates the minds of people like Anders Breivik?

For the present, Göbekli Tepe gives the earliest evidence of organized religion. With its discovery, archaeology seems to have buried the belief that temples had to have been a product of settled agricultural societies. Archaeological advances today are such that still earlier places of worship could be unearthed before long. But wherever organized religion came from, whatever its origins, it stands as the most divisive force on the planet today, and it is everywhere. Of the seven billion people on earth, six billion declare a religious faith.

Fear must have figured largely in the development of religion – fear of storms and eclipses, fear of fierce animals and enemies, fear of death. In the face of those fears our nomad ancestors tightened the cohesion of their groups and worked out cosmic narratives centered on angry and benign gods. Early leaders were quick to see the uses of fear in social organization, so that classes of priests were able to emerge as interpreters of the moods of gods that might send or ward off calamity. Those priests were the ancestors of today’s popes and ayatollahs.

There’s no question that religion has done some good, cementing societies and giving hope and solace to millions. But these benefits pale against its role in setting people against each other. The holy books repeatedly enjoin the faithful to strike off and smite the infidel. And the faithful have been quick to obey. In the Yugoslav wars of the Nineties it took no time for rival Orthodox and Catholic Christians to be at each others’ throats, and then for the two of them to join in slaughtering Muslims. The wars began, by the way, when the German government, egged on by Catholic factions, supported the secession of the Catholic Croats from the Yugoslav federation. Religion has a long and bloody reach – see the revenge bombing last summer by Somali Muslim terrorists that killed 80 Ugandan Christians.

The bloodshed goes on. Faith-based rage is the cause of the clash of civilizations that divides the world today. Across the globe there is an intermittent murderous free-for-all – not only among Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews, but among their sub-groups, the Sunnis, Shiites, Catholics and Orthodox. Religion pleads loving kindness, but has always had blood on its hands.

It may be that deep in human nature there’s a tendency to rally ferociously around beliefs anchored in the supernatural. Possibly this tendency is innate, like our killer instinct, and has simply found a channel in religion. Whether or not the beginning was at Göbekli Tepe, the record of devastation is there. The Oslo episode is just the latest entry.

 

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=six-billion-believers-2011-08-17

Protesters Want Trash Plant Out of Hartford [VIDEO]

 

A group of protesters converged on Connecicut’s capitol city Wednesday to advocate for a policy of “reuse, repair and recycle” when it comes to trash disposal.

 

Posted 18 August 2011, by David Moran, North Branford Patch (Patch Network), northbranfordpatch.com

 

(Ed Note: Please visit the original site for two videos associated with this article.)

A group of concerned residents and business owners in Hartford converged on the steps of City Hall Wednesday to protest the presence of the city’s massive trash burning facility, but operators of the plant say getting rid of the facility, and the hundreds of thousands of tons of trash it incinerates each year, is easier said than done.

“Connecticut burns more of its trash than any other state,” Claire Miller of the Toxics Action Center, a Connecticut-based public health organization, said on the steps of City Hall Wednesday morning as she and a group of protesters prepared to present a petition signed by 500 residents and local business owners to the mayor and the City Council asking them to significantly curtail incineration at the Hartford trash-to-energy plant. “Incineration is a major source of known toxins like mercury, nickel, and dioxin-toxins associated with aggravating asthma, cancer, diabetes and other diseases.”

Protesters complained that, aside from being an inefficient and environmentally insensitive disposal method, the presence of the trash incineration plant at 300 Maxim Rd. in Hartford also poses a health hazard and contributes to the city’s staggering asthma rate of more than 40 percent of its residents.

“We are home to the largest trash incinerator in the state, and the fifth largest in the nation, making us Connecticut’s trash capitol,” said Cynthia Jennings, an environmental lawyer with the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice, who asked that city leaders push for CRRA to shut down one of the facility’s three boilers by the end of 2012 and move toward a path to zero incineration. “…We’re trying to stop the incineration of trash in Hartford. This is an urban center, and we feel it’s inappropriate to expose so many young children to air pollution to the level that results from incineration.”

The plant is a 24-hour facility that burns about 2,850 tons of trash per day to generate energy, and is fed by 70 towns throughout the state, including Manchester; communities as far away as North Branford and Southbury also send trash to the plant. The Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority, a quasi-public agency that oversees the bulk of Connecticut’s trash disposal, owns and operates the plant through a private contractor, Covanta Energy.

Paul Nonnenmacher, a CRRA spokesman, said many of the environmental complaints about trash incineration have never been proved true, while it remains one of the most efficient and “environmentally friendly” forms of solid waste disposal because the incineration process is used to generate energy.

“The amount of material that has to go into a landfill after it goes through a  trash-to-energy plant is about 10 percent by volume of what it otherwise would be,” Nonnenmacher said. “…If you used fossil fuel to generate the amount of electricity that we’ve generated down at the Mid-Connecticut project over the last 20 years, you would have burned about 20 million barrels of oil, or about 7 million tons of coal, or about 25 million cubic feet of natural gas, and all those fossil fuels are a lot worse for the environment.”

Miller said the state should move toward a “zero waste” solution, an increasingly popular movement that aims to expand recycling, curtail waste and reduce consumption through a philosophy of “reuse, repair, recycle.”

“There are many cities throughout the United States, and internationally, that have set a goal toward ‘zero waste,’” Miller said. “I want to emphasize that it’s a goal; you don’t ever get exactly to zero, but you can get very close.”

But Nonnenmacher said that it would be almost impossible to shut down one of the Hartford plant’s three smokestacks by the end of 2012, because Connecticut is ill equipped to handle the overflow of waste that would result from the 70 towns, including North Branford, serviced by the plant no longer being able to send all their trash to the facility.

“If we shut down one of the boilers you would have to make 250,000 tons of waste per year go away,” Nonnenmacher said. “If you had a magic wand – great. If not, you’d have to find some way to realistically do that.”

Nonnenmacher said that Connecticut’s restrictive policies toward waste disposal has provided the state with few options through the years, and that trash-to-energy incineration was one of the most affordable forms of disposal. He said that trash incineration has never been linked to an increase in asthma rates, either.

“We’ve never seen any evidence linking asthma rates to trash incineration,” Nonnenmacher said. “If there is such evidence, we’d like to see it, and I think the (Department of Energy and Environmental Protection) and (the Environmental Protection Agency) would like to see it too.”

But John Steward, a Bolton resident and a professor at the University of Hartford, said he joined the protest Wednesday because he did not want to take any chances with the plant’s presence in the region.

“If you think about it, the prevailing winds blow from the west to the east. Bolton’s on the east part, so anything that goes out that smokestack is coming down to pollute my lungs as well,” said John Steward. “Anything that you don’t recycle, you get to breath again.”

Nonnenmacher noted that CRRA’s single-stream recycling process, which allows people to place all of their recyclables into one container and ends the process of sorting and separating paper from plastic, has greatly increased Connecticut’s recycling rate, which is only expected to further increase in coming years.

“We are doing everything that we can, more than anybody else, to get the state’s recycling up,” he said.

 

Ed Note: Please visit the original site for two videos associated with this article.

 

http://northbranford.patch.com/articles/protesters-want-trash-plant-out-of-hartford-video

The green thumb at Cleveland Cascade

 

Posted 18 August 2011, by Dave Newhouse (Oakland Tribune), San Jose Mercury News (MediaNews Group), mercurynews.com

Watching Barbara Newcombe toil in a garden evokes certain images: Barbara Flowerseed, Sod Goddess, Lady of the Loam, Oakland’s horticulture heroine.

Newcombe is all these things, but, for sure, she is the queen of the Cleveland Cascade, the dried-up waterfall across Lakeshore Boulevard from Lake Merritt.

Next time you’re running or walking up and down the steps of the Cleveland Cascade’s terraced garden, you might notice an 88-year-old lady who’s planting and watering flowers and who also scares off what she calls “rabble-rousers.”

And if you’re wondering why someone who’s nearly 90 is working so hard, well, the city of Oakland isn’t doing all that it can to keep up the Cleveland Cascade. So someone has to take charge.

“I’m a troublemaker,” said Newcombe. “I can’t stand to see a problem that can be easily cured.”

While the city isn’t doing steady gardening at the Cleveland Cascade, it hasn’t completely ignored Newcombe’s octogenarian inspiration. Thus, it’s slowly adding handrails along the Cascade’s steps, while also providing trash containers and tree-pruning.

“It’s not Barbara’s influence,” fellow volunteer David Bolanos said of the city’s occasional interest in the Cascade, “but her bullying.”

Bolanos, 69, is a retired architect who lives, like Newcombe, near the Cascade. He credits her bullying or “ordering people around” for his getting involved.

Newcombe admits to being pushy, but, all kiddingaside, “it’s in a very effective and diplomatic way,” Bolanos pointed out.

The Cleveland Cascade is worth preserving — with or without city assistance — because it’s a magnificent part of Oakland’s past.

Designed by Oakland architect Howard Gilkey, the Cascade was dedicated in 1923 — the year Newcombe was born — and is a sight to behold: Water flowing nonstop down 20 concrete bowls and illuminated at night by varicolored lights.

The Cascade continued in that spectacular form until the 1940s, then fell into neglect and disrepair. The water and lights were shut off sometime in the 1950s and haven’t been turned on since.

Newcombe and Jim Ratliff, starting in 2002, assembled a posse of 20 volunteers to assist in their green-thumb efforts. Newcombe’s thumb is the greener of the two, as Ratliff basically has withdrawn from Cleveland Cascade doings.

“I came in at the beginning,” said Newcombe, a retired newspaper librarian at the Chicago Tribune, “because (the Cleveland Cascade) was obviously a center for minor criminal activity. I had to make sure the resident bums wouldn’t stay around because they made it a smelly, awful place.”

Armed with only a weeder, this little woman entering her 80s succeeded in ridding the Cascade of its bad element without ever feeling threatened.

“Now they know that they’re not welcomed,” she said. “What has happened, families with children now come here who never used to.”

But imagine being confronted by a mother of four, a grandmother of five and Oakland’s 2010 Mother of the Year honoree. Watch out, rabble-rousers!

Newcombe also confronted the weeds and garbage — drug paraphernalia, sex objects, liquor bottles and cans — with vigor, realizing this beautification project would require patience and muscle.

“To bring it back to life again,” she said. “Nature does a great deal. Neighbors bring in a lot of things. Everything works together.”

She doesn’t believe the city will take over maintenance of the Cascade “in my lifetime.” So look for her to be weeding and planting into her 90s.

“This sounds bitter,” said Bolanos, “but, in many ways, Oakland is a dysfunctional city. And I would rather have Barbara taking care of the Cascade then the city of Oakland.”

But Newcombe insists Oakland will need “some kind of a program” to preserve the Cascade after she’s no longer involved. The program she has in mind will cost the city $2 million to restore water at the Cascade.

A pipe dream? Well, water takes pipes.

Dave Newhouse’s columns appear Monday, Thursday and Sunday, usually on the Local page. Know any Good Neighbors? email dnewhouse@bayareanewsgroup.com.

 

http://www.mercurynews.com/columns/ci_18703768