News

From Gothamist  illustrations by Clarisa Diaz, WNYC/Gothamist. Source: NY State Dept. of Environmental Conservation & NY State Dept. of Health

From BoweryBoogie:

“Cops are in pursuit of a man who they say sexually assaulted a woman in her Lower East Side apartment last week.”

“See site for photo of alleged perp

“Authorities describe the perp as 5 foot-8, weighing about 150 lbs., and last seen wearing a black Adidas sweatshirt. Police released surveillance footage to the public for assistance in identifying him.”

Go to site to see photo.

From Birdlink:

The full scale BIRDLINK  will be installed in 2019 at Sara D. Roosevelt Park on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in readiness for the seasonal migrations on the Atlantic Flyway that pass through New York City. Enlivening a plaza in Sara Roosevelt Park, the site is located in a busy, economically and culturally diverse neighborhood that also hosts the African M’Finda Kalunda Garden and the Chinese Hua Mei Bird Garden for exotic caged songbirds.  BIRDLINK attracts wild birds that reside or migrate through the city and touch down in this park with native plants that support them. It responds and expands upon community interests, and highlights the shared the urban ecosystem. Birds appeal to diverse individuals and bridge cultural differences. Dialogue is created when a community’s perception of a seemingly derelict place is replaced by an installation that activates that space.

Collaborative Partners

New York State Parks,  New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, New York City Audubon Society, Sara D. Roosevelt Park Coalition, BioBusGreenbelt, Native Plant Center : NYC Parks Audubon, New York For the Birds,  University Settlement Adult Literacy Program, The Lower East Side Partnership, Bronx Children’s Museum

Consultants

The New York City Department of Parks and RecreationStaten Island Greenbelt Native Plant NurseryNew York State Parks Recreation and Historic PreservationDonald Sussman Landscape ConsultantRobert Silman Associates Structural Engineers, DPCSalvatore Coscenza  Design ConsultantKiwi Nguyen Design ConsultantMarie Salembier Horticulture Consultant

Funders

The New York State Connect Kids to Parks initiative, a program of the Environmental Protection FundColeman and Susan Burke Center for Native PlantsThe Durst OrganizationThe City Parks FoundationNew York City Audubon SocietyAnovaHunter Industriesioby.org

For other postings on SDR Coalition site about BirdLink here and here (with more photos).

Neighbors to Save Rivington House at CB3 Health Committee on April 4^th  6:30pm 

Location: “The Lee” 133 Pitt Street at Houston Street 

“Mount Sinai has signed a 30 year lease on Rivington House. While N2SaveRH is pleased to have the building’s resources go towards a more public purpose, we also note that not a single bed will be devoted to local community elders who built this place and for whom this fight was waged.

Neighbors to Save Rivington House (with expertise on hospital mergers, public healthcare, reimagined nursing home care, continuums of care, architecture, former Rivington House employees, etc) will present some of what we’ve learned in this 3 ½ years on a number of issues at this coming CB3 Health Committee on April 4^th 6:30pm 

The unanswered issues:

There is still no provision being made in Rivington House for those in desperate need of a local nursing home bed on the continuum of care for elders who built this community.

There is no vision or plan for how we intend to tackle the Public Health crisis of Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

There is no plan in place to create anything here (or anywhere?) for people of little (or middle class) means who are in this predicament. 

There is no NY State overhaul of the nursing home industry, so we can continue to expect lousy inhumane care for vulnerable people while profiteering nursing home providers make money.

And…we know little about Mount Sinai as a community partner. 

In the end, whether this became luxury condos or a ‘behavioral health’ center it would mean exactly the same outcome for the people we fought for:

Nothing.

Neighbors to Save Rivington House”

Facebook

Twitter: @Nabe2SaveRH 

#CareNotCondos #RivingtonHouse

Petition 

Petition Call the Meeting

From AM NY:

By Jefferson Siegel

The indefatigable Wendy Brawer:

““We’ve been listening, watching and creating examples that help people find their own pathway through the process of making a map,” said Green Map founder Wendy Brawer.”

“Green Map is a locally led, globally linked movement mapping local nature, culture and green living places in communities around the world,”

“The trees, the community gardens and parks make us happy and healthier. They reduce stormwater on rainy days and increase our comfort and sense of well-being on hot days,” Brawer said.

Brawer cites one example of proverbial mountain-moving: Her “Are We Trashing the Apple?” map from 2000 revealed 48 acres of waterfront that would have been converted to waste transfer stations.

“In 1999 people learned about a plan to site garbage transfer facilities in Red Hook, Williamsburg and the South Bronx, which would have meant countless trips a day of garbage trucks into low-income communities of color on the waterfront. Mapping and community outrage stopped the plan and saved air quality in those neighborhoods,” she said.

“After Sandy, Green Map created three maps; in English, Spanish and Mandarin, showing different resources for disaster preparedness and environmental resiliency. Those were aimed to empower people and prepare them if a disaster ever happened again,” Reiss said.

Elissa Sampson created an interactive Garden Green Map of community gardens in 2009.

“When the gardens got attacked in the ‘90s because of gentrification and because of the value of the land they were on, people started defending the gardens because they understood the gardens saved the neighborhood…They were cultural and green resources for urban dwellers. I wanted to be able to explain visually where these gardens were, and why they were important.”

City Comptroller Scott Stringer tweeted, “Imagine if, instead of tearing down parks to build highways, we flipped the script and replaced highways with beautiful public parks?

Brawer remains tireless in her efforts to make every day Earth Day. She points to the 5,000 street trees in her downtown neighborhood that provide carbon dioxide reduction, stormwater capture and pollutants removal. She is also rallying against a plan to bury East River Park under 8 to 10 feet of soil, a drastic change from an original plan to save the park and adjoining neighborhoods from flooding.”

Council Members Brad Lander, Margaret Chin

Where: City Hall Steps

They worked to get the plastic bag consumption under City law. Now NY State has backed them up.

The Guardian: Ocasio – Cortez

Watch and Learn The Green New Deal: How you do politics that matter.

Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave an impassioned speech during a committee hearing in response to Republicans push-back on her climate change policy, the Green New Deal. ‘You want to tell people that their desire for clean air and clean water is elitist?’, she yelled. ‘Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country … You’re telling those kids that they are trying to get on a plane to Davos? People are dying!’

The Good Men Project   BY NOAH BRAND August 2013

It’s bred into your blood for literally a hundred thousand generations. Use it.

It’s another beautiful dawn on the veldt, two million years ago. You’re an antelope. And something appears on the horizon, approaching at a steady lope. As it gets closer, you recognize it as a dangerous predator. No problem; you’re an antelope, and you’re built to run. You take off in a burst of speed that would blind most species, and the predator recedes toward the horizon.

Except that when your sprint ends, it’s still coming…

But the predator’s still coming, and it catches up to you. And it’s got a knobbly stick in one of its gripping limbs, and you’re how that particular homo erectus feeds its family that week.

Nothing can beat it. Nothing can fight it. Some things can outrun it but that doesn’t matter. Because there’s no hack for “doesn’t ever quit” and so nothing on your veldt can compete with that two-legged, goofy-looking predator and its unbeatable strategy.

That strategy is called persistence hunting, and there’s strong evidence that it’s how we, humans, evolved as a species. That it was our first great advantage over the other species, the one that kept us going when the Smilodon and Eohippus gave way to better, more efficient models. The dinosaurs became chickens, and we became as gods. And it wasn’t language, it wasn’t binocular vision, it wasn’t even opposable thumbs. (Not that I’m complaining about the thumbs. They’re terrific.)

Our first superpower, our greatest, is and always has been persistence. When the antelopes ran away, we just kept going until we caught them anyway. When the earth froze over and nothing could live, we just kept going until we found spring again. When climate change killed every member of our species except a population the size of a small town, we kept going and thrived anyway.

If you are alive and reading this, you are the heir of two million years of not quitting.

Before we mastered language and learned to team up better than anyone, before we mastered weaving and made the baskets that made us the best hunter-gatherers in the universe, before we mastered agriculture and built cities and invented civilization, we had one hack, one exploit, one superpower that made all the rest possible.

Soon, very soon, probably even today, you’re going to want to quit. You’re going to want to just stop wasting energy on this stupid thing and just let it go. It’s okay. That’s a perfectly normal, human thing to feel.

But when that happens, try this. Picture an antelope receding across a veldt faster than you can run. You’ll never be as fast as the antelope, and it knows that. It thinks it’s safe, it thinks you’ll starve, because you can’t outrun it.

I’m not saying you can outrun it. I’m saying you can outlast it. And if that weren’t true, you wouldn’t be alive to read this.

You are better at not quitting than anything that has ever lived on this planet. Just remember that.

*****

Newsday: The Editorial Board  

“With 10 days left before the April 1 deadline for an on-time budget, several worthy proposals are being debated that would have great impact on our environment.“

Food waste: For two years, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo pushed in vain a plan to reduce the huge amount of food wasted in New York and to help feed the hungry. He left it out of this year’s budget proposal, but spurred by environmental conservation committee chairman Sen. Todd Kaminsky, the Senate, formerly the obstacle, included it in its one-house budget. In the plan, supermarkets, colleges, hospitals and other big generators of excess food would have to donate edible items to hunger-relief organizations and recycle the rest. The timing is fortuitous; the metropolitan area’s first large-scale anaerobic digester just received a contract from the Long Island Power Authority for the power it will produce and is slated to open in Yaphank in 2020. With Cuomo ready to jump back on board, Kaminsky’s Assembly counterpart, Steve Englebright, another Long Islander, is well-positioned to bring it home.

Plastic bag ban: Another way to reduce obscene waste. Cuomo wants a ban on plastic bags and would give municipalities the option to charge a fee for paper bags. The Senate’s plan would make the paper fee mandatory, which has been shown to be the best way to promote reusable totes and reduce litter. But if the up-to-now resistant Assembly is willing to budge only on the plastic bag ban, negotiators should take it to keep moving the ball forward.

Bottle bill: Cuomo’s plan to add nickel deposits on glass, plastic and aluminum containers for beverages like sports and energy drinks and ready-to-drink iced teas and coffees was met with silence by both chambers. Now the issue is suddenly hot, but it’s complicated. Recycling is in crisis, sparked by China ratcheting up standards for recyclables. Cuomo’s plan would further hurt municipal recycling programs by removing plastics that still have value. Other proposals would add wines and spirits to the bottle bill, to get more glass out of curbside recycling to reduce the contamination issues they present. Another option is to hike the nickel fee to a dime or more to increase participation. Moving valuable aluminum cans back to curbside recycling would give municipalities and recyclers another source of revenue. Albany should be able to accomplish both goals — increasing recycling and keeping recyclers in business. If that can be done properly within the budget process, great. If not, punt it to the rest of the session. It’s that important.