From the Brooklyn Paper:

“City officials fibbed to advance their controversial redesign for a section of Fort Greene Park when they claimed that dozens of meadow trees destined for the hatchet are sick and near-death, because most of the green things are actually young and in prime health, according to… a report from city-hired arborists.

The agency, as part of its “Parks Without Borders Program,” plans to make Fort Greene Park’s entry…into a grand corner entrance… which requires leveling some hilly mounds, …and chopping down trees.

Parks department honchos told locals…that the green things chosen for removal wouldn’t survive for much longer. But the agency’s forestry report — a survey of all 129 trees currently growing where the redesign would occur that Friends of Fort Greene Park received via a Freedom of Information Act request and shared with this newspaper — shows that many of the trees deemed old and ill were anything but, according to Gruen.

Residents’ outcry over the trees getting the axe led some top city officials to question the plan…

“I believe that the city has not done its due process, and that the redesign dulls the environmentally resilient features that the park currently provides, such as mitigating storm water runoff,” Public Advocate Letitia James penned in a Nov. 27 letter to the commission. “The city has not done the proper environmental review.”

From The Tribeca Trib:

“The 191-foot-long sliver of sand, known as Brooklyn Bridge Beach, lies beneath the bridge, along the East River Esplanade. A padlocked gate on the esplanade fence keeps it off limits, though it sometimes serves as a stopover for kayakers.

Now a group is launching a new effort to reverse the city’s policy.”

“The push to open the beach comes as the city readies a request for proposals from designers for the Brooklyn Bridge Esplanade Project that would make improvements to the waterfront experience from Peck Slip, at the southern end, up to Catherine Slip, several blocks north of the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Read on.

NYTimes:

Soil Power! The Dirty Way to a Green Planet

By Jacques Leslie Dec. 2, 2017

“People reap more benefit from nature when they give up trying to vanquish it [instead see it] as a demanding but indispensable ally… [we’ve been conditioned to think of ] carbon’s climate change connection……when it’s as vital to life as water. The way to make amends is to put it back in the soil, where it belongs.”

Excerpt:

“The last great hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change may lie in a substance so commonplace that we typically ignore it or else walk all over it: the soil beneath our feet.

The earth possesses five major pools of carbon. Of those pools, the atmosphere is already overloaded with the stuff; the oceans are turning acidic as they become saturated with it; the forests are diminishing; and underground fossil fuel reserves are being emptied. That leaves soil as the most likely repository for immense quantities of carbon.

Now scientists are documenting how sequestering carbon in soil can produce a double dividend: It reduces climate change by extracting carbon from the atmosphere, and it restores the health of degraded soil and increases agricultural yields. Many scientists and farmers believe the emerging understanding of soil’s role in climate stability and agricultural productivity will prompt a paradigm shift in agriculture, triggering the abandonment of conventional practices like tillage, crop residue removal, mono-cropping, excessive grazing and blanket use of chemical fertilizer and pesticide. Even cattle, usually considered climate change culprits because they belch at least 25 gallons of methane a day, are being studied as a potential part of the climate change solution because of their role in naturally fertilizing soil and cycling nutrients.

On the other hand, carbon sequestration in soil and vegetation is an effective way to pull carbon from the atmosphere that in some ways is the opposite of geoengineering. Instead of overcoming nature, it reinforces it, promoting the propagation of plant life to return carbon to the soil that was there in the first place — until destructive agricultural practices prompted its release into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. That process started with the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago and accelerated over the last century as industrial farming and ranching rapidly expanded…

…Mr. Durham’s farmers are learning a lesson that resonates throughout human interactions with the natural world: People reap more benefit from nature when they give up trying to vanquish it and instead see it clearly, as a demanding but indispensable ally. Because of carbon’s climate change connection, we’ve been conditioned to think of it as the enemy, when in fact it’s as vital to life as water. The way to make amends is to put it back in the soil, where it belongs.”

FABnyc Storefront Residency

Last night:

NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join for the launch event of John Krinsky and Maud Simonet’s new book Who Cleans the Park? Public Work and Urban Governance in New York City. Author John Krinsky will be present in conversation with Penny Lewis and Gianpaolo Baiocchi.

NYU

The book:

America’s public parks are in a golden age. Hundreds of millions of dollars—both public and private—fund urban jewels like Manhattan’s Central Park. Keeping the polish on landmark parks and in neighborhood playgrounds alike means that the trash must be picked up, benches painted, equipment tested, and leaves raked. Bringing this often-invisible work into view, however, raises profound questions for citizens of cities.

In Who Cleans the Park? John Krinsky and Maud Simonet explain that the work of maintaining parks has intersected with broader trends in welfare reform, civic engagement, criminal justice, and the rise of public-private partnerships. Welfare-to-work trainees, volunteers, unionized city workers (sometimes working outside their official job descriptions), staff of nonprofit park “conservancies,” and people sentenced to community service are just a few of the groups who routinely maintain parks. With public services no longer being provided primarily by public workers, Krinsky and Simonet argue, the nature of public work must be reevaluated. Based on four years of fieldwork in New York City, Who Cleans the Park? looks at the transformation of public parks from the ground up. Beginning with studying changes in the workplace, progressing through the public-private partnerships that help maintain the parks, and culminating in an investigation of a park’s contribution to urban real-estate values, the book unearths a new urban order based on nonprofit partnerships and a rhetoric of responsible citizenship, which at the same time promotes unpaid work, reinforces workers’ domination at the workplace, and increases the value of park-side property. Who Cleans the Park? asks difficult questions about who benefits from public work, ultimately forcing us to think anew about the way we govern ourselves, with implications well beyond the five boroughs.

John Krinsky is Associate Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York and the City University Graduate Center.

Gianpaolo Baiocchi is Associate Professor at NYU Gallatin, and Director of the Urban Democracy Lab at NYU.

Penny Lewis is Academic Director and Associate Professor at the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City College of New York.

From Next City:

By Rachel Dovey November 27, 2017

“Following investigations in London and New York earlier this year, officials in both cities have announced legislation to regulate privately owned public spaces, or POPS….

… legislation that passed the New York City Council earlier this month aims to hold local landlords accountable for their POPS. The rules — part of a package authored by Council Member Ben Kallos — would require additional signage in all POPS areas detailing amenities and hours of operation, and include a website address where visitors could find out more information and register complaints.

Landlords who don’t comply could face fines of between $4,000 and $10,000.

That legislation comes seven months after NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer released a blistering audit, which found that of the 333 sites surveyed, 182 were not compliant with local laws.

Shortly after Kallos’ legislation passed the council, Stringer released the results of a second audit, which found that many sites were still violating existing laws. Stringer’s office zoomed in on 34 of the previous 182 — and found that 32 still weren’t up to code. Some of the supposedly public spaces were restricted by barricades or fences, some featured signs that read “for private use only,” and some gave priority to restaurant seating.

[In NYC] developers have received bonus space in exchange for building those …public spaces..

Kelsey E. Thomas wrote:“New Yorkers are literally getting cheated out of tens of millions of dollars in public space — and the city is willfully choosing to do nothing about it. Public resources are effectively being given away at the expense of all of us,” Stringer said in a statement at the time.”

Op-Ed by Sandy Reiburn (longtime Fort Greene Resident and a member of Friends of Fort Greene Park) 

The De-Greening Of Fort Greene Park Leaves Its Friends Feeling Blue

“With its decision last week (11/21) to let the city’s Parks Department make major renovations to historic Fort Greene Park, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has apparently added yet another New York City icon to the vanishing city list.

…. the park will still be there, but it won’t be as leafy and green. It will be missing more than four dozen trees, lose the beloved grassy mounds created by landscape architect A. E. Bye, be robbed of swaths of grass which will be replaced by more concrete pavement – and denied some historical features that provide the essential character of this park. ..”

And From The Bowery Alliance of Neighbors:

“On the Lower East Side there are two almost 200-year-old Federal-style houses that need your help now. 

206 Bowery and 22 East Broadway had been deemed by the Landmarks Preservation Commission as significant enough to be classified as “calendared”, which means placed in a protected category pending landmark designation. Unfortunately, the Commission never acted to designate and due to a law passed by the City Council, these rare survivors will lose their protected status unless the Commission acts to designate. 

Please click this link to SEND A LETTER to the Commission Chair supporting landmark designation:

These rare surviving Federal style houses represent the architecture style of the young American republic… These structures help give us a sense of historic place and time…

Federal era houses are being demolished all over the city at an alarming rate.

The Bowery has lost several of them, including those at 135 Bowery and at 35 Cooper Square.

Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation has been campaigning on behalf of the Federals for years.

Links to the descriptions of 206 Bowery and 22 East Broadway 

A M’Finda Kalunga Community Gardener posted this stunning picture (taken by Mary Hahn) in the Park. Her niece calls her ‘the hawk whisperer’ for her abilities in getting this close to these birds.

We are working on more bird habitats and focus for the park.

Earlier Birding articles:

Audubon visited for a bird walk-through of the SDR Park (thanks to Pam Ito of The Hort).

Migrating Striped or Black and White Warblers and Vireos in MKGarden. 

From the Audubon Society – protecting Red Tailed Hawks

Buteo Jamaicensis or ..Red Tailed Hawk in Sara Roosevelt Park