And another November 14th at 1pm.

EV Grieve:  Someone placed memorial ribbons commemorating the life of East River Park:

‘We will miss your breeze, your trees, your plants and flowers and your birds and bees.”

The Guardian:

“But it is not too late.”

They set out a series of urgently needed actions:

• Use energy far more efficiently and apply strong carbon taxes to cut fossil fuel use
• Stabilise global population – currently growing by 200,000 people a day – using ethical approaches such as longer education for girls
• End the destruction of nature and restore forests and mangroves to absorb CO2
• Eat mostly plants and less meat, and reduce food waste
• Shift economic goals away from GDP growth

“A broader set of indicators should be monitored, including human population growth, meat consumption, tree-cover loss, energy consumption, fossil-fuel subsidies and annual economic losses to extreme weather events,” said co-author Thomas Newsome, of the University of Sydney.

“The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”

“The good news is that such transformative change, with social and economic justice for all, promises far greater human well-being than does business as usual,” the scientists said. The recent surge of concern was encouraging, they added, from the global school strikes to lawsuits against polluters and some nations and businesses starting to respond.

From Village Sun article -Travis Price, third from right, and neighborhood residents who worked on installing the building’s solar panels. (Courtesy Travis Price)

“Remembering E. 11th St. green-power pioneers”

CityLab:

“This Basketball Will Be Your Father”

MICHAEL KLAWANS

“I found these courts 16 years ago when I moved to New York City’s Lower East Side. To a street basketball lover they are beautiful: two wide-open courts, lined with sycamore trees and benches.”

“The Sara D. Roosevelt Park, has been here for 84 years. One block wide and seven blocks long, it stretches from the Manhattan Bridge to Houston St. and is flanked by Chrystie and Forsyth Streets. It actually contains six full courts: Two on Canal St, and another two next to a soccer field between Stanton and Rivington. Those two have been recently repainted by a famous graffiti artist in a co-branding partnership with Nike: Flashy, but not for me. The real action is on the north-side courts.”

Read more here.

“The movement to take climate action has begun – but we have a long way to go”

The Guardian: António Guterres

“Young people, the UN and a growing number of leaders are mobilizing, but we need many others to take action, the UN secretary general writes”

Global emissions are increasing. Temperatures are rising. The consequences for oceans, forests, weather patterns, biodiversity, food production, water, jobs and, ultimately, lives, are already dire – and set to get much worse.

The science is undeniable. But in many places, people don’t need a chart or graph to understand the climate crisis. They can simply look out the window.

Climate chaos is playing out in real time from California to the Caribbean, and from Africa to the Arctic and beyond. Those who contributed least to the problem are suffering the most.

I have seen it with my own eyes from cyclone-battered Mozambique to the hurricane-devastated Bahamas to the rising seas of the South Pacific.”

Where Does All the Plastic Go?

The New Yorker:

very year, an estimated eight million metric tons of land-based plastic enters the world’s oceans. But when marine researchers have measured how much of this plastic is floating on the water’s surface, swirling in offshore gyres—most notably, the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, between Hawaii and California—they have only found quantities on the order of hundreds of thousands of tons, or roughly one per cent of all the plastic that has ever gone into the ocean. Part of the explanation for this is that all plastic eventually breaks down into microplastic, and, although this takes some polymers decades, others break down almost immediately, or enter the ocean as microplastic already (like the synthetic fibres that pill off your fleece jacket or yoga pants in the washing machine). Scientists have recently found tiny pieces of plastic falling with the rain in the high mountains, including France’s Pyrenees and the Colorado Rockies. British researchers collected amphipods (shrimplike crustaceans) from six of the world’s deepest ocean trenches and found that eighty per cent of them had microplastic in their digestive tracts. These kinds of plastic fibres and fragments are smaller than poppy seeds and “the perfect size to enter the bottom of the food web,” as Jennifer Brandon, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told me. “They have been shown to be eaten by mussels, by coral, by sea cucumbers, by barnacles, by lots of filter-feeding plankton.”

But what happens to all the marine macroplastic—big stuff, like buckets, toys, bottles, toothbrushes, flip-flops—before it breaks down? lots of junk gets eaten: it is likely that marine debris kills hundreds of thousands of sea birds, turtles, and marine mammals each year, though no one knows the exact number. In March, a Cuvier’s beaked whale, a species that can dive deeper and hold its breath longer than any other marine mammal, washed up dead in the Philippines with eighty-eight pounds of plastic in its body. In April, a sperm whale washed up dead in Italy with forty-eight pounds of plastic, as well as the remains of a fetus, in its body.

If you want to clean the coastal environment, you need to close the tap. The broader statement is that we need to do it all, which includes cleaning up plastic pollution in the environment, from garbage patches to the mountains.”

it seems that land is likely “storing a major fraction of the missing plastic debris.” A small fraction of the plastic is “possibly slowly circulating between coastal environments with repeated episodes of beaching, fouling”—the accumulation of living and nonliving things on the materials’ surface—“defouling and resurfacing.”

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

Scientific America

By David Wallace-Wells

“An alarming book provokes a vision of a world that has solved the problems of global warming and war”

“Wallace-Wells limns doom with literary flair. But what makes him especially persuasive is that he came to the topic of climate change late, and reluctantly. He was never particularly green. He likes meat, doesn’t like camping. He cares much more about humanity than about “nature,” whatever that is. He was once skeptical of “the Environmental left,” but after delving into climate change a few years ago he got scared. “Alarmist” is a derogatory term, but Wallace-Wells embraces it. “I am alarmed,” he says, and we should be too. “It is worse, much worse, than you think.”

“We can’t keep waiting until we know everything.”

“In Rhode Island, the state’s largest water utility is experimenting with importing trees from hundreds of miles to the south to maintain forests that help purify water for 600,000 people. In Minnesota, a lumber businessman is trying to diversify the forest on his land with a “300-year plan” he hopes will benefit his grandchildren. And in five places around the country, the United States Forest Service is running a major experiment to answer a basic question: What’s the best way to actually help forests at risk?”

Mount Sinai intends to bring a Behavioral Health Center to replace Rivington House. It will directly impact here. 

The full size flyers are below for the November 4th Forum on the Behavioral Health proposal and the entire plan to downsize Beth Israel.

There will be advocates and elected representatives and a few experts and Mount Sinai there to listen.

Please come November 4th – both of these institutions will affect our lives here  – bring your questions, hopes, demands..etc…

Sample Questions:

• – How will these institutions impact their new locations?
• – Will services will be accessible for our low -income community members?
• – What advocacy will we see for those who (with Mount Sinai’s lease) have lost their chance to remain in their neighborhood of Rivington House, our most fragile elders (including some formerly housed people living with HIV/AIDS) in need of skilled care – who, but for our appalling failure to provide adequate oversight rightfully should be living in Rivington House now?
• – What benefits will be seen for the 40-60 homeless, mostly Black men right outside Mount Sinai’s doors – a number who suffer from the stresses of lifetimes of racism, poverty, poor health care, abuse, targeted for destruction and/or who are “mentally ill”?
• – If an ER room is downsized without capacity what happens? 
• – If Rivington House is allowed to again be repurposed with no iron-clad assistance to build model housing with skilled nursing care regulated ratios – what happens to those without the means to ‘age in place’ in their community who were denied a home due to mismanagement/profiteering? 
• – Who will the proposed Behavioral Health Center serve? 
• – What catchment area (who?) were the provisions in the Behavioral Health CON based on?
• – Will the deaths by suicide of three young women doctors and lingering questions from a sexual assault of a patient (in part of Mount Sinai’s vast network) result in a radical independent review with recommendations – which are then put in place? (with a full understanding this is not an isolated problem in any institution).
• New Yorker article

“In a statement, the hospital says, “We are so sorry that Ms. Newman was the victim of this horrible criminal act.” But for more than three years, it has been fighting her in court, where she has brought a damages suit.”

…Mount Sinai is a massive world-class teaching hospital with a selective medical school ..with women in several prominent leadership positions and a collection of programs focused on underserved communities. Caring clinicians are literally everywhere. …But the hierarchical, macho, fear-based, profit-oriented culture of hospital medicine is especially intense and pervasive there, according to dozens of interviews, most off-the-record owing to anxiety about career-damaging retribution. People who know [the director] well note that, for a psychiatrist, he is short on empathy and patience, and though the hospital denies it, among the faculty and staff, he has a reputation as a bully. So in 2009, for example, when Andrew Goldstein.. organized a panel on pharmaceutical companies’ extending their patents in order to increase profitability (a position Mount Sinai’s CEO, Kenneth Davis, endorsed in an advertorial in the New York Times) and had the temerity to question a last-minute addition to the panel by Charney, he received a call while studying at home from the dean himself. Charney came out blasting…”

“…according to several people with knowledge of the finances, the hospital system began bleeding cash. Charney and Davis — also a psychiatrist and Charney’s close friend — sharpened their focus on profitability, consolidating and cutting wherever they could, including in the ED. In September 2017, when Erik Barton, an emergency physician and M.B.A. who had been hired to rationalize processes among the seven emergency rooms in the Mount Sinai system, presented Charney with his budget, which included an increase in head count — “to bring things up to safe standards,” Barton tells me — “he slammed his hand on the table and said, ‘How do you expect me to go to the board with that?’?” Barton remembers. “I was in shock to be treated like that in front of a whole group of people.” Citing differences in management styles, Barton proffered his resignation within six months….”

“And, according to a complaint filed in federal court this spring that charged the hospital with widespread violations of Title IX, when Charney got involved in the hiring of the new head of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health, he sent an email to the female candidate favored by the search committee, calling her an IDIOT, in all capital letters, in red. The hospital says she was asking for ridiculous compensation, but the candidate withdrew her application, saying she had never been so bullied in her life. Charney tapped a 32-year-old resident named Prabhjot Singh instead. Singh was a “rising star” within Sinai with connections to the Arnhold family and a protégé of the public intellectual Jeffrey Sachs. When he got the job, Singh allegedly demoted and humiliated women on his staff and hired a deputy who allegedly called women “c***ts” and “b****s.”

• Refinery article

“…Dr. Joomun was the third Mount Sinai hospital employee in two years to die by suicide while at Mount Sinai. First-year internal medicine resident Esha Baichoo died in March of 2016 and fourth-year medical student Kathryn Stascavage died in August of that same year.” 

For a health system gearing up to bring a Behavioral Health facility into our neighborhood assurances are necessary – the people served will be far more vulnerable than the general public. 

Hoping to see The NY State Department of Health [DOH] on November 4th.

If our NYState health oversight agency isn’t providing expertise on 2 CONs that entail a seismic shift in two major healthcare institutions – who else does the public turn to? 

Mount Sinai presents authoritatively and with vested interests – how will they be held accountable for adequate care, representations in the CONs, and their promises/gestures of ‘community engagement’ and ‘partnerships’?

and…Dr. Howard Zucker you kind of owe this neighborhood?

Rivington House was lost through a series of missteps, outright deception, the profits-over-vulnerable-people cultures of Allure/Slate/China Vanke/Adam America 

it was also lost through a lack of proper oversight by NY State Department of Health (among other City and State agencies).

WNYC’s Cynthia Rodriquez 3-month investigation:

“Nursing home operators are supposed to give the state Department of Health 90 days notice and submit a detailed plan on how patients will be transferred. The plan includes a roster of patients, a process for relocating them and notification to families of possible alternatives. The agency has to approve the plan before anyone gets moved out.  …

None of that happened at Rivington House. People in fragile condition were removed despite the risks to their health. No comprehensive plans were in place.

“After the state Health Department [DOH] found it empty, the Allure Group was allowed to submit a closure plan anyway. Health officials then approved it without fines or penalties.

“Danford works for a non-profit and any time a nursing home closes, he gets notified and acts as an advocate for patients and their families. But this time, all the patients were gone before there was a chance to meet with them.  Danford said that when proper procedures are not followed, there is no way of knowing who was living there or where they went.

“You have aged people, people with serious disabilities. The process for relocating for that population is very complicated and they do have rights,” Danford said. 

“I have never heard of being able to file a closure plan retroactively,” said Susan Dooha, director of the Center for Independence of the Disabled in New York  …She’s been advocating for seniors for 14 years.

Danford was also surprised by the state’s actions: “It was highly unusual. Let me put it that way. I’d never run into anything like that..”

The PHHPC is already rumored to be ‘captured’ by interests other than the consumer. This doesn’t help.

To view close-in photos of birds in Sara Roosevelt Park during the NYC Parks Department’s Urban Park Rangers Bird Walk this past Saturday (October 12, 2019) graciously posted by Angus here.

Sapsucker and other birds that inhabit this park unbeknownst to most who walk through it…

Read the lovely article about the walk that accompanies the photos. We especially appreciate this quote:

“It was noticeable that wherever there was a little more variety, there were also a lot more birds.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in M’finda Kalunga Garden, a community garden nestled in the heart of the park. Stepping into the garden was like entering a different world. In place of cracked cement and disciplined rows of London planes, you suddenly found yourself in a modest (but carefully-tended) jungle, with an exuberant riot of different types of vegetation great and small…”

Again our thanks Angus!

Other Bird Sitings in Sara Roosevelt Park:

Urban Park Rangers Take Us Through Sara Roosevelt Park

These are pictures of humans but we’re going to link with a photographer’s site to have bird photos and we’ll hear from Urban Park Rangers to get a list of what was observed here.

Great group of folks who came. Thank you Jill and all of your crew.

Nice stop at M’Finda Kalunga Garden and the fantastic duo below who do children’s programming every Saturday!

Sapsuckers, Canada warblers, many more…

Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer’s Office:

A special event for seniors Oct. 27.

“An age-friendly world enables people of all ages to actively participate in community activities and treats everyone with respect, regardless of their age. It is a place that makes it easy for older people to stay connected to people that are important to them. And it helps people stay healthy and active even at the oldest ages and provides appropriate support to those who can no longer look after themselves…”  – World Health Organization