The Delaware Valley Green Building Council and
AIA Philadelphia’s Committee on the Environment
invite you to join us for a
Tour of Montgomery/Bucks County Green Homes
The Environmental Home Store – Jackie O’Neil’s Zero Energy LEED Home & David Hartke’s Keystone Green Building Initiative (GBI)-LEED Home
Saturday, June 9, 2007 8:30 am - 4:00 pm
The Environmental Home […]

Environment Meetups > The Philadelphia Environment Meetup Group

PennFuture’s 2007 Annual Clean Energy Conference
To Market, To Market:
Producing Pennsylvania-Made Energy in Governor Rendell’s Second Term

From Negawatts to Biofuels to Wind to Solar to Hydro and Beyond

Thursday, May 31, 2007
8:30 AM …

Philadelphia, PA 19147 - USA

Thursday, May 31 at 8:30 PM

Attending: 0

Fee: Event fee: USD 100.00 per person

Details: http://environment.meetup.com/228/calendar/5689115/

The Los Angeles Times’ Marla Cone has written two important new articles about chemicals’ adverse effects on women’s and children’s health.

A summary of and link to the first piece, “Common Chemicals Are Linked to Breast Cancer,” can be found over at the WIMN’s Voices blog. There, I also offer some analysis and criticism of press coverage of the larger issue of chemicals and cancer.

The second article, “Common Chemicals Pose Danger for Fetuses, Scientists Warn,” was published today and is available here. It opens:

In a strongly worded declaration, many of the world’s leading environmental scien-tists warned Thursday that exposure to common chemicals makes babies more likely to develop an array of health problems later in life, including diabetes, attention deficit disorders, prostate cancer, fertility problems, thyroid disorders and even obesity.

The declaration by about 200 scientists from five continents amounts to a vote of confidence in a growing body of evidence that humans are vulnerable to long-term harm from toxic exposures in the womb and during their first years.

So much for “better living through chemistry”…?

The Firefox plugin Real Costs inserts emissions info into travel sites.  Pretty cool, haven’t tried it out yet but what a great idea.

I have a short article out in this month’s issue of E: The Environmental Magazine . However, my piece, “For Haitian Artisans, Recycling Is Survival” does not appear in the public version of the online edition. But, Green Gazette readers, you’re in luck. At the end of this post is the original version of the article, which is longer and more detailed than the published version.*

(Getting this story was a bit of a challenge, as in order to interview actual Haitian artisans, I had to overcome two obstacles: distance and language. I wound up e-mailing my questions, written in English, to a bilingual office manager in Haiti, who translated them to two artists. They then replied in French, and she translated their responses verbatim back into English and emailed them to me. Computer-assisted reporting at its best!)

Meanwhile, Haiti’s not the only country where creative souls make art from garbage. The new blog Money Changes Things recounts that in Israel, public recycling bins are transformed into beautiful sculpture – using recycled materials!

For Haitian Artisans, Recycling Is Survival

The Caribbean nation of Haiti is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, suffering a 60%-80% unemployment rate, a longstanding AIDS epidemic, and a devast-ated environment. But a phoenix is rising from these ashes. One of the country’s many challenges, garbage, has become a tool for sustainable development, thanks to the revival of its rich, regional artisanal and utilitarian crafts scene.

Waste Crisis
“Because people are poor and hungry, people cut trees and environment is destroyed. The country is not what it was when we were young,” second-generation metal craftsman
Jean-Wilbert Bruno told [me] through an interpreter. Indeed, only 2% of Haiti’s once-lush mountain forests remain, and the rest are being used to make charcoal for fuel. In turn, the deforestation aggravates flooding and soil erosion, leaving little arable land for subsistence farming (Haiti’s main occupation), and pressing the rural population into the capital, Port-au-Prince – which only adds to the mountains of garbage cluttering the landscape.

“The situation is an overwhelming factor of every day life…. It’s hard to find a street that isn’t completely littered,” notes Hugh Locke, executive director of Yelé Haiti, an arts- and sports-centered foundation established in 2005 by Haitian-born
musician Wyclef Jean. The trash remains, Locke explains, because Haiti lacks regular municipal sanitation services–-in a time of relative peace after decades of polit-ical upheaval, that’s still relatively low on the federal government’s priority list.

Mothers of Invention
However, this refuse has become a key means by which Haitians, through re-use and recycling,tackle litter and poverty. In Croix des Bouquets, 55-gallon oil drums, scavenged or bought from dumps, are the raw material for rough-hewn yet delicately detailed metal sculptures called fer de coupe. Craftspeople burn out the oil, then cut the drums apart, hammer them flat, draw a design with chalk, then hand-chisel them into the desired shapes. In Jacmel, papier-mâché artists fashion old cement bags into carnival and decorative masks. In Port-au-Prince, street kids collect white plastic jugs, snippets of which they shape into graceful floral pins and AIDs fundraiser ribbons.

“Haitian craft is defined by recycling, an important strategy in a country with lit-tle in the way of resources [and] money to import,” says Alden Smith, Haiti program officer with the nonprofit Aid to Artisans. Since 1998, ATA has helped craftspeople develop business skills to break into and build relationships with new markets for their work.

Haiti uses more recycled materials in its crafts than any of the 15 other countries in which ATA currently works, Smith observes. And the color and texture of the materials makes for a unique and quirky esthetic. Moreover, he says, creating “junk art” offers two benefits: “It creates buyer and sellers of garbage, and eases trash problem a little.”

Small is Beautiful
ATA’s and Yelé Haiti’s efforts are part of a struggling but steady trend of small collaborative projects and training programs that network artist “microentrepre-neurs” — individuals, co-ops, and family workshops –with NGOs, fair-trade mer-chants, the USAID and other international aid organizations. The goals: jump-starting a former $30M industry that crashed after the 1994 UN trade embargo but is still the No. 2 source of employment.

The strategy seems to be working, with Haitian objets d’art appearing everywhere from the shelves of Neiman-Marcus to the Ten Thousand Villages website – with garden stores in particular snapping up the oil-drum sculptures.

And at the New York International Gift Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center this past January, the merchandise at folk art importer Casey Riddel’s booth was getting plenty of traffic. On display were whimsical fer de coupe wall hangings, mirrors, and knicknacks depicting typical scenes from Haitian life: tropical plants and aquatic animals, folktales and voodoo spirits, along with Nativity scenes Riddel designed with Haitian crafters to appeal to American tastes. For the past six years, her sales have helped some 17 families survive – she purchases their creations for a flat fee, sells them, then each month sends back about $15,000 US.

Individual artisans can also make a decent, if not always steady, living. Pierre-Richard Desrosiers, for example, runs his own shop and helps support a family of eight children through his signature line of painted, seaweed-shaped bowls made from scrap metal he finds near airports and factories.

Looking Ahead
Craftwork, Locke observes, is “an irrepressible part of Haitian culture…[even] in the midst of tanks rolling by…It has a great deal of potential that hasn’t been fully tapped.”

To that end, Yelé Haiti – a force behind Pwojè Lari Pwòp (Project Clean Streets),which hires teams of up to 2,500 workers to remove garbage in Port-au-Prince — is trying to forge more arts-environment connections. These include “exporting” its Falla Boucan festival, in which young leaders created and ceremonially burned a 20-foot papier-mâché sculpture wrought from old wood scraps. The celebration, he says, could provide a way to “challenge youth [elsewhere] to come up with other ways to incorporate recycled stuff, in a way unique to each area.”

Jean-Wilbert Bruno, who employs up to 40 people, has a more straightforward vision: “The role of artists is to continue to create products and sell them so more people can live better.”

###

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/05/staples_will_re.php

Environment Meetups > The Philadelphia Environment Meetup Group

Urban Sustainability Forum
Thursday, May 17

New Urbanism:
How Everything Old is New
(and Better) Again
Reception at 6:00 pm, Forum at 6:30-8:30 pm
The Academy of Natural Sciences,
19th Street and Benjamin Franklin Parkway

Featuring:

Thoma

Philadelphia, PA 19147 - USA

Thursday, May 17 at 6:30 PM

Attending: 0

Details: http://environment.meetup.com/228/calendar/5748816/

More than 50 businesses, organizations, educational institutions, agencies, and individuals were nominated for the first (and presumably not the last!) Philadelphia Sustainability Awards. PennFuture, together with a team of core partners, came together to honor those who are making Philadelphia a more livable, healthy, sustainable city– what is truly the next great city.

In this podcast, PennFuture’s Christine Knapp talks with Secretary of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Michael DiBerardinis, and a number of the nominees and winners of this year’s awards. Secretary DiBerardinis was rooting for his home team, the Philadelphia Eagles, for their Go Green program.

Christine also spoke with folks from RecycleBank, Philly Car Share, Judy Wicks from White Dog Cafe, Re:Vision Architecture, all award winners that evening, as well as Whole Foods Market, another nominee.

To learn more about the work PennFuture is doing in Philadelphia and across the Commonwealth to ensure that every environmental victory grows the economy, visit our Web site. As always, we welcome your support and your feedback. Comment below or e-mail us at podcast (at) pennfuture (dot) org.

back in february, nutter promised he could fix the recycling program within three months or so of his administration. does that mean that this time next year we could have weekly pickup with single stream in every neighborhood in philly? are we going to hold him to this?
i saw mr. recycling maurice sampson at the […]

Learn more about The Nutter Plan for Sustainability Now: America’s “Greenest” City - Philadelphia: http://www.nutter2007.com/index.php?/issues/full/sustainability_release/
Find your polling place: www.seventy.org
Make the obvious choice in the primaries.