By Kaid Benfield

A new, peer-reviewed analysis performed by the staff of Jonathan Rose Companies, with assistance from the federal EPA, shows the power of a superior location in substantially reducing a household’s environmental footprint.  In fact, it shows this is so whether the housing type is a single-family home, townhome, or multi-family building.  In particular, a comparison based on national averages indicates that the energy consumption (and, thus, global warming emissions) of a typical household in a transit-oriented location is likely to be less than that of a household in a conventional suburban location (i.e., “sprawl”), even if the household in a conventional suburban location employs energy-efficient building technology and drives fuel-efficient vehicles.

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http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/households_in_transit-oriented.html

Hello, You are invited to the following event: GreenScape 2013: A Green Schools Summit Event to be held at the following time, date, and location: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 from 5:00 PM to 8:30 PM (EDT) Baltimore Polytechnic Institute 1400 W. Cold Spring Lane Baltimore, MD 21209 View Map Attend Event Share this event: GreenScape 2013: A Green Schools Summit GreenScape is a free for-youth-by-youth celebration of student environmental leadership in Baltimore. All are welcome to attend, including kids and adults. GreenScape will feature recognition for schools newly certified as Maryland Green Schools and schools that have completed projects to save energy, clean stormwater runoff, green their schoolyards, recycle waste, and much more. There will be local food, music, games, art, DIY learning stations, info on summer opportunities, and forums for students and their supporters to learn from each other. A light dinner will be provided. Read More Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you know who would be interested -- you can also share this event on Facebook and Twitter. We hope you can make it! Sincerely, The Student Environmental Leadership Action Team (SELAT) and the Baltimore Office of Sustainability

[B' Spokes: This has relevance for Maryland and the so called "rain tax" as our roads and poor use of public lands should be taxed along with other impervious surfaces. Well we can't have government tax itself but we can try to get better policies so we don't pay the price of governments ineptness. (I'll note other places have a tax for this too but the more common way is just an addition to the sewer tax.) I will also point out in my travels in Arizona they use water retention areas to form a grade separated road crossing for trails. It's really cool not have to cross hardly any roads when on the trails in Arizona. ]
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Via Switchboard of the Natural Resources Defense Council

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Does suburban sprawl – spread-out, automobile-dependent strip malls, big-box stores, wide arterial roadways, and unending large-lot housing – cause flooding? Absolutely not. (Sprawl doesn’t make it rain, although I can put together a very plausible theory about increased driving, tailpipe emissions, global warming, and severe weather events.) But does sprawl aggravate flooding? Oh, yeah. Here’s how:

When it rains, the water needs somewhere to go. Ideally, that someplace is a forest or meadow, which filters and absorbs the water into the ground. But when, instead of natural vegetation, we have rooftops and pavement, the natural process is broken and the water runs off, gaining volume and velocity. If the rainfall is hard enough and/or steady enough, flooding occurs; and floodwaters increase as runoff increases. Nature, already overburdened by severe precipitation, is prevented entirely from doing its job at limiting the accumulation of flood waters when impervious surface is in the way.

What does this have to do with suburban sprawl? Spread-out, low-rise development contributes more rooftops and pavement per unit of development to the watershed than do walkable neighborhoods. Imagine a 200,000-square-foot, one-story Walmart Supercenter surrounded by 15-20 acres of surface parking. When it rains on Walmart's property, there’s no way the water can get into the ground through naturl filtration processes. Now multiply that by all the other parking lots required for strip malls and office parks, and all the widened and extended road surfaces needed to accommodate traffic heading to the retail and spread-out housing.

Now imagine a different scenario: The same amount of floor space is accommodated by a combination of even two- to four-story buildings, and housing built more compactly to a walkable scale. Imagine that the pattern reaches sufficient critical mass to support decent transit service and the substitution of walking, bicycling, and transit use for some of those car trips, thus reducing the amount of road surface needed. Where there is parking, imagine that some of it, rather than spread out on surface lots, is placed in multi-story, above- or below-ground garages such as those found in urban areas. With rainwater hitting a smaller footprint of pavement and other hard surfaces, there is less runoff.

Would the difference be great enough to prevent flooding altogether during the most severe weather events? Probably not. But it could make a difference in the volume of water running off into the flood.

EPA has done some calculations on the residential part of the issue. Suppose your metropolitan area is going to grow by 10,000 homes over the next several years. If those homes are built one to an acre, a hypothetical storm might produce 187 cubic meters of runoff; but reducing the watershed coverage to an average of four homes per acre, the runoff from those same new homes would be reduced to 62 cubic meters. Build the homes at eight to an acre, and the runoff would reduce further, to 49.5 cubic meters. The main reason for the difference is the amount of roadway required to service the homes is much greater at low densities than at moderate densities.
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http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/before_the_next_deluge_midwest.html

By Doyle Rice, USA TODAY

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Increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and other gases caused by the burning of the oil, gas and coal that power our world are enhancing the natural "greenhouse effect," causing the planet to warm to levels that climate scientists say can't be linked to natural forces.

Carbon dioxide levels were around 280 ppm prior to the Industrial Revolution, when we first began releasing large amounts into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels.

For the past 800,000 years, CO2 levels never exceeded 300 parts per million, according to Scripps, which measures CO2 levels along with several other agencies, including NOAA. Records of past levels of CO2 are found in samples of old air preserved as bubbles in the Antarctic ice sheet, Scripps reports.

"The 400-ppm threshold is a sobering milestone, and should serve as a wake up call for all of us to support clean energy technology and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, before it's too late for our children and grandchildren," said Tim Lueker, a Scripps oceanographer.
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http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2013/04/24/carbon-dioxide-keeling-curve-global-warming/2110445/

B' Spokes: This is a bit off topic but since our Senator Barbara Mikulski is involved I thought I would at least give a link to a summary of issues. I should note my main issue with GMO is just label it and let the market place decide. And if there is no market advantage (a benefit to the general population) why are we giving so many protections to Monsanto?

More info: http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/mpa.asp

[B' Spokes: I'm posting this because by my causal observations too many dog walkers treat our trails as having a poop fairy.]

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From Sustainable Storm Water

No mention of Baltimore but still interesting to see what other cities are doing.

http://billmoyers.com/content/12-cities-leading-the-way-in-sustainability/

[B' Spokes: This funny video has relevance for Maryland in that we are considering a 5 cent plastic bag tax.]

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How can you help?

https://givecorps.com/en/baltimore/projects/300-gather-baltimore-from-farmers-markets-to-food-deserts?project_id=300

Farm Alliance of Baltimore City
We won't be at Waverly this Saturday, but we'll be back to every week starting 3/16. In the meantime, don't forget to sign up for our urban farming workshops series and tell your friends! http://farmalliancebaltimore.org/workshops