Snow removal hasn’t changed much since the introduction of the horse-drawn plow in 1862. But this winter’s blizzards, which have already shattered records for the sheer amount of snow (Boston’s been deluged in 78.5 inches of powder — three times its average — and Worcester, Mass., has received a hefty 92.1 inches), are prompting smart collaborations and innovations to get the white stuff out of thoroughfares.
Make it a group effort.
Local governments plow the streets so that school buses and emergency vehicles can pass through, but some fed-up pedestrians say the policy prioritizes drivers over those who walk, bike or take public transit. Instead of griping, neighbors in Ann Arbor, Mich., banded together to operate the Snowbuddy, a 32-horsepower tractor to clear 12 miles of sidewalk each storm. Paul Tinkerhess, a 30-year resident and the lead organizer, says a unified effort makes much more sense than individuals shoveling. “It’s like taking something that’s really a linear transportation corridor, it’s one line, and dividing its maintenance responsibility into hundreds and even thousands of little links,” he says, “and assigning that responsibility to people who have a widely varying ability and even interest in maintaining that walkway.”
Solicit others to shovel.
One of the downsides of plowing the roadways is that all that snow gets piled up in huge icy banks on the curbs and corners, impeding pedestrians and upping their risk of taking a hard fall. To remove the windrows, some public transit authorities, like Rhode Island’s, have negotiated deals with advertising companies, requiring them to clear the snow around bus shelters where their signs are posted.
D.I.Y.
Chicago residents invented an ingenious way to make every ordinary citizen into a street-clearing machine: By attaching plows to almost any kind of personal vehicle. You name it, SUVs, Priuses, lawn mowers, ATVs. The Nordic Plow is a lightweight, rounded snow blade that works on almost any surface, too, so you can clear your grassy lawn or your gravel driveway. “The idea for the Nordic Auto Plows came from watching people struggle with shovels and snow blowers in cold, wintry weather,” says Richard Behan, the founder and CEO. “I believed there must be a better way.”
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Move it out of town.
Conjuring odd images of the original Tea Party protest, hard-hit Boston has considered dumping the snow into the harbor. But concerned citizens have cried foul, worried that the snow will also carry salt, litter and residue of gasoline that could pollute the bay. The strategy in Minneapolis has always been to use payloaders and dump trucks to pick up snow and consolidate it into giant piles in vacant lots. The strategy is the same in Portland, Maine, where one of the collection sites has been filled with so much snow that the mound is now 40 feet tall, just below the FAA height regulation.
Melt it.
This one’s a no-brainer. In Boston, the city is using machines that can zap up to 400 tons of snow per hour. Some of the technology is so advanced that it filters debris out of the water before releasing the cleaned H20 down a storm drain, as the Snow Dragon does by heating snow over a tank of hot water. (Other melters work like giant hair dryers, blowing out hot air.) While effective, these machines are expensive and require lots of energy to operate. But until the city implements civil engineer Rajib Mallick’s idea — building a network of pipes that could be filled with rushing hot fluid near the surface of streets, warming the pavement and melting the snow — it’s Boston’s best bet to get rid of 6+ feet of the white stuff.
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Tag: Boston
This City Is Reducing Cancer Risk, One Laundromat at a Time
The dilemma: The chemical that gives your clothing that “fresh-from-the-dry-cleaner” look is toxic. But even though it poses a risk to employees’ health and pollutes the neighborhood, many mom-and-pop operations don’t have the money to do anything about it.
About 75 percent of the nation’s 37,500 dry cleaners and laundromats rely on perchloroethylene — or “perc,” for short — a chemical that dissolves oil-based stains but is an air pollutant and suspected carcinogen.
One laundromat in Boston, owned by a family of Latin American immigrants, is demonstrating how communities can come together to fund “greener” business models that don’t depend on cancer-causing chemicals. It’s a way to benefit local patrons with safer practices and strengthen existing stores against waves of gentrification.
“The chemicals we used — we knew they were not healthy,” says Myra Vargas, a Guatemalan immigrant who purchased J&P Cleaners with her husband in 1996. When she was pregnant with her second child, she was so worried about the off-putting smell that stayed away from the store.
Breathing perc — even for a short time — can harm the nervous system, overwhelming a person with dizziness, fatigue, headaches and even fainting spells. (California is in the process of outlawing it, and other states are looking at voluntary incentives.) The colorless liquid evaporates when exposed to air, so cleaners working near it on a daily basis will inhale the chemical, putting them at risk of kidney and liver damage or cancer. The Vargas family didn’t like using perc, but without $80,000 to buy new machines, they were stuck with it. “We went 17 years using something that was dangerous for everybody,” she tells the Boston Globe.
As their neighborhood transformed — blocks of vacant storefronts in Jamaica Plain were revitalized into a hip area known for its arts and sustainable dining — the Vargas family sought a way to renew their decades-old business. The Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition (JPNET) was there to help, aiming to eliminate cancer-causing chemicals at the source (i.e. dry cleaners, beauty salons, car mechanics and retail stores).
“Not enough effort, not enough research, not enough funds have been directed toward upstream efforts to prevent carcinogens from getting into the human environment in the first place,” says Richard Clapp, an epidemiologist who partnered with the group. “How do we get to the point where we don’t pour this fire hydrant of carcinogenic chemicals into the environment?”
JPNET’s answer is to be “proactive” and “help existing businesses adopt healthier and safer processes, attract more customers and thrive financially,” Carlos Espinoza-Toro, JPNET’s lead organizer, tells Yes! Magazine. Rather than boycotting offenders, they ask the community to invest in scrubbing the neighborhood of toxic fumes. “In a gentrifying urban neighborhood, we want to ensure that the benefits of ‘going green’ are not limited to affluent households,” he adds.
In less than a year, with JPNET’s support, J&P Cleaners crowdsourced $18,000 from 160 donors and won a $15,000 state grant. The Vargas family now practices a technique called “wet cleaning,” which launders clothes in a computer-controlled wash of water, soaps and conditioners (that sometimes spins as slowly as six revolutions a minute) and then reshapes the garment under tension. Although the process produces some wastewater, the final product is spot-free clothing that doesn’t reek of chemicals.
Joined by local politicians, Vargas beamed at a ribbon-cutting ceremony late last year where she successfully opened the only wet cleaner in the neighborhood and one of a dozen in Massachusetts. “I’m thrilled with our wet cleaning,” she says. “The whites are whiter. We use less energy and water. I don’t have to pay to have toxic chemicals hauled away. There is no chemical smell in the store. What’s not to love?”
The 10 Most Inspiring Books of 2014
In a year where our country witnessed a widening gap between rich and poor, a toxic chemical leak, long delays for veterans at hospitals and clinics, botched lethal injections, racially-charged protests, record low voter turnout and stunning Congressional dysfunction, we at NationSwell turned to these ten books for stories of hope. Confronted by complex issues, these authors never flinched. Instead, they brought us creative solutions and unwavering heroics. Read on for our top ten books of 2014 (alphabetized by author):
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Are there any inspiring books we missed? Let us know in the comments below.
This App Helps Urban Farmers Get Their Crops Growing
Across the country, urban farms are cropping up and making a difference in communities where food deserts have persisted. The idea is simple, but execution can be tricky.
Which is why a new app is aiming to help expedite the process by identifying potential areas to set up anything from growing vegetables to farming bee hives. Urb.ag is a mobile app developed by Fathom Information Design and was first developed for Boston after the city passed legislation allowing commercial urban farming in December 2013.
While Article 89, the new zoning policy, was heralded as a way to open up the city for commercial farming, Fathom designer Terrence Fradet recognized that understanding the policy was going to be difficult for most people who might want to start a farm. With support from the city, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and funding from the Knight Foundation’s Knight Prototype Fund, Fathom launched the app over the summer.
Urb.ag, which derives from urban agriculture, maps out the process of how to obtain zoning permits, submit necessary applications and explains the dense, municipal codes that are required to launch such a business. A user simply enters the Boston address into the app to begin the process, which then prompts a series of questions about whether you want to farm on the ground or roof, use hydroponics or conventional planting, etc. After customizing an ideal farm, the app clues you into the next steps on which government body to obtain permits from and where to apply.
“The way that zoning legislation works, you have different divisions, and within that there are subdistricts, and within that there are parcels,” a data lead on the project Alex Geller tells Fast Company. “You really quickly fall into a rabbit hole.”
Urb.ag, on the other hand, hones in on the location of where someone might want to start a farm and then applies the exact codes and what is required of the new law. For food deserts and other communities facing health problems, simplifying the process for urban farming could be a solution they’re seeking.
“You hear a lot of talk about food deserts and you hear a lot of talk about the obesity epidemic, and it all falls back on the idea that healthy food is less accessible for certain sectors of the population,” Geller tells Boston magazine. “I think what’s so cool about urban agriculture is in a city, where you have a coalescence of different populations, that seems like a point where it’s most especially important to make healthy food and local food accessible at a reasonable price.”
While the app is only available in Boston, it has potential to shape urban farming elsewhere and help government create better connections with citizens looking to transform urban agriculture.
MORE: No Soil? Or Sun? This Urban Farm is Raising Fresh Food in a Whole New Way
In Boston’s Poorest Neighborhood, The Seeds of a Food Economy Are Being Sown
Boston can boast about many things – top colleges, rich history and vibrant business. And now, it can add one more item to that list: an emerging local food economy.
That’s right, ever since the 1980s, the areas of Roxbury and Dorchester have been slowly developing their communities into burgeoning food hubs. With community land trusts, local kitchens and retailers, a waste-management co-op and others, Boston is achieving an integrated food economy.
Back in the eighties, residents banned together and formed the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, acquiring 60 acres of land in the middle of the Dudley neighborhood. Since then, the land has been used to build homes and start a community land trust consisting of parks, gardens, a town common, community center, charter school and a community greenhouse.
That greenhouse is leased to the Food Project, a nonprofit focused on youth development and urban agriculture. Half of the greenhouse is used for produce that is sold to cover the majority of the operating costs, while the other 50 percent is utilized by local residents and organizations.
Food Project works with more than 150 teens and thousands of volunteers to produce food that is sold at famers’ markets and community agriculture programs in order to raise money for hunger relief programs.
Additionally, since 2001, the Grow or Die campaign run by Boston’s youth has been turning vacant lots into raised-bed community gardens servicing more than 100 families.
And in 2009, City Growers entered the scene. Started by Glynn Lloyd (who also runs Roxbury catering company City Fresh Foods) because he wanted access to fresh, local food, the for-profit farming venture is one of the area’s firsts.
Lloyd hasn’t stopped there, as he recently founded the Urban Farming Institute and facilitated in the passing of Article 89, a commercial urban agriculture zoning ordinance. As a result, a groundbreaking was held last July for the Garrison –Trotter Farm, which sits on two lots that had been vacant since the 1980s.
Along with the programs, gardens and more processing business, retailers and restaurants are emerging that want to utilize the local food. Linking all of these organizations is that community’s first step toward a successful local food network.
And for Lloyd, coordination and cooperation is the key for the future.
“Many of us don’t come from conventional business backgrounds,” Lloyd tells YES! Magazine. “Innovation won’t just come from private sector, nonprofits, or government, but from all of them working together.”
MORE: This Startup Uses Urban Relics to Serve Up Local Food
One of the Country’s Largest School Districts Joins Meatless Monday
A single day can make a world of difference.
The Boston Public School system will be adopting the practice of Meatless Monday — a non-profit initiative with the aim of reducing global meat consumption by 15 percent — to promote better health and help save the environment.
According to a news release, the 57,000 students enrolled in Boston’s 128 public schools will have vegetarian choices such as black bean burrito bowls, garden salads topped with chickpeas, protein-packed chili and other healthy entrees that, hopefully, won’t leave anyone wondering “where’s the beef?”
“Offering students nutritious meals as part of the Meatless Monday programs allows us to meet the diverse needs of the families in our district while getting the week off to a healthy start,” Deputy Director of the Boston Public Schools’ Department of Food and Nutrition Services, Deborah Ventricelli says in a statement. “Now, every Monday, our students know they can look forward to a high-quality meatless option in addition to the choices they already have.”
The school district is working with the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) to implement the once-a-week break from eating animals. Kristie Middleton, a food policy manager at the HSUS says, “Students will also be seeing posters in cafeterias encouraging them to take a holiday from meat in order to do their part to save the environment and to eat healthier.”
MORE: A Titanic Shift: James Cameron’s School is the First in the Nation To Go 100 Percent Vegan
EcoWatch reports that the schools started Meatless Monday after receiving more than 1,000 requests from parents and students.
As we’ve mentioned before, Americans are way over-proteined — consuming more meat than nearly every other population on the planet. Although the American Heart Association recommends eating less than six ounces per day of meat, many of us eat double that amount, putting us at a much higher risk for cardiovascular disease.
Meat-eating also puts stress on the environment. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, meat production is responsible for 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — more than all forms of transportation combined. Eliminating meat for a single night a week is the same as taking 30 to 40 million cars off the road for a year.
While we’re not telling you to wave bye-bye to burgers, eating less meat is not only better for your health, it’s better for the planet’s health, too.
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DON’T MISS: 5 Very Simple, Practical Things You Can Do to Curb Climate Change
When Traditional Disciplinary Actions Don’t Work, Restorative Justice Can Bring About the Healing Process
Professor Carolyn Boyes-Watson remembers getting a call from distressed administrators at a Boston high school: “We have so many girls fighting,” they said, “we’re picking up clumps of hair in the hallways.”
Students were yanking each other’s hair out while brawling in the school’s corridors and cafeteria, and administrators couldn’t figure out how to make the violence stop.
So they called in Boyes-Watson, a sociology professor at Suffolk University in Boston, to train students and teachers in a conflict-resolution practice known as restorative justice. Drawing from Native American traditions, the concept uses ritualized dialogue to try to mend broken communities. Participants gather in circles to try to resolve problems through discussion, rather than retribution.
Across the country, more and more schools are turning to restorative justice as they realize that traditional disciplinary measures — suspensions and expulsions — often don’t deter misbehavior, but can instead set troubled students up for failure by further disengaging them from school.
While traditional justice systems are based on punishing perpetrators (usually by ostracizing or isolating them), restorative justice focuses on healing the harm that has been inflicted — personally and community-wide. Restorative justice programs in schools seek to establish cultures of openness, communication and respect.
Boyes-Watson helped the Boston school set up a practice in which groups of students and teachers met regularly to discuss problems while sitting in a circle. “The kids absolutely take to the circle immediately,” Boyes-Watson says. “They treat each other better. They’re kinder to one another. They feel a sense of belonging and connection. It’s really quite simple. … It’s a small intervention that makes such a powerful difference.”
The effect was transformative. By the following year, the school had solved the problem of girls fighting — no more brawls in the halls.
With similar results being reproduced in other schools, restorative justice is catching on nationwide: Schools in California, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota are using the practice. Even the federal government is getting on board.
Earlier this year, the Obama administration released new school discipline guidelines asking administrators to move away from zero-tolerance discipline and begin using alternative measures like restorative justice. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted that suspensions often lead to additional disciplinary action, repeating grades, dropping out and ending up in the juvenile justice system. Restorative justice seeks to change that trajectory, known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
DIVERTING THE PIPELINE
The growth of restorative justice in schools comes in response to the failure of zero-tolerance discipline, which uses removal from school as a punishment. During the 1990s, suspensions and expulsions became increasingly popular, paralleling a dramatic increase in the country’s prison population as a result of the War on Drugs.
Initially, zero-tolerance discipline was focused on the most extreme offenses: guns and drugs in school. “But what happened over the years was that morphed into including more and more things into what were zero-tolerance offenses,“ says Dr. Martha Schiff, a restorative justice expert at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Fla., including bringing nail clippers or butter knives to school.
Not surprisingly, the number of suspensions and expulsions has nearly doubled since 1974.
Disproportionately, students of color have been the recipients of those punishments. Nationwide, while 17 percent of school-age children are black, African-American students comprise 37 percent of suspensions and 35 percent of expulsions. Additionally, black students are suspended or expelled at a rate three times that of white students.
“Kids who should have been in school were being systematically kicked out and winding up in the justice system,” says Schiff. A name for this dynamic emerged — the school-to-prison pipeline — highlighting the parallel failures of school discipline and the justice system, in which African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated.
Now, as restorative justice takes root in schools, studies are showing that it does reduce suspensions and expulsions — often quite dramatically. Whether the practice addresses the racial disparities in school discipline is a question that requires further study, says Schiff.
Not everyone is sold on restorative justice. Annalise Acorn, a law professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, has written a book-length critique, arguing that the practice can traumatize victims and allow unrepentant offenders to fake their way out of trouble. And Dr. Hilary Cremin, a senior lecturer at the University of Cambridge in England, warns that restorative justice is not a panacea and must be implemented carefully in order to avoid causing more harm than good.
At the moment, however, critical voices are in the minority. “I’ve never seen the momentum and groundswell around it quite like it is now,” says Schiff.
MAKING IT RIGHT
In Oakland, Calif., the entire school district has adopted restorative justice practices, after seeing dramatic results at a single troubled middle school.
In 2005, Cole Middle School was in crisis. Student behavior at the school — located in West Oakland, a low-income, high-crime neighborhood — was out of control despite aggressive disciplinary tactics. The school had a suspension rate nearly five times higher than the district average and was expelling four times as many students.
Fania Davis, head of the organization Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, helped the school implement restorative justice circles. In a single year, suspensions dropped by 87 percent and not a single student was expelled.
“In our first pilot, we were able to completely eliminate violence,” says Davis. Principals took notice, and by 2011 the Oakland Unified School District had hired a district-wide program manager to help administrators and teachers bring restorative justice into their schools.
According to David Yusem, Restorative Justice’s program manager, schools first establish dialogue circles as a regular practice in classrooms. Students sit with their teachers and establish group values, creating a space to connect and speak personally about events in school or in their lives. Circle members talk one at a time — without interruption — passing a “talking piece,” an object indicating whose turn it is to speak.
On their own, dialogue circles have a dramatic impact, says Ina Bendich, of the Restorative Justice Training Institute in Berkeley, Calif. “Eighty-five percent of your problems will be taken care of when you really focus on community building,” she says.
For the other 15 percent of problems, schools use response-to-harm circles, designed to address the aftermath of specific conflicts, like two students fighting, or a student yelling at a teacher. With these, the affected parties talk about what happened and what they were feeling at the time.
“It gives the person who did the harm a chance to make it right, rather than pushing them out of school,” explains Yusem.
Taking responsibility for one’s actions can include things like public apologies or community service, or a modified form of a traditional punishment, such as in-school suspension instead of removal.
Kris Miner, executive director of St. Croix Valley Restorative Justice in River Falls, Wis., says she helped facilitate a healing circle that included parents, students and school staff after a white 11th-grader used the N-word and nearly got into a fistfight with a black student.
As the talking piece went around the circle, one father, a corrections officer, spoke about how damaging racial slurs can be and how, in prison, they can get you killed. A Latina guidance counselor talked about being called a “wetback” and a “spic.”
The circle created an opportunity for reconciliation for all parties involved — a moment that never would have occurred if the offending student had simply been removed from school.
The student who had used the racial slur became more and more emotional as people spoke. “I am so sorry that I said that,” he said, tearing up. “I will never say that word again.”
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Name the Most Pedestrian-Friendly City in America
Pedestrian life is picking up speed across the country, with an estimated five percent more Americans walking to work now compared to 2000, Bloomberg reports. But with more than 4,700 pedestrian deaths in 2012, city planners are recognizing the importance of improving pathways and policies to protect citizens on their feet.
In a study of the safest cities for pedestrians by insurer Liberty Mutual Holding Co., Seattle topped the list. The Pacific Northwest city had fewer than 10 annual pedestrian deaths in 2012 and was noted for its investment in infrastructure to improve the walking safety of more than 108,000 commuters each day. That same year, the city ordered more than 500 crosswalks and also improved walking routes for students.
Boston and Washington, D.C. came in second and third, respectively. San Francisco notched fourth and New York City grabbed the fifth spot on the list of of 25 cities analyzed for pedestrians. The most dangerous for walkers? Detroit. The report ranks cities by traffic data, infrastructure and local attitude on public safety among 2,500 residents across the observed cities.
Dave Melton, Liberty Mutual’s managing director of global safety, attributes well-planned pedestrian safety to countdown lights and flashers at crosswalks that help drivers focus on the road and direct attention from pedestrians. But pesky cellphone usage still remains an issue.
“The human brain doesn’t multitask,” Melton says. “It switches back and forth.”
It’s tricky to try to control phone distraction, but ensuring every other component of protecting pedestrians is a step in the right direction.
Think You’re Getting the Flu? Diagnose Yourself by Crowdsourcing Your Symptoms
As the weather cools down, Americans brace for flu season. Although it typically runs from December to February, the flu can strike as early as October, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
To combat the spread and help you learn whether you’re at risk, Flu Near You is an app that tracks nearby outbreaks in real time. Launched in 2011, the app was developed by Boston Children’s Hospital, HealthMap, the American Public Health Association and the Skoll Global Threats Fund, a San Francisco-based group that works on dangers such as climate change and pandemics.
The app relies on a weekly survey, in which users self-report symptoms to help map out where a potential flu groundswell is located. With around 120,000 users, the survey asks six questions about symptoms that takes only a minute to complete, according to Dr. Florence Bourgeois, a pediatric emergency medicine specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
The app then analyzes information to provide a local and national lens on the spread of influenza-like symptoms. Users can search by zip code for outbreaks in their area, as well as search through data from weeks prior.
The flu sends around 200,000 people to the hospital each year; in total, there were around 31.8 million flu-associated illnesses and 14.4 million medically attended illnesses during the 2012 to 2013 season, according to the CDC.
“It engages the public directly,” says Jennifer Olsen, manager of pandemics for the Skoll Global Threats Fund. “Not everyone goes to the doctor when they feel sick. Sometimes people will Google their symptoms, or take medicine and stay home. This gives us more ways to engage more broadly.”
Indeed, Flu Near You is one of many tools tapping social media and the Internet to track flu outbreaks. Google currently monitors geographic spread of the flu by aggregating data based on search terms, while the Chicago Department of Public Health uses Twitter and Yelp reviews to discern cases of food poisoning outbreaks.
The team is aiming to develop the app beyond flu tracking, with the goal to use it to identify severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) as well as the virus affecting Midwestern and Southern children called Enterovirus D68.
MORE: The New Way for Citizens to Report the Actions of Law Enforcement
This App From MIT Tells You How Much Solar Energy Your House Can Produce
As solar energy continues to become more available, more Americans are getting on board with the idea of taking their power off the grid and embracing more sustainable sources like solar panels.
But with that decision comes a lot of research. Individuals must find out just how expensive it might be and how much money installing solar panels actually saves, which can be a costly process if it involves seeking professional consultation.
Enter, Mapdwell.
Mapdwell, born out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), helps individuals determine solar potential of their properties using massive data sets across cities including Washington, D.C., Boston and Cambridge, Mass.
The company taps into LIDAR data from aerial mapping flights to produce one-by-one meter resolution 3D models of landscape including the shape of a roof and surrounding greenery.
With up to 8,600 data points to illustrate, the maps then provide a rating of solar potential based on analysis and historical weather data. Users can also share visual components of the data with a systems installer.
“We had to show you all the information, which can be overwhelming, but you need to have it if you really want to make a decision,” CEO Eduardo Berlin tells Fast Company. “Many times designers want to communicate the minimum amount of information to get you interested. But in this case, it’s different.”
Mapdwell lets users simply enter their address to access the information, as well as helping design custom solar systems based on metrics such as price, energy and environmental impact.
“The challenge is: How can you get people interested? How can you get people informed and excited with all these little things that we can do. If I do it, and you do it, and your neighbor does it, it could really have a huge effect,” Berlin says. “…You can really empower change within a community by people having all this information — if you manage to get it to them.”
The technology is only available for a select few cities right now, but the company is planning to expand, as well as design similar systems for rainwater collection, small wind energy installations and green roofs at a city level.
While solar energy still only accounts for less than 1 percent of the country’s electricity, the potential of transitioning more people off environmentally harmful fossil fuels is evident. With the help of companies like Mapdwell, the process can move more quickly.
MORE: How Utah Stopped a Power Company’s Ridiculous Bid to Tax the Sun
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