How Games Are Helping Veterans Recover from Injury, Polygon
U.S. Army Major Erik Johnson discovered the healing power of video games firsthand while recovering from a horrible car accident. Today, the occupational therapist serves as Chief Medical Officer for Operation Supply Drop, a nonprofit that taps the therapeutic benefits of technology to help veterans and active service members recover from physical injuries, mental struggles, memory and cognitive problems and more. Sure, it’s unconventional to put a Nintendo Wii controller in a soldier’s hand during therapy, but the results are undeniable: reestablishing “themselves as an able body person who can enjoy things they used to enjoy.”
What Can Stop Kids From Dropping Out? New York Times
The massive amount of outstanding student loan debt might not be the biggest problem when it comes to higher education. What is? The fact that almost half of college freshmen fail to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. Dropout rates are highest amongst minorities, first-generation undergrads and low-income individuals, but through advisory sessions at the first sign of trouble, classes that offer immediate feedback, tiny grants of just a few hundred dollars and more, George State University is helping these traditionally poor-performing students achieve higher graduation rates than their white peers.
The Bag Bill, The New Yorker
A self-described child of hippie parents, Jennie Romer fondly recalls visiting the local recycling facility with her parents. The weekly trips clearly had an impact on Romer, who’s spent much of her adulthood fighting for plastic bag bans. Success has been plentiful in California, with San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles all passing ordinances against the notorious environmental menace. Now Romer has her sights set on implementing a fee on plastic bags in the country’s largest metropolis. Will she add the Big Apple to her list of triumphs?
Editors’ note: Since the publication of the New Yorker article, the New York City Council has approved a 5-cent fee on plastic bags.
MORE: The High-Energy Activity That’s Healing the Invisible Scars of War
Tag: Preserving the Environment
This Sustainable ‘Farm of the Future’ Is Changing How Food Is Grown
After working as an industrial fisherman for decades and witnessing the devastating effects of mass-fishing, Bren Smith decided to look for more sustainable ways to feed the planet.
A few years ago, he developed an unique, vertical 3-D ocean farming model: a sort of underwater garden composed of kelp, mussels, scallops and oysters. Those species are not only edible and in high demand, Smith explains, but they also act as a filter for nitrogen and carbon dioxide, rebuilding natural reef systems and restoring our seas. In 2013, Smith launched the nonprofit GreenWave to help other fishermen replicate his innovative farming model. “This is our chance to make food right and agriculture right,” he says.
Learn more about Smith’s journey and his vision of what tomorrow’s seafood plate looks like by watching the video above.
Special thanks for The University of Connecticut and Professor Charles Yarish.
Can Americans Accept This Environmentally-Friendly Burial Method?
Katrina Spade isn’t afraid of death; in fact, the 38-year-old Seattle designer has spent the last five years of her life preparing for it.
Not that Spade has received a bad prognosis or expects an accident to happen anytime soon. But she’s been thinking about her end-of-life decisions because she feels the environment itself is on life support. Spade started seriously contemplating death while in architectural school, because her interests in urbanism and greener living seemed to conflict with our nation’s contemporary burial practices: the use of formaldehyde-based embalming fluid, thick steel and wooden caskets and crematoriums that spout carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere. Laying 2.6 million Americans to rest every year, she came to realize, is a for-profit industry that didn’t give much thought to sustainability.
In the most ambitious plan yet presented by the Green Burial movement, Spade designed a facility to compost human bodies into reusable soil. Known as the Urban Death Project, the modular building can be erected in every major metropolis, reining in demand on overcrowded urban cemeteries and providing an eco-friendly option for city-dwellers. Spade has attempted “to create a system that can take our bodies, which are — even when we die — full of potential and don’t need to be burned or buried away” and transforms them, she explains. “What I designed is not just a system that will turn bodies into soil. I actually thought about that for a while: Am I trying to do something that can be inserted into existing funeral homes, like a crematory has, and keep doing things the way we are doing now? I right away realized that’s just a piece of it.”
Spade’s expansive vision involves a new kind of facility, “a secular sacred space” which she imagines would sit on a forested city block. Its interior would resemble Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan (a nautilus-shaped spiral), but where the museum features an open rotunda at its center, Spade’s building would house a 24-foot vertical tower, inside which bodies would compost over several months. Until recently, the concept was theoretical, but Spade recently held a design session with architects, engineers and a compost expert to design a prototype that will be built in the next nine months and run by Dr. Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, a crop and soil scientist, at Washington State University in Pullman.
“The bodies we leave behind aren’t just shells of our former selves; they are full of potential – nitrogen, water, calcium and phosphorus – the building blocks of nutrient-rich soil,” Spade has written. “The truth is that without decomposition – the process by which organic material is broken down to support new growth – we would not exist at all.”
Intended to delay the decomposition process for a public viewing of the body, embalming (which fills the body with formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, and other chemicals) may cause lasting environmental harm, as chemicals eventually seep into graveyards and, potentially, groundwater supplies. (Morticians themselves are also put in harm’s way: a 2009 study found funeral workers and anatomists had a heightened risk of dying from myeloid leukemia, presumably because the repeated exposure to formaldehyde.) While less toxic, the same principle applies to the other accoutrements of funerals: between coffins and urns, we build entire cities underground that are only seen for a moment at the open graveside.
“The typical 10-acre swath of cemetery ground,” writes Mark Harris in his 2008 book “Grave Matters,” “contains enough coffin wood to construct more than 40 homes, nine hundred-plus tons of casket steel, and another twenty thousand tons of vault concrete. To that add a volume of embalming fluid sufficient to fill a small backyard swimming pool and untold gallons of pesticide and weed killer to keep the graveyard preternaturally green. Like the contents of any landfill, the embalmed body’s toxic cache escapes its host and eventually leaches into the environment, tainting surrounding soil and groundwaters. Cemeteries bear the chemical legacy of their embalmed dead, and well after their graves have been closed.”
Spade first stumbled onto the environmental damage inflicted by the funeral industry during grad school, as she tried to answer a simple question: “What happens to my body after I die?” Around the same time, almost by chance, a friend called her up and asked her if she knew that ranchers composted entire cattle carcasses, which had died due to age, weather or certain diseases. A native of rural New Hampshire who’s now a committed urbanite, Spade’s innovation involved modifying that agricultural process into a way to dispose of bodies in the cramped landscape of a city. (She, of course, plans to use the process once it’s completed, although she adds, “I think once I’m dead, I really won’t care.”)
Working with a team at Western Carolina University, Spade and the researchers are currently testing the composting process outdoors with five human cadavers. They want to figure out which materials (like wood chips) speed up the decomposition process. Spade compares the process to lighting a fire in a wood stove: one needs to figure out the right amount of kindling, logs and oxygen to achieve the greatest heat. (Like the fire, decomposition rates are also measured by temperature: more heat is a sign of microbial activity.) If conditions are right, after six weeks, she expects the bodies will be fully composted.
For most, it takes a mental leap to agree and swallow the implications of the Urban Death Project. Spade, however, takes comfort in that admission, believing there’s new potential to be unleashed through a person’s final choice. “During the process, we cease to be human. I mean scientifically, we cease to be human. So what’s being created is not remains: it’s not ashes (which are actually often bone fragments, crushed up, and some ash); it’s not the bones in a casket. We move on from being human into a part of the natural ecosystem,” Spade says. “I find that both to be kinda magical and comforting to me.”
That belief helped her through a personal loss two years ago, when her maternal grandmother passed away at age 92. With family gathered around her bedside, Spades’s grandmother appeared to be drifting off to sleep. At one point, Spade recalls, she opened her eyes and asked, “What do I need to do to make this happen?” Some family members laughed. They squeezed her hand and told her, “You’re doing the right thing.” Nobody knew what came next for her grandmother, but Spade believes it’s such an intimate part of being human that we shouldn’t be frightened by its eventual arrival. “It was kind of miraculous,” she says. “Time really slowed down for those days [at her deathbed]. All we were doing was waiting for this huge, unknown thing to happen. It’s a little like being in labor, honestly. You don’t care about what’s going on in the outside world, because everything is focused on this transition.”
She continues, “I want people to know that there’s a lot of potential for us, as living people, to kind of gain from being close to the event of death. That’s one thing that the Urban Death Project is trying to do: give us a closer, more nuanced understanding of that event.”
Spade knows full well that not everyone will agree with her, and she doesn’t waste any breath trying to convince anyone to sign up. Once the prototype testing is underway, Spade expects more people will join the growing movement.
Increased interest wouldn’t be surprising, considering Americans have altered our burial practices before. Modern cremation chambers were slow to catch on, yet today, more than half of the dead are cremated. Presumably, we, as a society, can overcome any revulsion to the idea of being composted and will wake up to the environmental benefits it holds. From dust we were created, the Biblical passage goes — but with Spade’s plan, unto dirt we will return.
Thanks to One Mom, Schools Join the Farm-to-Table Movement
In New York’s Hudson Valley, farm-to-table food is no longer limited to upscale restaurants like Blue Hill Stone Barns. Because of mom Sandy McKelvey, fresh food grown on local farms is now bettering the fare in school cafeterias.
The Farm-to-School movement took off in this rural, scenic region north of New York City in 2009, shortly after McKelvey and her family moved to Cold Spring. At Haldane Elementary, her daughter’s new school, she volunteered to introduce a new curriculum centered on a new vegetable each month. For each lesson, kids plant or harvest the produce themselves from a garden, and with instruction from a local chef (often a student from the Culinary Institute of America in nearby Hyde Park), they prepare a hands-on recipe like asparagus and cheese tarts or Delicata squash salad, to be served in the cafeteria that week.
“Over the years, I’ve sensed a disconnect between kids and their understanding of where food comes from. When it’s prepackaged in boxes, they do not realize that everything comes from farms,” says McKelvey, a longtime CSA customer, in which she received weekly shipments of crops from a local farm. “Farm-to-School helps them better understand where food comes from, and it also really encourages healthier eating.” She adds, “It’s making cooking and growing food part of their life.”
If you asked any child in the country to recall the last food advertisement they saw, there’s a 97.8 percent chance that it was for a product high in fat, sugar or sodium. The fast food industry as a whole spends $12.6 million every single day marketing what public health advocates call “calorie-dense, low-nutrient” foods. The Farm-to-School lessons try to undo these commercials by getting kids interested in how fresh produce grows and tastes. McKelvey acknowledges that sugar occasionally slips into the menu, as in her pumpkin bread or strawberry-rhubarb parfait, but she says it’s all a part of getting kids to try something they wouldn’t normally eat, “whether it’s sweet or savory or kind of hidden.”
Happy to spend a day outside, the kids are enthused about the project; some of their teachers, on the other hand, have been harder to convince, as they worried it would take away from precious class time. But after seeing the program work, McKelvey says, even these naysayers relented. One crafty teacher even turned the recipes into a math lesson by changing each ingredient’s amount to a complex fraction.
A chance to learn while cooking? Sure beats mystery meat.
Can This Ambitious Plan Both Preserve History and Revitalize a City?
Infrastructure determines how we live, says Ryan Gravel, an Atlanta planner. But he’s not just talking about the tedious methods for relieving road congestion or figuring out how to efficiently transmit water, gas and electricity to every home. No, Gravel’s got something more personal in mind. Infrastructure, to him, determines how people interact and bond, children grow up, residents spend their time and communities preserve their heritage. “Infrastructure is the foundation of social life and economy and culture,” he tells NationSwell. That may sound grandiose, but thinking big hasn’t stopped Gravel before. He’s the visionary behind the mother of all urban redevelopment projects: a 22-mile metamorphosis known as the BeltLine, linking Atlanta’s unused railroad tracks and abandoned industrial zones in a gigantic loop of public transit, green parks, walking and biking trails and neighborhood revitalization.
“If we build highways and off-ramps, then guess what? We end up with a way of life that’s dominated by cars. If we build walkable communities with transit, we get something that’s entirely different,” Gravel says. “The BeltLine is catalyzing a new way of life, a new kind of infrastructure. It’s supporting something other than what Atlanta is known for, which is car dependency, and it’s working.”
By picturing what kind of city he wanted to live in, Gravel first envisioned the BeltLine in 1999 as part of his master’s thesis. Cathy Woolard, former city council member and gay rights advocate who’s readying to replace Mayor Kasim Reed (who’s in the midst of serving his second term) in 2017, provided invaluable early assistance and got the massive 25-year project up and running by 2005. Gravel personally helped oversee its rollout with a full-time role at city hall. Yet working in government bureaucracy quickly tested his nerves. He loved meeting all the different stakeholders interested in the BeltLine — from local restaurant owners to fellow urban planning wonks — but, as he told Ozy, “The politics of it got too much.” Gravel quit after five months. (He notes he continued to be involved in the BeltLine’s development through volunteer work, advocacy and private-sector work.)
A decade later, the BeltLine has generated $2.5 billion in economic development, and Gravel wrote a book about infrastructure, out last month. Recently, Gravel announced he’s rejoining the planning process from within the mayoral administration, by serving as manager of the Atlanta City Design project, a new design studio that will sketch out long-term plans for Atlanta’s growth after at least six months of public meetings at Ponce City Market. Writing in an email, he made clear that the job isn’t a long-term position: “My role … is as a consultant. And by this time next year, I’m guessing it will be over/near over.” But on the phone, he communicates enthusiasm for the project’s ambitious goal. Essentially, Gravel wants to find out what makes Atlanta tick and preserve those elements through a projected boom in population.
In January, Mayor Reed welcomed Gravel back to city hall. ”His vision to transform old railroad corridors into a 22-mile transit greenway has spurred economic development across the city, improved the quality of life for residents and led to a total transformation for Atlanta,” Reed said. Part of that renewal has been an in-migration to Atlanta’s downtown. Regarded as the capital of the South, the urban center of Atlanta dwarfs in size compared to the city’s suburbs. Fewer than one in 10 people live downtown out of the 5.7 million that claim the metro area home. Stretching out 50 miles in every direction, the outer ring of the nine-county area was once the hotspot for new growth. Now, people are pouring back into downtown. ”There’s a limit to the sprawl,” Matt Hauer, head of the University of Georgia’s Applied Demography Program, tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We’re seeing much more urban revitalization and growth in the central metro counties.”
With so much in flux, Gravel’s assessment of what defines Atlanta will be all the more important. “The purpose of City Design is to identify the things that are special about Atlanta, then embed those things in the decisions about how the city grows in the future,” Gravel says. In other words, he believes that Atlanta’s history and environment should inform every planning decision. The BeltLine, in repurposing old railroads, for instance, would get high marks for its nod to Atlanta’s beginnings and its reclaiming of industrial land. The neighborhood containing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthplace and burial site in the Historic Fourth Ward have been connected to the BeltLine via a trail and a 17-acre park, but there’s plenty of other sites from the Civil Rights Movement to safeguard and integrate.
“We have been so car-centric that you didn’t experience the city in an intimate way,” Reed explains to The New York Times. “We are changing Atlanta into a city that you can enjoy by walking and riding a bike.”
There’s not much precedent for this type of metropolitan-wide planning in North American cities. Workers within individual departments may come up with an idea for housing stock or parks and recreation, but they’re almost never joined together in one unified vision. (Gravel points to only one prior example in the United States that he can find: Chicago’s Burnham Plan in 1909.) That’s because the hardest part is getting everyone to sign off on one big plan.
By taking hundreds of thousands of people’s opinions all being taken into account, the BeltLine has run up against some major political hurdles (typical for massive government undertakings). Not surprisingly, the biggest tiffs involved money. When the stock market took a nosedive in 2008, it looked as if the BeltLine wouldn’t get built. Under then-mayor Shirley Franklin, the city set up a new process, known as tax-allocation districts in 2005, to borrow school tax revenues to fund the initial construction (to be returned upon the project’s completion), but it didn’t go into effect until a state constitutional amendment was approved in 2009. Construction resumed, but when the city missed its payments on the $162 million owed by 2030, Reed received a sharp rebuke from Atlanta’s school superintendent, including threats of a lawsuit. “Bikes or books?” one graduate student at George State University asked. “What does Atlanta support more?
This February, three years after that budget fight turned nasty, Reed brokered a deal that offered less money, but with a guarantee the schools would be paid first. He argued that funding the BeltLine would foster a more robust tax base — a $30 billion increase is hoped for by 2030 — filling both the city and the school’s coffers. The deal “will allow the Atlanta BeltLine to recover from the worst recession in 80 years. And then, when the Beltline is strong and able again, it can make payments at a higher level,” he promised. The school board unanimously agreed.
Across the rest of the city, however, individuals still questions if they will be able to cash in on the investment. Neighbors bordering the city’s new lifeline worry that gentrification will drive up rents to sky-high prices. There’s plenty of evidence in other cities to support their point. For instance, in Southern California’s Elysian Valley, proximity to the Los Angeles River redevelopment — a concrete blight that’s now a natural asset — drove up the median price per square foot 28.3 percent in one year.
Gravel hopes people see that the answer is not to leave the city as it is, without improvements, in the hopes of warding off gentrification. That’s not to say, there won’t be unintended consequences, he admits. But if anything, this is where planning is all the more important, preparing ways to keep housing affordable while sprucing up a neighborhood’s character.
Gravel looks around him for all the signs that the BeltLine’s already improving Atlanta. “It’s not just people commuting or exercising, they’re going out on dates, going to the grocery. That to me is a huge measure of success. To me, it’s changing the way that people live their lives,” he says. With more long-term planning still to come, we can expect to see a new model for urban growth born in the south in the decades ahead.
Correction: A previous version of this article referred to Atlanta City Design as a “committee.” It is a design studio. The article also said that Ryan Gravel was nervous about his new position, which was incorrect. It also stated that Mayor Reed set up the tax-allocation districts. That work was done under Mayor Shirley Franklin. NationSwell apologies for these errors.
Former Prisoners Find Redemption Running a Prosperous Business in San Francisco’s Public Housing
At the age of 13, Tyrone Mullins had his first contact with the justice system in 1998, handcuffed for starting a small tussle at school. He could’ve been hit with a minor reprimand, serving a few weeks of detention or even a suspension, but instead, he was formally charged with a crime — setting Mullins on a path of near-permanent incarceration for the next half of his life. “From that point on, it was juvenile hall, county jail and prison,” says Mullins, a San Francisco native who grew up in a Western Addition public housing project. As a felon, Mullins had limited employment opportunities after each release. Rejected from positions at hotels, supermarkets, department stores, doughnut shops, Jamba Juice and McDonald’s, Mullins subsided on money from the government ($336 a month, split into two checks). “All that allows is temptation to come in and make you do another thing, follow another walk of life,” Mullins explains. “You may not necessarily want to take that route, but people do things when they’re hurting.” And Mullins was hurting.
Navigating past numerous hard knocks, in 2010, Mullins co-founded a successful business that provides jobs to public housing residents, regardless of their parole status. At three Bay Area public housing complexes, Green Streets pays employees $12.25 an hour to sort trash from recyclables and compostables. While handling garbage is far from glamorous in a city that’s home to Salesforce, Twitter and Dropbox, Green Streets’s roughly two dozen workers wear their grey jumpsuits with pride. For many, it marks the first time they’ve financially supported themselves. (“Legally,” Mullins likes to add.) In a city that’s witnessed a mass exodus of low-income African-Americans due to the rising cost of living, these denizens of the projects can finally point to ownership of an enterprise in a world where so much is out of their price range.
Green Streets got its unofficial start in 2010, when a work crew arrived at a Western Addition affordable housing development, managed by the for-profit company McCormack Baron Ragan, to install solar panels. Worried about thieves, round-the-clock security was desired. David Mauroff, McCormack Baron’s vice president at the time, didn’t have the money for guards, but he had another idea: “Why don’t you hire the guys who you think are gonna steal your stuff?” Resident DeMaurio Lee staffed the job, and nothing was stolen. Mullins, meanwhile, with two out of three felony strikes against him, installed panels himself, after finding the job through a nonprofit. Four months later, after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, DeMaurio and Mullins gathered the courage to approach Mauroff (despised by most residents, Mauroff says of himself, as the man who personally signed off on evictions) and asked for more work. With a background in city-run gang intervention programs, Mauroff could see the determination on their faces and agreed to see what he could do.
The solution appeared when the complex’s next waste disposal bill arrived. At just one project, Buena Vista Plaza East (193 units, known to many as “O.C.” or “Outta Control”), McCormack Baron faced a $14,000 annual charge from Recology to haul trash to the landfill or an incinerator. As part of San Francisco’s plan to become a zero-waste city by 2020, the bill could be significantly lowered by removing plastic bottles, aluminum cans, food, soiled paper and garden clippings from the overflowing dumpsters. Mauroff, who’s now credited as one of Green Streets’s co-founders, told Mullins he would pay residents to sort through waste, earmarking any savings on his bills for their wages. “I’m not telling you how to do this. I will just help you get the resources in place for you to launch this business,” he told the two men.
Neighbors made fun of the crew digging through rat-infested trash piles in their white protective suits. Yet within six months, thousands of gallons of trash were diverted each month, saving the property 60 percent on its bills. Soon, neighbors started handing Mullins their résumés.
To turn the model into a business, complete with hiring plans, a mission statement, marketing and sound financials, Mullins enrolled in free classes at San Francisco City College’s Small Business Institute. Severely complicating matters was the fact that in the Western Addition complex, danger and temptation were omnipresent. In the courtyards, residents had to dodge literal bullets. Mullins himself was sent back to prison for two years for violating his parole.
While Mullins served his time, the rest of San Francisco’s black population continued its decades-long “black flight.” (Since 1970, the city’s portion of African-Americans has been halved, from 13.4 percent to just 5.8 percent in 2014.) Green Streets employees interviewed for this story feel keenly aware of their skin color. Unprompted, they often identified others by race: Mauroff was a “white dude”; neighbors, a “bunch of black people.” They feel that racial differences have been exaggerated by California’s penal system, with which many public housing residents come into contact. In the past, more than half the lockups in San Francisco’s jail have been African-Americans, and last year, four city cops were investigated for trading bigoted text messages. Even in this famously tolerant city, race continues to be a point of tension, says London Breed, one of two African-American city supervisors on the city’s nine-member board. “I am just trying to hold on to evidence that blacks ever existed in San Francisco,” Breed, who grew up in Western Addition public housing, tells the Los Angeles Times.
For those African-Americans who have stayed in the city, the economic outlook looks bleak. The median household income among black residents has fallen to a slim $29,500, while all other racial groups have seen wages rise. (By comparison, the median household pay for white residents, thanks to tech money, now exceeds six figures: $104,300.) Roughly one quarter of the city’s black population relies on subsidized housing, according to data from the Mayor’s Task Force, but the lifeline doesn’t begin to meet demand (only 3.6 percent of applicants receive housing through a lottery system). For the lucky few, like Green Streets employees, housing may be affordable, but the city is anything but.
Gentrification isn’t the only reason why some neighbors are gone: gun violence regularly racks the housing developments. “In San Francisco, with this extreme wealth and income disparity, most of our crime is really centered, not in, but around public housing, these little pockets of poverty isolated from the $1 to $2 million homes right across the street,” Mauroff observers. Last summer, a 19-year-old girl was gunned down in a spray of bullets. The girl’s aunt, Shannon Watts, is Green Streets’s human resources manager. A victim of gun violence herself (taking a bullet in her right leg in 2012), Watts says that her work with Green Streets helped her overcome the debilitating trauma that once kept her captive inside her apartment, door locked and shades drawn.
The difficulties that Green Streets’s employees encounter are considered a badge of honor, a sign of how much they’ve overcome to reach their current success — meager as a minimum-wage job might look to any of the Bay Area’s elites. When Mullins finished his two years in prison, he enrolled in Project ReMADE, a 12-week program at Stanford that trains ex-cons to be entrepreneurs. “I see the transformation I’ve made, and I’m honest with myself,” Mullins says today. “I continue to be a work in progress.”
Reinstated as Green Streets’s operations manager and the leader of the business development team, Mullins took his education back to the informal economy of the projects, where some residents earn extra cash by doing each other’s hair, fixing cars and babysitting, while others sell drugs and break into cars. This self-contained marketplace arose because so many are kept out of workplaces by criminal records or lack of job experience, Mauroff notes. Green Streets bridges that transition to the working world, though it’s not without its bumps. Turf wars between gangs in different housing projects sometimes bleeds over when rivals are staffed together on company cleanup crews. Randolph Lee, the 48-year-old operations supervisor, says he’s responded to fights, stabbings and “a little bit of gunplay.”
A “two-time ex-felon” convicted of murder, Randolph has regularly been tempted to snap back to his old ways. Before he got the job with Green Streets, he says, “I was ready to go back to what I had done before. Just hustling, you know?” he recalls. “I was on my way back to do something I wasn’t supposed to do: I was going to go get it, go get some bread to pay bills.” Since starting with Green Streets in 2013, Randolph has been promoted through the ranks. In his current role as supervisor, he helps employees productively deal with their anger, pointing to his own story: “The only thing we have is our pride, and how far could that go if we allow ourselves to get incarcerated for life,” Randolph says. “I done terrorized and fought my community. It was time to heal my community. I never wanted my last legacy of myself just being a screwup.”
Mullins envisions the same impact helping the poorest residents of Detroit, St. Louis, Miami and Phoenix, but a recent failed expansion to nearby Richmond and Oakland shows any scaling must overcome logistical issues. Because the two East Bay cities don’t have strong zero-waste initiatives that discount hauling of recyclables and compostables, the trash bill at housing projects only increased by hiring Green Streets. That’s not to say the model can’t be applied elsewhere, but green subsidies will have to be in place for it to work.
The Western Addition and Plaza East projects serve as evidence of just how successful this business can be. There’s a changed vibe and it’s cleaner, too, as 60,960 gallons of trash are being diverted into other waste streams. But more importantly, there’s fewer men on the corner, whispering street names for drugs to passersby. Many, like Randolph, now work for Green Streets, a model demonstrating that an entrepreneurial spirit can be found in any community, Mauroff says, no matter how unexpected. “A bunch of guys and girls in public housing aren’t given the credit for showing they can do that,” he argues. “I want people to understand that: Under the right circumstances, everyone will go back to work and try to compete in the market.”
For all the frustrations tech startups have unleashed on the Bay Area, they’ve also instilled a sense that the calcified structures of the past don’t necessarily need to be around tomorrow. Mullins brought that Silicon Valley ethic to the Western Addition projects. He deserves credit for his own powerful disruption: not just finding a new way to sort trash and manage its pickup, but for an entirely new vision of labor for those the tech world’s prosperity is leaving behind.
This Easy Fix Is How You Stop Poisoning the Fish in the Gulf of Mexico
There’s a 6,475-square-mile “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Roughly the same size as Connecticut and Rhode Island, this area located off the Louisiana coast becomes so polluted that it can’t support the fish and shrimp populations that are vital to southern fisherman. While actions by those living in the bayous play a part, the real cause is located 1,000 miles north: Iowa’s golden cornfields, whose runoff is dirtying the Mississippi River and its tributaries, says Dan Jaynes, a research soil scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Laboratory who’s studying ways to decrease the contamination.
While the prairie’s black soil is extremely fertile — roughly 25 million acres of cropland were harvested last year — the former swampland is also excessively moist. “It’s a fairly flat landscape, so water has no place to go,” Jaynes says. That’s why, beginning a century ago, farmers in the Hawkeye State built artificial drainage systems (that consisted of four-inch-wide clay pipes buried a few feet underground; today, perforated, plastic tubing is used) to shunt water into streams.
Today, these small-scale systems add high levels of nitrates (a form of nitrogen) and phosphorous (additives that largely come from fertilizer) to nearby waterways. During the spring, these nutrients fuel algal growth, presenting a health hazard to the many cities like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids that obtain their drinking water from the rivers. (Des Moines’s water utility has filed a controversial federal lawsuit against drainage districts upstream.)
Jaynes has a simple solution to the problem that’s impacting the entire Midwestern Corn Belt, from Ohio to southern Minnesota: just shift the pipes 30 to 50 feet away from the streams to allow the water to percolate through the vegetated land between the fields’ edge and the riverbed. Grasses and soils retain some of the nitrates or send them back to the atmosphere as harmless gas, and in the process, the water’s nitrate levels drop anywhere from two-thirds to zero, according to several pilot projects of the “saturated buffer,” which was built in partnership with Iowa State University. The fix comes at a reasonable cost: ranging from $3,000 to $5,000 and can be installed within a half hour, Jaynes says.
If citydwellers along the Mississippi River and fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico want to see clearer waters, saturated buffers will have to be implemented, along with other land management practices, Jaynes says. The only alternative? “We can get rid of all the corn or soybeans in the area,” he adds, “but I don’t think that’s very practical.”
How a Classic Denim Company Is Greening up the Fashion Industry, Why One Judge Went out of His Way for a Convicted Criminal and More
In Its Quest to Decrease Water Use, Levi’s Is Open Sourcing Production Methods, FastCo.Exist
3,781: The number of liters of water required to produce a pair of jeans and grow the cotton they’re made with. To reduce its H2O usage, Levi’s developed a process that consumes 96 percent less water (think: transitioning from roomy boyfriend to super skinny cut). Even better? Instead of sequestering its eco-friendly methods in a top-secret lab, the producer of the classic 501 is sharing its techniques with industry competitors.
A Federal Judge’s New Model for Forgiveness, New York Times
Checking the conviction history question on a job application can make it next to impossible for the formerly incarcerated to gain employment. When issuing a 15-month-long prison sentence to a woman for faking an auto accident in order to collect insurance money, New York judge John Gleeson didn’t mean to issue the lifelong punishment of unemployment. Which is why, 13 years later, he handed her something unusual: a federal certificate for rehabilitation.
The Powerful, Young Gallery Owner Shaping L.A.’s Art Scene, OZY
The Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, which boasts the city’s second highest property crime rate, is also the unlikely home of Michelle Papillion’s art gallery. Showcasing the works of emerging African-American artists, Papillion is out to do more than just bring awareness to creatives that aren’t widely recognized and celebrated; she’s working to beautify the community around her.
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The Forecast for These Veterans’ Career Prospects Is Sunny
In a sunlit office building in northwest Austin, Texas, former Marine Corps electro-optical technician Logan Razinski greets his boss, a one-time sailor who maintained naval nuclear reactors. The day’s work ahead between the two soldiers won’t involve military operations, however. Both are now employees for SunPower, a solar energy company.
Razinski, a lance corporal (not “one of those movie star ranks”) who was previously stationed at Camp Pendleton near San Diego, found the job through a Department of Energy-sponsored program, Solar Ready Vets (SRV), which prepares former service members to work in the solar energy industry. Living in California, where utilities will get one-third of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, Razinski saw the field “growing like wildfire” and joined SRV’s first cohort. After receiving four weeks of intensive training (since expanded to six) covering photovoltaic panel installation, electrical grids and local building codes, Razinski interviewed and landed a job with SunPower, where he now remotely controls utility-scale arrays.
“There is still an alarming mix of veterans, who, as soon as they get out, look for work or try the college thing, and, for some reason, that doesn’t work out. Next thing, you know, they’re living on the street,“ Razinski says. Nationwide, in 2014, close to 50,000 vets lacked housing, and 573,000 lacked jobs. With SRV, “I went from somebody who was in the Marine Corps to being a far cry from the poverty line,” he adds.
So far, Solar Ready Vets has trained nearly 200 soldiers at five pilot bases: Camp Pendleton, Hill Air Force Base in Utah, Fort Carson in Colorado, Fort Drum in New York and Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.
While the connection between military service and solar power might seem tenuous, Razinski says it’s about transitioning workers with proven leadership skills into industries that need talent now. As the solar industry adds new jobs 12 times faster than the overall economy, America’s veterans are a natural fit for various positions. “In an industry that’s growing as rapidly as the solar industry, you need somebody to actually be promotable. You need somebody who’s going to understand the magnitude of the situation and say, ‘Holy cow, this is growing faster than anybody anticipated,’” he says.
“This is definitely a path that I believe in,” Razinski adds. “I see it going nowhere but up.”
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Tech Visionaries Look to Disrupt Traditional Education, The Move to Make Climate Change a Nonpartisan Issue and More
Learn Different, The New Yorker
Brooklyn’s AltSchool is just one of seven “educational ecosystems” (there’s six in the Bay Area as well) that uses technology to create a personalized learning experience for each individual student. The brainchild of Max Ventilla, an entrepreneur and former Google employee, AltSchool aims to turn education on its head: teaching skills that are applicable to the 21st century workplace instead of the memorization of facts — creating an educational model grounded in Silicon Valley values. But can be replicated in existing public schools nationwide?
Can a GOP Donor Get Conservatives to Fight Climate Change?, CityLab
What can get politicians to put partisan bickering aside? North Carolina businessman Jay Faison is bringing congressional candidates from both sides of the aisle together to support clean energy initiatives, arguing that these policies (which are notoriously used to drive a wedge between the left and the right) increase jobs and energy independence, while also reducing carbon pollution.
Government Goes Agile, Stanford Social Innovation Review
Bringing the federal government into the digital age doesn’t have to increase the deficit — or be as disastrous as the rollout of HealthCare.gov. Implementing the commonly-used tech practice of agile development, groups like the United States Digital Services and 18F are giving citizens frustration-free, web-based opportunities to interact with their government for a fraction of the cost.