Environmental Information
The Union League Club, Chicago; Monday, April 24, 2006
CHICAGO (April 11, 2006) - Environmental scientists and leaders convene in Chicago on Monday, April 24, 2006 for one of the country's first public discourses on global warming.
Sponsored by The Chicago Council of The Garden Club of America, the conference, held at The Union League of Chicago, 65 W. Jackson Boulevard, begins with panel discussion at 2 p.m., followed by a reception. Keynote address with Ross Gelbspan, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of "The Heat is On" and "Boiling Point," follows at 6:30 p.m.
Panelists:
* Paul R. Epstein, M.D., M.P.H., associate director, Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard Medical School, Boston;
* Robert B. Gagosian, Ph.D., director, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Mass.;
* Diana Liverman, Ph.D., director, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford;
* Alden Meyer, director, strategy and policy and office director, Union of Concerned Scientists, Washington, D.C.; and
* Adele Simmons, vice chair, senior executive, Chicago Metropolis 2020.
Global Warming
As the ominous impacts of earth's warming atmosphere continue to surface, the panel will provide background and information on the crisis as it relates to science, economics, globalization, oceans, education, media, business and politics.
"The importance of understanding global warming and the immediacy of its impacts are imperative for every citizen to grasp," says Judy Boggess, president of The Chicago Council of The Garden Club of America and president of The Lake Forest Garden Club. "It is in turn every citizen's responsibility to create awareness, and to demand a strong public energy initiative that will keep our planet safe for all time."
Harvard's Dr. Epstein says global warming is "a national and international crisis," and the pace and magnitude is accelerating.
Until recently, monitoring ocean activity has largely been the job of satellites, which literally only scratched the waters' surface.
"Scientists vastly underestimated the biological impact of the heat accumulating in the deep ocean," Epstein says. "We missed it because deep water temperatures based on submarine and buoy data had not been assessed until a few years ago."
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps in heat. For the past 10,000 years we had the same amount - 280 parts per million - that created the hospitable climate that allowed the development of civilization. That thin blanket of CO2 trapped in just enough heat to maintain a relatively stable climate. Since the industrial revolution, however, our burning of coal and oil has raised the concentration of atmospheric CO2 to 380 ppm.
"This is a level the planet has not experienced for more than 900,000 years and probably millions of years," Epstein says. "As a result of the atmospheric and deep ocean warming, glaciers and ice caps are melting, plants are migrating to higher ground, insect populations are flourishing in highland regions and we are experiencing much more violent weather in the form of stronger storms, more intense downpours, longer droughts and more heat waves."
Scientists worry, adds Gelbspan, that unless the level is reduced through a worldwide switch to non-carbon sources of energy, such as wind, solar, tidal and wave power, geothermal and eventually non-polluting hydrogen fuel, the build-up of carbon in the atmosphere could trigger runaway changes in the climate.
"The Chicago heat wave of 1995 was really one of the first major impacts of an extreme weather event in an American city, with hundreds of deaths," Epstein says.
"The massive Mississippi River floods in 1993 affected 400,000 Milwaukeeans with the water-borne disease cryptosporidium and killed more than 100." Even the migration route of birds, which may have been short-circuited by severe cold weather in Eastern Europe driving them westward, may have accelerated the east-to-west spread of Avian Influenza (Bird Flu).
Easing the environment's stress, Gelbspan and Epstein agree, will not come about through lifestyle changes, but will result through changes in financial and industrial sector practices, and public policy changes, spurred on by public awareness, which is what they both hope will be an outcome of the Chicago conference.
"The U.S. is about 10 years behind the rest of the world in grasping the importance of reducing global use of coal and oil by 70 percent. The Chicago seminar is important to promote awareness of the urgency and magnitude of this issue," says Gelbspan. "Rewiring the world with clean energy will create millions of jobs -- and a much more equitable and sustainable planet."
May 17, 2006
Strategies
To Revitalize a City, Try Spreading Some Mulch
By KEITH SCHNEIDER
CHICAGO
IN many ways, this city's current fortunes are all about mulch. It's everywhere. Bark mulch is spread in neat circles around the city's trees; roughly 30,000 new trees are planted annually. Darker leaf mulch fills planters along State, Dearborn, Michigan and the other major thoroughfares now blooming in spring colors.
Mulch adorns 70 miles of green medians that have been sown over the last decade with native flowers, grasses and bushes. It's spread on the gardens and open spaces now required by the city to accompany new homes, stores and office buildings. And it sits on many of the energy-saving green roofs of 200 buildings.
But even more than its soil-enriching, moisture-conserving utility, mulch is an organic metaphor, tying together the various pieces of Chicago's novel development strategy, praised by the Sierra Club and the Chamber of Commerce alike. By wrapping its arms and famous big shoulders around its Latin motto — Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden) — Chicago has become a global model for how a metropolis can pursue environmental goals to achieve economic success.
During the last decade, the city's performance, measured in virtually every conventional category of civic well-being, has been off the charts, local boosters say. Chicago attracted more than 100,000 new residents, added tens of thousands of downtown jobs, prompted a high-rise housing boom, reduced poverty rates, built thousands of affordable homes, spurred a $9-billion-a-year visitor and convention industry, and transformed itself into one of the most beautiful cities in America.
The generator of Chicago's mulch is Richard M. Daley, the unorthodox and popular Democratic mayor who took office in 1989 vowing to replant the urban forest of his youth that was lost to Dutch elm disease and other blights. At the time, the pledge raised the eyebrows of supporters and critics, who chalked up the mayor's love for trees to his birth on Arbor Day in 1942.
The tree planting, though, evolved over Mr. Daley's five terms into a much more sophisticated understanding of the benefits — including to the city's treasury — of conserving resources, saving energy, expanding parks, constructing environmentally sensitive buildings, reducing the amount of storm water, restoring wetlands, generating renewable energy and doing everything feasible to heal instead of harm the city's natural systems.
Over the years, Mayor Daley's plan to turn his hometown into the "greenest city in America" has ceased to be an unusual experiment in revitalization. Instead it is seen by urban policy specialists as an effective response to the rapidly changing expectations that business executives and residents, especially young professionals, have for cities.
"It's not so much about saving the world," Sadhu Johnston, the 31-year-old environment commissioner for Chicago, said in an interview. "It's more about using green technology to save $4 million here, or earn $10 million there, and make the city better by doing that."
The breadth and diversity of Mayor Daley's environmental and economic pursuits, one idea connecting and supporting the next, mimic natural systems. Take Mr. Daley's fondness for mulch. It's useless unless it gets spread.
That falls to people like Christy Webber, a landscape contractor who has turned Chicago's devotion to lawns, gardens, planters, parks and green roofs into a $13-million-a-year business and one of the city's fastest-growing small companies. "By planting more gardens, the mayor encouraged new businesses to grow," said Ms. Webber, whose company, Christy Webber Landscapes, has helped install many of Chicago's important new gardens.
Ms. Webber, who is 44 and was raised in a working-class family outside Flint, Mich., started her company in 1990, the year after Mr. Daley was elected. Her company's development closely tracks the mayor's evolution of environmentalism as an economic plan.
The Daley administration has planted 500,000 trees, is putting up the most energy-efficient and environmentally sensitive municipal buildings in the country, has agreed to provide developers with much faster permits if they construct green buildings, instituted a $600-million-a-year program to repair neighborhoods and city parks, promised to obtain 20 percent of the electricity used by the city from clean and renewable sources, and converted hundreds of abandoned and contaminated properties into new businesses.
Mr. Daley's commitment is praised by the city's environmental leaders, although they note that there are gaps in the green program — including the presence of two big state-licensed coal-burning power plants that operate without modern air-pollution controls.
"The mayor took the idea of green and has become increasingly serious," said Scott Bernstein, the founder of the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a research and policy organization that earlier this year earned "platinum" designation from the U.S. Green Building Council — the nation's highest environmental rating — for the renovation of the center's West Side office. "If you compare where the city was when Daley first came into office and where the city is now, it's night and day."
Nobody in or out of the Daley administration, including the mayor, knows exactly when environmental sensitivity became central to Chicago's development strategy. Ms. Webber is convinced that the moment came in 1996 when Mr. Daley began spending on a citywide beautification program to impress the delegates and the media who were attending the Democratic National Convention that year.
City crews cleared abandoned buildings in the West Side neighborhoods surrounding the United Center, the convention site. Mr. Daley accelerated bush and flower planting, hung flowering pots from new period street lamps and promoted neighborhood gardens.
The sparkling appearance turned heads. Mayor Daley and his green initiative rose to national and international prominence. In 2001, Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle to Chicago, partly because the company's executives said they wanted to live there. That same year Mr. Daley built a green roof on City Hall.
Ms. Webber rode the green wave to contracts to cut, plant, mulch, install and maintain enough gardens and parks to employ over 100 people. Her revenue increased to $2 million in 1998, and $6.8 million in 2003. In 2004, Inc. Magazine said she and her squad of workers were the 54th fastest growing "inner city" company in America. This year Ms. Webber is scheduled to move the company to a new green headquarters designed by Farr Associates, the most prominent of the city's growing cadre of ecologically sensitive architects.
"After the convention, business just took off," said Ms. Webber, whose building is going up on the reclaimed site where the 1996 West Side demolition debris was dumped. "And it hasn't stopped."
Indeed, when the results of the 2000 census were published, the magnitude of Chicago's transformation became clear. The city population increased by 112,000 people, the first time that happened since the 1940's. Just as striking was the resurgence of Chicago's downtown neighborhoods, which grew by 16,000 residents during the 1990's, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program. The city's median income increased 12.6 percent in the 1990's, 2 percent higher than the median incomes of the state or the six-county metropolitan region. With the new wealth, Ms. Webber and others here assert that Mr. Daley's crowning achievement is Millennium Park, a 24.5-acre, $475 million expanse of lawn, wild-grass prairie, sculpture and gardens that joins the fast-growing neighborhoods along Michigan Avenue.
Ms. Webber helped install the turf and gardens, but says she lost money on the project because of constant design changes. Mr. Daley, who also encountered turmoil, dedicated the park in July 2004 amid criticism about delays and the cost, which was three times the original estimate.
Hardly anybody is still complaining. Landscape architects say the park set a new standard for design. Environmental leaders note that it showcases some green technologies, especially because it is the largest green roof in the world. Millennium Park is above an underground parking garage and ribbons of old Illinois Central track, which for more than a century separated the South Loop from the lakeshore.
Mr. Daley and his staff say that the park provides more evidence of the value of pursuing green goals. A market study commissioned by the city found that the park attracts nearly four million visitors annually, was responsible for encouraging at least 25 percent of the 10,000 units of new housing under construction or planned in neighborhoods nearby, and increased hotel, restaurant, shopping and entertainment sales by $190 million a year.
Chicago is currently the host for an exposition, Garden in a City, set in an adjoining park. The show, which opened on May 13, is expected to attract tens of thousands of home owners and landscape professionals before it closes this Sunday. On display are plants that thrive in cities, with demonstrations on how to decorate bungalow backyards and build beautiful plazas. Ms. Webber prepared an exhibition to showcase her company's work. No surprise, the event also features beds of mulch.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company