A blue-collar business embraces a green stormwater fix.

by Lisa Stiffler

Editor's note 3/9: This profile is now available in PDF format here.

On Seattle’s 8th Avenue South in the Georgetown neighborhood, empty school buses and recycling trucks rumble by. Semis squeeze past each other. Cars are parked on the street’s gravel shoulder amid shoe-soaking pools of muddy rainwater.

Georgetown’s busted streets and heavy-duty manufacturing plants seem like the last place where earth-friendly, sustainable stormwater solutions would take root. But this is the story of blue-collar industry partnering with a green-thinking community group to benefit them both. The trouble is, it was an unnecessarily long and challenging route to get the project done.

The century-old Markey Manufacturing Co. is a neighborhood institution, cranking out marine winches used to tow barges and haul anchors out of the sea.

But Seattle’s heavy rains were threatening to disrupt Markey’s operations by pocking the company’s driveway with gaping potholes, creating a perilous obstacle course for forklift drivers maneuvering their cargo.

“It was becoming a real safety issue,” said Bob LeCoque, Markey’s vice president. “We had a couple of loads drop off.”

The potholes are now gone, replaced with two paved driveways and three long, shallow ditches that catch the rain. The ditches, or swales, are lined with sand, soil, and plants that soak up the water.

When it rains, it puddles

Throughout most of Seattle, when the rain falls on roofs and streets, it’s shunted away by gutters and pipes. This area of Georgetown, however, is something of an anomaly; before the swales were built, there was no infrastructure to handle the stormwater and prevent flooding. When it rained, the water sat in puddles that took days or weeks to evaporate. Or it streamed over the industrial landscape into the nearby Duwamish River, carrying with it toxic pollutants and mud.

LeCoque wanted to pave Markey’s potholes, but city regulators opposed the plan unless something was done to address the potential increase in runoff that the paving could bring. LeCoque could lay hundreds of feet of pipe to connect with the existing King County stormwater system at the end of the street – at the cost of more than $1 million.

While Markey was trying to resolve its stormwater troubles, a community group comprised of nearby businesses, residents, local government employees, and others was working to improve the area through an effort called the Georgetown Riverview Restoration Project.The group teamed up with LeCoque to create a plan that was more environmentally friendly and cheaper than traditional stormwater infrastructure. They proposed what was essentially a large rain garden in the heart of one of Seattle’s grittiest industrial zones.

With help from Seattle’s Department of Transportation, Markey and the community group built three swales along the front of the Markey site, the largest stretching 60 feet long and 14 feet wide. The swales were dug about 2 feet deep, then refilled with 3 inches of soil and sand. The swales were ringed with wood chips and are still being planted with trees, grasses, and shrubs that can tolerate soaking wet soil in the winter and drought conditions in the summer.

“We’re trying to recreate what’s in the forest,” said Cari Simson, project manager with the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition who helped lead the effort.“Obviously, we’re way removed from the forest.”

Innovative -- and slow going

The innovative project – which is being hailed as Seattle’s first “industrial strength” natural drainage – is getting plenty of kudos now. But being the first of its kind, the project was tough to get done.

“It was a huge struggle,” said Shauna Walgren, a planner with Seattle’s Department of Transportation. There were months of meetings and countless questions about how it would work and what sort of precedent would be set.

“When you’re trying to do something different,” Walgren said, “the city doesn’t have experience to draw from."

Walgren helped coordinate between the multiple city departments involved and was key to getting approval for the plan, Simson said. The project, which started in 2007, was nearly derailed over concerns that the dirt to be excavated for the swales was contaminated with toxic chemicals. Fortunately, tests showed it wasn’t too polluted, and the swales were dug in October 2009.

Designing and excavating the swales close to $40,000, paid for by the Department of Transportation. The Georgetown Community Council working with the nonprofit Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition spent an additional $20,000 on soil for the swales, plants, designs, and other support. Markey Machinery paid roughly $35,000 to pave the driveways and add new sidewalks. Total bill? Under $100,000, a bargain compared to the price tag for a traditional stormwater system.

No more need for hip waders

Simson and others want to replicate the project in other industrial centers that also lack stormwater infrastructure, such as parts of Seattle’s South Park and SODO neighborhoods. As the Markey example shows, natural drainage can be a cheaper fix than building traditional pipes and stormwater holding tanks. Plus, it’s better for the environment because it re-greens areas with mostly native plants, and the swales and retention ponds actually clean the stormwater by allowing it to percolate into the ground.

But this kind of project won’t become more widespread unless the city makes it faster and easier to get approval for this sort of effort, said some of those involved. City departments – including Seattle’s Department of Transportation, Public Utilities, and Department of Planning and Development – need to work better together and make clear who is responsible for which decisions and permits, community members said. Even city officials said Seattle should create a standardized protocol for doing industrial projects like this one, and appoint someone to help a business navigate the process. Another way to encourage more industrial strength, low-impact development is through financial incentives -- grants, tax breaks, or a cut to utility bills -- for green stormwater solutions.

Before the swales and driveways were installed, Markey was a muddy mess in the winter and LeCoque was loath to host visitors. “The place looked like hell,” he said. That’s changed.

“I can walk from my car to my office without hip waders on,” LeCoque said. “We’re pretty proud of what we’ve done on the site here.”

Learn more about industrial stormwater fixes

The Duwamish River Clean-up Coalition and EOS Alliance are hosting a panel discussion and meeting about natural drainage projects in the Seattle area. It's free to attend, and here are the details:

• WHEN: Wednesday, March 10, from 5:30 - 8:30 p.m.
• WHERE: EOS Alliance Offices, 650 South Orcas St., Suite 220, Seattle
• RSVP: Email bkantner@eosalliance.org, re: "Green Forum"
  

For more information, go to the Community Natural Drainage Forum website, or email Ben Kantner at EOS Alliance at bkantner@eosalliance.org or call 206-762-2553.

Photos of 8th Avenue South and the Markey Manufacturing Co. swales are used with permission from Laura Treadway.

This piece originally appeared on the Sightline Institute's blog, The Daily Score

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Urban Design and Planning at 4:19 PM)

Inhabitat readers huffprojects recently wrote in to tell us about this green office complex they designed for their clients R. B. Murray and Co. Here at Inhabitat we have been referring to this beautiful building as the Butterfly House because it features a distinguished butterfly roof that opens to allow a maximum amount of daylight into the building’s open offices, executive core, and conference rooms. This roof has greatly reduced the need for artificial lighting during the day. As for the other green aspects of this project they intend to use natural, recycled and reclaimed materials, and the building’s design features natural ventilation, air filtration, and abundant views of the landscape. Such features have the added benefit of improving the quality of the work environment and employee productivity.

The building will exhibit a warm aesthetic that is pleasing to both occupants and those passing by. The new R.B. Murray Company office building signifies the company’s forward thinking commitment to creating an architecturally progressive and environmentally conscious future.

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Italian firm Studiodosi’s proposed building for the waterfront in Leeds, UK definitely packs a radical punch with its bright green facade, but its sustainable features are just as notable. Named “The Calls Henge,” the design was developed for the 36 Calls competition, which challenged architects to submit proposals for a site by the same address. Situated by the northern bank of the river Aire, the verdant building (which actually looks more like a hedge than a henge) is an eye-popping addition to the area.

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Post tags: geothermal heating and cooling, Green Building, green design, London, rainwater recycling, sustainable archtiecture, sustainable design, The Calls Henge by Studiodosi, UK

Key senators, industry officials, senior advisers and cabinet members met yesterday with President Obama to talk about the upcoming Climate and Energy Bill. The bill has been largely put aside by Congress in favor of passing Healthcare legislation and yesterday’s meetings were an attempt by President Obama to get the bill moving. The talks highlighted the simple reason the bill is stalled: the Democrats are largely for a Climate and Energy bill and the majority of Republicans want to leave the “Climate” part out of it — mainly any kind of carbon capping or taxing legislation.

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Inhabitat reader e_meliss tells us that Global Architectural Development (GAD) is on its way to constructing a mixed-use complex that will be a reflection of technology, sustainability and aesthetics in Istanbul. Dubbed the “One & Ortakoy,” this project is under construction in the neighborhood of Ortakoy.  The developers have planned two buildings – one which will be designated for residential purposes while the second will be reserved for commercial use. Positioned right next to an enchanting hillside location, the project will be a major step toward improvement of the area.

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ATTENTION GREEN SOCCER FANS

Nike recently unveiled its new team jerseys for the upcoming World Cup and here’s the kicker (pun intended) – they’re made from discarded plastic bottles! That’s right, the uniforms, or “kits” in proper soccer speak, are made from melted down bottles from landfills in Japan and Taiwan that have been spun into fabric. Check out pics of all of the team designs here.

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Flowers die, but the Dandelion portable windmill will keep on brightening your day without the wilting. A new wearable tech accessory from designers Mary Huang and Jennifer Kay, this beauty uses tiny windmills and turns the energy generated from the moving blades into LED light or plugable power for a small electronic device. The quirky design is also made from 99 percent reclaimed materials!

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If the threat of rising seas and altered ecosystems isn’t enough to convince lawmakers we need some serious climate legislation, maybe the financial bottom line will. A report released today indicates that Arctic melting could cost global agriculture, real estate and insurance anywhere from $2.4 trillion to $24 trillion by 2050!

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While everyone else is commuting home from work today, a NASA rocket will be making another, longer, trip–taking the agency’s newest weather satellite into space! After the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-P (GOES-P) journeys to its orbit 22,000 miles above Earth’s surface, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will use the data it gathers to support scientists’ work. Though satellites have been around for a while, newer satellite technology like this will undoubtedly play more of a role as climate change alters environmental conditions.

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One day after Obama announced his “Cash for Caulkers” energy efficiency program, a group of senators is trying to block government-funded, international renewable energy projects. In a letter to be read at a news conference today, the group of Democratic officials argue that financing renewables overseas under the Recovery Act runs counter to the economic stimulus plan’s goal: to create and preserve American jobs.

Read the rest of Senators Try to Block Government Financing for Renewable Energy Projects Overseas

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The passing of Measure R at the end of 2008 provided Los Angeles County with funds for up to $40 billion in transit-related projects over the next 30 years. The measure also inspired a competition to design new transport solutions, and Paris-based Odile Decq and Bonit Conrnette Architects have proposed an extensive plan to make the ‘freeway city’ a little greener. The project proposes large stretches of green space, a system of small vehicles with designated transportation lanes and parking stations, and a complete overhaul of the city’s streets, overpasses, culverts, right of ways, power lines, and underutilized rail lines.

+ ODBC

Via Design Boom

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How can we support local business owners who want to make bright green changes? One of our favorite techniques: The CarrotMob.

Using social networks, CarrotMobs coordinate with the store and each other to show up and make massive purchases to reward the business's proactive green steps. In Seattle, for example, a CarrotMob arranged a deal with the Pike Pub & Brewery. On Earth Day, the CarrotMob showed up for food and drinks. In return, Pike Pub put 25 percent of all sales back into providing a mini-energy retrofit and other improvements for the location.

A great idea -- a mob of people coming together for the collective good. So why isn’t that concept applied elsewhere?

Well, time has now come to introduce Crop Mob - a group of young, nomadic farmers who partner with local, sustainable farms for a days worth of volunteer efforts.

According to Cropmob.org:

“Crop mob is primarily a group of young, landless, and wannabe farmers who come together to build and empower communities by working side by side. Crop mob is also a group of experienced farmers and gardeners willing to share their knowledge with their peers and the next generation of agrarians. The membership is dynamic, changing and growing with each new mob event.”

In four days since the New York Times coverage of a Crop Mob event at Okfuskee Farm in Silk Hope, North Carolina, social media outlets have been blowing up with coverage. A recent twitter post, for example, highlights the success of the mob, and the eagerness by folks to get back in touch with the land: Holy Cow! 90+ rsvps for edible earthscapes mob tomorrow.

And thanks to the original mobsters, other cities such as Seattle, Wash., Atlanta, Ga., and Madison, Wisc., now have a central online presence to connect wannabe mobsters with volunteer opportunities on local farms.

What is great about this effort lies in the connections being made between those involved. Farms receive extra hands to help out in the fields, and volunteers take away knowledge on sustainable farming practices. With the average age of today’s farmer on the rise, crop mobs exemplify simple, unique ways to help on ways to diversify the field of agriculture by intimately involving the next generation of farmers.

Photo credit: Flickr/heacphotos, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Sean Conroe in Food and Farming at 11:27 AM)

In the last two decades, network theory has emerged as a way of making sense of everything from the World Wide Web to the human brain. Now, as ecologists have begun applying this theory to ecosystems, they are gaining insights into how species are interconnected and how to foster biodiversity.

by Carl Zimmer

Ecologists who want to save the world’s biodiversity could learn a lot from Kevin Bacon.

One evening in 1994, three college students in Pennsylvania were watching Bacon in the eminently forgettable basketball movie The Air Up There. They started thinking about all the movies Bacon had starred in, and all the actors he had worked with, and all the actors those actors had worked with. The students came up with a game they called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, counting the steps from Bacon to any actor in Hollywood. In general, it takes remarkably few steps to reach him. Even Charlie Chaplin, who made most of his movies decades before Bacon was born, was only three steps away. (Chaplin starred with Barry Norton in Monsieur Verdoux, Norton starred with Robert Wagner in What Price Glory, and Wagner and Bacon worked together in Wild Things.)

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon became a 1990s sensation, complete with talk show appearances and a book deal. University of Virginia computer scientists got on the bandwagon as well, building a web site called The Oracle of Bacon. You can use it to analyze the connections between all 1.6 million actors listed in the Internet Movie Database. It reveals that all actors in Hollywood are connected to Bacon on average by just 2.95 steps.

But it turns out that Bacon is not so remarkable. Over 1,000 actors are linked to the rest of Hollywood by less then three links. And even the most obscure actors can be linked to everyone else in Hollywood by less than ten steps. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon says less about Bacon, in other words, than it does about the organization of the Hollywood network. If you were to simply join 1.6 million actors to each other at random, it would take many more links to connect any two of them than in real life.

Mathematicians call this intimate linkage a “small-world network.” And physicist Albert-Laso Barabasi of the University of Notre Dame and his colleagues have discovered that Hollywood actors are not unique in forming a small-world network. The World Wide Web is organized in the same way. So is the anatomy of the human brain. What’s more, all these networks get their small-world organization because they follow similar rules. In each network, most nodes are linked to only a few other nodes. But a small fraction of nodes have lots of links. These hubs shorten the paths between all the nodes in the entire network.

Over the past two decades, Barabasi and other researchers have developed a sophisticated theory of networks that helps make sense of what look at first like hopelessly intricate tangles. Network theory is allowing scientists to understand how networks produce unexpected kinds of behavior you wouldn’t be able to predict from looking at individual parts, from the remarkable robustness of the Internet to the sudden crash of financial markets.

In the past few years, ecologists have begun to apply network theory to nature. By mapping the connections between species, they are discovering some of the rules by which all ecological networks are organized, and how these rules help foster biodiversity. They’re also studying how biological invasions, overfishing, and other threats are reorganizing these networks, and possibly putting them at risk of collapse. By discovering early warning signs of networks in trouble, scientists hope to be able to predict these collapses and prevent them from occurring.

Species are joined in an ecological network if they have some kind of relationship. One species may be a predator, and the other its prey. One species may be a tree, and the other a bird that spreads its seeds in its droppings. Ecologists have been well aware of the fact that nature is arranged in networks made up of links between species. Food webs are a common sight in grade-school textbooks, after all. But when the first food webs appeared in the scientific literature in the early 1900s, they were not supposed to be complete roadmaps of ecological networks. Instead, they were cartoons that illustrated some of the new concepts emerging at the time.

One of the most important of those concepts was that plants and other photosynthetic organisms served as the foundation of life on Earth. These photosynthesizers converted the sun’s energy into biomass, which then fed other species, which in turn fed still others. These fundamental insights eventually led to important advances in conservation biology. They helped conservation biologists understand, for example, how pesticides and other pollutants ended up so concentrated in the bodies of large predators like polar bears and tuna.

For decades, however, the best pictures of ecological networks remained extremely simple. It’s a lot harder to record the interactions of all the species in an ecosystem than it is to figure out the links between Web sites. Many ecologists also felt that it might not be worth fleshing out networks in too much detail. As networks became more focused and realistic, ecologists found that they became too complex to make sense of — let alone to yield any rules about ecological networks around the world.

But ecologists have started to shed that pessimism in recent years. They have seen how scientists like Barabasi have been able to extract meaningful lessons from full-blown networks. And so ecologists have borrowed these scientific methods to analyze networks without drowning in detail.

Their studies have shed new light on the biggest debates in ecology. Most plants, for example, depend on animals of one sort or another to spread their pollen. In some cases, scientists have discovered exquisitely co-evolved partners that specialize only on one another. For example, some flowers keep their nectar in deep recesses that can only be reached by flies with tongues stretching several inches in length. Other pollinators are far less picky, browsing many different species, and there are also flowers that don’t rely on a single species of pollinator.

Ecologists have argued over which kind of partnership — specialized or generalized — is most important in ecosystems. The answer has important practical significance. If many plant species each depend on just one pollinator, then they are exquisitely vulnerable to extinction if they lose their partner.

Jordia Bascompte, an ecologist at the Spanish Research Council, and his colleagues have traveled to a number of ecosystems to catalog the plants animal pollinators visit and which animals visit each plant. The picture is much the same from one ecosystem to another. But that picture doesn’t match the simple extremes in the pollination debate.

Most animals and plants only form partnerships with a few other species. A few generalist animals and plants interact with many species. Generalists form a highly-linked core of the network, interacting with other generalists. The specialists tend to interact with these generalists rather than with each other, with the result that the pollinator network is arranged around hubs. In other words, a field of wildflowers is a lot like Hollywood.

Like Hollywood, there’s a lot of competition between the players. A generalist moth, for example, will visit several species of plants in search of food. In some ways, each species of plant might be better off if the moth only visited it and no other species. The moth would spread more of its pollen, and so more of the plants would be able to make seeds.

But Bascompte’s research suggests that the benefits of the network outweigh any drawbacks. If the other species of plants visited by the moth can thrive, that means that the moths have nectar to eat. And that means they can make more moths—which in turn can make more visits to every individual plant species. By modeling these kinds of interactions, Bascompte has found that the small-world network of pollinators and plants fosters more biodiversity than other kinds of networks.

This arrangement not only fosters more biodiversity, but also makes ecological networks better able to withstand assaults. Losing a single species is unlikely to bring ecosystems crashing down, because most species in an ecological network are only linked to a few other species. As a result, its absence will have relatively small effect. On the other hand, if a hub species becomes extinct, there may be big trouble.

Recently, Bascompte and his colleagues drew the network of marine ecosystems in the Caribbean. They discovered that fish form interconnected clusters known as modules. In each module, the nodes are more connected to each other than to other nodes outside the module. Each module was organized around sharks, which acted as the top predators. Some modules contained a few species of sharks, but many included just one. The sharks may sort themselves into different modules as they avoid competing with one another for fish.

With global warming pushing some animals and plants to the brink of extinction, conservation biologists are now saying that the only way to save some species may be to move them, science writer Carl Zimmer reports.

The Caribbean network is thus organized around sharks, with each species a highly connected hub in its particular module. That arrangement means that overfishing sharks could have an even bigger effect on marine ecosystems than ecologists have previously realized. As the population of a shark species dwindles, the other fish in its module will feel the effects. The fish the sharks eat will boom, in turn putting pressure on the species those fish eat. The structure of the entire network may change as well, as sharks take over modules that have lost their hubs. It’s possible that in this new arrangement, the entire food web may become fragile, and thus more vulnerable to a sudden collapse.

Network theory tells scientists that subtle changes to complex networks can trigger sudden changes. Financial markets, for example, can wobble up and down before collapsing. It may be possible to monitor ecosystems for early warning signals of collapse as well. The forest will tell ecologists more about trouble to come than any individual tree.

This article originally appeared on Yale e360

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(Posted by Yale Environment 360 in Biodiversity and Ecosystems at 1:51 PM)

Publishing giant Condé Nast - meet tech bohemoth Apple. Condé Nast is set to announce today in an internal memorandum that it will start testing out iPad versions of five of its most popular magazines. If all goes well, readers will be able to read Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Glamour on an iPad by this summer.

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Whenever anyone threatens climate science, you can bet Al Gore will be there. The former Vice President took to the New York Times this weekend, writing a heated Op-Ed piece aimed at climate change skeptics and politicians. The piece came soon after the recent UN announcement that an independent scientific  board would be reviewing reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Prize with Gore, who is a huge proponent of the scientific body’s work.

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New York Fashion Week has come to a close, but we’ve got the all the highlights from the hottest shows in town. Check out our exclusive video coverage featuring some front row moments that would even get Ann Wintour wishing she was at the GreenShows. Plus, we’ve got inside scoops from designers Samantha Pleet, Leanne Mai-ly Hilgart of Vaute Couture, Melissa Kirgan and Xing-Zhen Chung-Hilyard of Eko-Lab, JoAnn Berman, and Lizz Wasserman of Popomomo on their eco-lines.

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Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could turn our humongous e-waste problem into a source of something we all need – like shoes? Well, vegan footwear company extraordinaire, Olsenhaus, is doing just that with their Fall Winter 2010 collection. Their always fashion forward heels, peep toes, and booties are all going to be made with a new polyester microfiber made from discarded television screens! Yes, really!

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Is your favorite t-shirt in such distress that it garners more attention for its rips and holes than its clever declaration against CO2 emissions? There is no reason to despair over your cherished threads, because your loss is your computer’s gain. The people at Hello Rewind have come up with a great way to upcycle your old tees into new duds for your laptop. But best of all, by doing so, not only will you be getting a nifty new outfit for your computer, but you’ll be helping to support the fight against sex-trafficking.

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Starting this Friday your taxi ride in New York City might get a little cheaper. The NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission just announced that they are launching a taxi share program where riders will be able to pay a flat fare to be picked up and dropped off at designated taxi share stops. The city used GPS data from cabs to determine heavily trafficked routes and is hoping the share will reduce congestion and emissions by lowering the number of vehicles driving during rush hour.

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Vermont may soon become the first state in America to shut down a nuclear reactor. During a meeting tomorrow, the state senate is likely to deny a request to extend the life of the 38-year-old Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor. The reactor site has come under scrutiny in recent years because of safety issues and leaks of tritium, a radioactive isotope linked to cancer.

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