What good is 3,300 vacant parcels of land in Cleveland if you can’t do anything productive with it? Can growing food on empty lots, backyards and vast tracts of open land in the city translate into economic gain? What do you need to put into the land to make it ready to grow food? These and many more questions were discussed by a group of urban food growers and advocates of local food at their second gathering last night at AJ Rocco’s in downtown Cleveland.

Again the subject of banding together as an Urban Growers Association surfaced: Improving buying power and creating larger lots of food to make it easier to sell appealed to the urban farmers who numbered 20 of the roughly 40 in the crowd. Nobody seemed to know if this idea is a new one or if a group existed here or elsewhere that they could join or use as a model.

The need for a value statement was discussed: Should the group adopt principles such as, help the community feed itself, consider gardening as a social equity activity that can have intergenerational learning and economic prosperity for low income communities at its core; should they advocate that the city ease the process of converting vacant land to farmland?

The group decided to break into smaller discussions focused on the following topics to help the local food economy grow:

Just as the wind turbine at the Great Lakes Science Center is a highly visible symbol of a future less dependent on fossil fuels, the Cuyahoga County Fairgrounds is getting serious about adding solar panels and a 250 ft. tall wind turbine to educate, provide clean energy and a training program for green jobs.

Project Description
The Cuyahoga County Agricultural Society, operator of the County Fairgrounds in Berea/Middleburg Heights, Ohio is aggressively pursuing the installation of a wind turbine and solar arrays at the Fairgrounds. The turbine size is targeted at 600 kw, to be installed at the end of the main parking lot. The solar array will be 20kw erected on the low roof of the International Pavilion, with high visibility to Fairgrounds visitors.

Purpose
The wind turbine and the solar array would be installed to demonstrate the Society’s commitment to renewable energy, to educate the community on this subject by actual demonstration, to provide wind industry jobs training through collaboration with Polaris Career Center and to reduce the Society’s single largest expense, its electricity bills of about $100,000 per year.

Read more.

• For “bridging the gap between sometimes esoteric national debates about economic issues and the real-life challenges faced by people living in Cleveland, Youngstown and Dayton,” Policy Matters Ohio is selected as one of the Nation magazine’s Most Valuable Progressives of 2008. Read more
• Akron Metro Regional Transit Authority unveils $14 million green bus station which boasts the largest solar panel array in Ohio and geothermal heating and cooling, which will offset one-third of the station’s electricity.
• Ohio Department of Transportation announces new priorities, including a dedicated funding stream for public transit and statewide passenger rail and a goal to reduce the state’s carbon footprint. Also, it wants a Complete Streets policy so that all new streets have bike lanes and pedestrian areas. Advocates for a sustainable transportation system will have to keep an eye on and push for making these goals translate into action at the local level.
• Ohio will give homeowners $3.5 million in grants for wind, solar power.
• Ohio House Speaker Armond Budish, D-Beachwood, is a powerful new force for greater regional collaboration among local governments. He also pledged to step up the use of successful tax credit programs such as those targeted at green businesses, new technologies and innovative businesses. Read more.

I’m hoping to apply our weatherization guidelines to my own home energy efficiency project this winter. I’m starting by doing a little research and asking the experts a few questions about how to best protect my family's leaky Colonial from the cruel winds of Cleveland’s winter.

What I’ve discovered so far is, today’s insulation techniques aren’t your grandfather’s head to the attic with the Pink Panther rolls. The experts know so much more today about what works, and will tell you that insulating your home might not be a simple DIY weekend project – if you want to make the most of your time and money. A smart investment and some research may pay off in the long run, and, strangely, might even make it enjoyable for this home-improvement-adverse writer.

Read my journal here.

Knowledge is power, literally. A colleague brought in a nifty little device today called a Kill A Watt—it measures how much power an appliance or computer is using. Right now, my Dell laptop is sucking 20 Watts of electricity per hour, or .11 Kilowatts for the last six hours (compared to our server, which draws that much in one hour).

I learned that if I right-click my desktop and click Properties>Screen Saver>Monitor Power and select “Turn off Monitor After 5 minutes” my power draw drops to 11 Watts (when I’m idle, which is hardly ever!). We also found that our Braun 12-cup coffee maker draws 60 Watts per hour when the burner’s on, but spikes to 850 Watts while brewing a pot (the equivalent of 120 Wh). That’s a pittance compared to the four-burner Bun-o-Matic coffee maker which gulps 1200 Watts to brew a pot and 100 Watts per burner to warm, or about 2.2 Kilowatts per day.

This tool has been enlightening (one can be had online for about $20)—it’s fun to get real time data of our carbon footprint and be able to make informed choices about where to change behavior.

Jan 7 Update

• From ClevelandBikes:
  Cleveland Metroparks Zoo will be installing bike racks to park 350 bikes at the Zoo entrance, hopefully in time for spring. The racks will be located in the Hippo Lot, just behind the main ticketing booth. ClevelandBikes has offered bike parking with the Ohio City Bicycle Co-Op during Earthfest at the Zoo, advocating that more bike parking should be a permanent element at the Zoo, founded upon a commitment to nature and education. We have also pointed out to builders and developers that cycling makes good business sense, providing credits for sound environmental design and construction. The Zoo, which shares the commitment to environmentally sound design practices, will use the bike parking to meet LEED certification in the design and construction of the new elephant exhibit area
• From All Aboard Ohio:
  3-C Corridor summit in Cleveland—Join Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and All Aboard Ohio at a breakfast meeting in Cleveland on Wednesday Jan. 7th to help build support for passenger trains linking Ohio’s major cities. Ohio Rail Development Commission Executive Director Matthew Dietrich will discuss what is being done by Amtrak; why the state is motivated to pursue this project; and what are the potential planning, funding and implementation timelines.
  Also: ODOT Changes Project Evaluation Criteria
• From the Biodiversity Alliance:
  A new program being developed for 2009 by Biodiversity Alliance is the Academy, an informational program designed to keep staff and volunteers at the four Alliance institutions up-to-date on the threat posed by invasive species to our natural heritage. Information will be presented in several formats, including brown bags, stewardship opportunities and in the Connections newsletter.
  
  

Just as Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas reminds us of the true spirit of the holidays, this essay by Bob Hinkle, Ph.D., Chief of Outdoor Education at the Cleveland Metroparks, is a simple, but powerful reminder of what we’re really looking for at the winter holidays:

Love, time and caring are not obtainable in any mall this season, or any season. They are gifts of the heart, and unique to you and me. They are not found in glittering decorations, or twinkling lights, or in mind-numbing music. They are gifts that are found in small quiet places and unexpected times. You can create them, if you try.

Read on.

Re-imagining a more sustainable Cleveland starts from the premise that the loss of population over the last 60 years will not likely be reversed in the near term and that Cleveland’s future as a post industrial city that can attract and retain residents and investment depends in large part in how it adapts to population decline and changing land use patterns to realize its potential as a green city on a blue lake.

—From the final report produced by Neighborhood Progress, Inc., December 2008

We continue to report about this 30-member (and growing) group exploring innovative strategies to reuse vacant land (3,300 parcels) in Cleveland. They recently produced a final report and recommendations on how vacant land can derive benefit for low-income and underemployed residents, increase community self-reliance for food and energy production and link natural and built systems.

We’re starting to see a nice slow burn of ideas bubbling up from the concentration of resources that NPI and the Urban Design Center have marshaled. They include:

Wind power in Cleveland is “no longer a matter of whether, but when?” said Case President Barbara Snyder at the opening of yesterday’s ‘Building an Advanced Energy Future for Offshore Wind’ conference.

Case has invested $200,000 in plans for the world’s first freshwater wind turbine off the shores of Cleveland and a complimentary research center. Case is home to the Great Lakes Energy Innovation Center which raised more than $4 million from Cleveland and Maltz foundations to build the wind farm and a local knowledge base that will be used to establish renewable energy companies of the future. One million dollars went to hire JW America, a company with roots in Germany and some massive wind projects under its belt, to study the feasibility.

This conference gathered all of the players for an update on the study, which will be released in April 2009, and related issues like regulations and environmental concerns.

Peter Mandelstam, head of Bluewater Wind, noted the challenges in placing turbines in Lake Erie. They include:

• Higher (per kWh) cost because coal is cheap
• Ice floes – increased the cost of the foundation
• Depth – has to be 30 ft. or less which means it might have to be closer to the shore and so it could create view-shed obstructions

“It may be a tad more expensive in terms of cents per kilowatt hour, but there are so many benefits,” he said, noting clean tech jobs and tons of carbon dioxide avoided.

Amalie Lipstreu, Ohio Department of Agriculture’s sustainable agriculture program manager, shared updates on the state’s plans to increase the percentage of locally grown food production, distribution and consumption this morning. The formation of an Ohio Food Policy Council – and its four task forces – last year was an important step.

Also, Dr. Elaine Borawski, a professor and biostatistician at Case shared results from a Cleveland survey on food preferences and how urbanites view their access to fresh, healthy food.

Read more.