Green Patriotism Bus Ads Prompts Americans to Address Climate Change

BIKE TO THE Bluegrass Concert this Sunday (7/20) at Mill Creek Falls

Join neighborhood residents and bicyclists this Sunday at 6:00pm at Washington Reservation as we bike to Mill Creek Falls to enjoy the bluegrass sounds of the Crook Neck Chandler and the Tibbee Bottom Boys (we will be meeting in the parking lot for the Washington Park Horticulture center).

Location

When our neighbor Dr. Pat Blochowiak told us to stop by her garden and pick some raspberries, blackberries and snow peas, I didn't realize the depths of her bounty... or how great blackberries may be. As my kids picked through nature, they chomped down probably $50 worth of the best food in town, when you may find food so good. As I looked at the bowls of berries collected in short time, I felt blessed by my community and nature. Over a fresh berries and whipped organic cream desert, our family celebrated Summer and life in the best way. All that is the certain promise of East Cleveland, with community farming. Help plan that reality with Maurice Small and others as we meet again, today, for what has become an every-other-Tuesday City Fresh I GRO EC brainstorming session, in East Cleveland. This week, we'll meet at the Hough/Star Bakeries complex, and also visit Brown's Market, which we plan to convert into a pilot City Fresh Market.

Location

Two weeks ago, City Fresh's Maurice Small met with friends in East Cleveland to discuss City Fresh, urban farming, and how we may convert a typical urban convenient store, Brown's Market, into a pilot City Fresh local foods market. During our discussions, Maurice mentioned that a dedicated urban farmer may earn more than $30,000 per year from sales of food grown on one typical urban lot (say 1/10th an acre). That being the case, and considering our ever-growing need and realigning demand for locally grown food, and the fact food may be grown locally as cost effectively as elsewhere in the world, it occurred to me that the highest and best use for most of the land now cleared, abandoned, blighted and wasted in our urban neighborhoods is for urban farming. So that is a use we are now planning to be core to redevelopment of the Star Neighborhood. Intrigued? Discuss and plan for this reality with Maurice and friends this Tuesday, from 6-7 PM, at that house on Roxbury, in East Cleveland. Please RSVP if you plan to attend.

Location

Monday, June 16, 2008 - Fine Particle "Soot" Pollution Urban traffic" />
 
Northeast Ohio - An Air Quality Advisory has been issued for Monday until such time as the front containing rain moves through the region.  This Advisory is for the counties of Ashtabula, Cuyahoga, Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Portage, and Summit.

You can read about the task force here and here.  At this latter site you can get up to speed by seeing a video of part of a previous task force meeting and take part in a survey.  We need better public transportation now, so come and speak up.

Location

Maurice Small is the most economically and ecologically sensible planner I know.

Joe Stanley, Sudhir Kade and I have been brainstorming with City Fresh's Maurice Small about "I GRO EC" - Independent Green Republic Of East Cleveland. City Fresh already operates a Fresh Stop at Huron Road Hospital - which Maurice reports is doing great - and is active in community farming in East Cleveland. Recently, we've been discussing City Fresh having an involvement converting Brown's Convenient store into a pilot City Fresh Market, which could offer a paradigm-shifting model for bringing local food, farming and their economies into very needy urban neighborhoods, in very innovative and important ways.

Join the nonprofit organization ClevelandBikes on its annual "Bike to Work" rides, everyday May 12-16, now bigger than ever by partnering with other riding organizations in the first Cleveland Bicycle Week.   Ride and you can be elgible for great prizes!  This year, you can also find partners on your own through a "Bike Buddy" system brought to you by NOACA. And remember, join us for our ride on Wednesday May 14th and wear yellow for Lance Armstrong Foundation's LIVESTRONG Day! 

* ClevelandBikes hosts commuting rides downtown to our host, the Greater Cleveland YMCA (2200 Prospect Avenue), every day during Cleveland Bicycle Week, May 12-16.  Join us for coffee, while the YMCA provides free, secure bike parking, showers and free passes for the day.  Join us and share your goals about riding in Northeast Ohio, while riders are eligible for fun prizes.

* ClevelandBikes is also pleased to assist with the Northeast Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA), which is offering to match solo riders through th Ohio Ride Share "Bike Buddy" program, matching riders with common starting points,ride times and common destinations (www.ohiorideshare.com).

* ClevelandBikes also supports a major health initiative, with a "Bike to Work"ride for the Lance Armstrong Foundation (www.livestrong.org) and "LIVESTRONG" day on Wednesday May 14.

* ClevelandBikes will host "Bike to Work" rides on the final Friday of every month and special rides for festivals and other activities.

Pick a starting location from the list below and ride along with a ClevelandBikes ride leader, or just meet us between 8:00 and 9:00 AM at our downtown host, the Greater Cleveland YMCA,  which is offering free showers, secure bike parking and free day passes for YMCA activities.

East Side Starting Points

7:45 AM  Arabica at 11300 Juniper in University Circle
7:15 AM  Dewey's Coffee on Shaker Square
7:30 AM  Starbucks at Cedar and Fairmount
7:00 AM  Bus Shelter at E. 222nd and Lakeshore
7:45 AM  McDonald's on E. 159th and Lakeshore

South Side Starting Point
7:15 AM  Arabica at 5615 Turney Rd.

West Side Starting Points
7:45 AM  Civilization Coffee Shop in Tremont at W. 11th and Kenilworth
7:50 AM  Talkies Film and Coffee Bar in Ohio City at 2521 Market Ave.
7:25 AM  Phoenix in Lakewood at 15108 Detroit near Warren Rd.
7:50 AM  Arabica in Lakewood at 11604 Detroit near W. 116th

National "Bike to Work" Week is sponsored by the League of American Bicyclists  (www.bikeleague.org), which offers bicycle advocacy and support programs for more than 125 years.

ClevelandBikes , a 501C3 nonprofit organization, is committed to advancing all forms of bicycling as economical and healthful recreation, sport and transportation.

For More Information, Contact:  Kevin Cronin
216.374.7578; kevin [at] clevelandbikes [dot] org
On the Web: www.clevelandbikes.org
When ClevelandBikes. Cleveland Benefits!

Little Italy has always been core to my REAL NEO experience. From earliest childhood memories,  my family has always had many meals at various Little Italy restaurants, each year, as well as picking-up an occasional pizza (where else in NEO but Mama Santas or Valentino's... well, do try the Gelatoria at Fairhill). I also love getting Lemon Ice and other goodies at Corbos. with their unusual greeting of "Leave the gun, take the cannoli"... as authentic as life gets, in NEO. Last night, I noticed Corbos moved next door to their old home, to a remodeled new space (much as Prestis did, a few years ago) Little Italy has always been a great hyper-local neighborhood, where people live, work, eat and socialize together within, and interact well with the world without. There's always lots of private rehab and strong entrepreneurial business activity here, off the Med-O-Mart grid. Which makes me ask you, what matters to the hyper-local economy in your neighborhood, and how is that doing.

So I am just back from 14 days in Japan.  Interesting to be on the sidelines as 3,000 Japanese police protect the olympic toarch from what I thought would be a calm, reserved crowd.  Dont get me wrong, I was not in Nagano, I was in Shibuya / Tokyo.. but it got a lot of attention.  Pro and anti China student groups and observers literally throwing punches, 70 year old Japanese men going to jail for throwing tomatoes in the face of the police protecting the toarch... etc.  It was akin to what I saw in the USA when the toarch came thru California.

I would not be alarmed. We may continue to get a break on the pie in the sky dreams of the "quick and dirty delivery system - Opportunity Corridor"  for University Circle, Inc. (UCI) and Cleveland Clinic as well as the "curbcuts for developer's - West Shoreway" due to this news:

It seems like many people, especially in the big media, are obsessed with whether or not that hybrid/plug in hybrid/electric car/etc will "pay for itself" with fuel savings. The latest example is the (misleading) "The payoff for plug-in hybrids: 95 years?".

Location

Good Video... 

The Euclid Corridor Bus design doesn’t make sense to me. 

Technology is such an important wildcard in the social consciousness picture, whether we speak of the most innovative approaches to community development using WI-FI and FOSS in tandem or we celebrate some of the latest advances in product development.  While bumbling bureaucratic banter restricts radical progress at the nexus of environment and technology (current Ohio legislation insiduously inculcates clean coal and nuclear power measures as green and renewable technologies and considers a 35 MPG mandated standard by 2020 significant) some very innovative R&D experts have launched their media campaign to expedite progress by demonstrating how very close we are to a 100 MPG standard.  I was heartened by a full page ad which recently manifested via a variety of media outlets - I happened to catch the one in this week's issue of US News and World Report.

The Adelaide City Council has raised the standard in International sustainability with the introduction of the world’s first solar-powered electric bus.

CHAPTER ONE Recently, when I spoke with a conductor on the Albany-Boston Amtrak coach, he told me that he had been working on that run for the last four years and the train had NEVER arrived on time.  Consistent with his experience, we arrived an hour late.

FOUR YEARS!?  Well, right off the bat you’ve gotta find that that is intentional. 

So why? What seems to be going on?

Pacific Northwest is example of energy boom — and worried biologists

PORTLAND, Ore. - Wind energy may be emerging as an important alternative power source for the Northwest, but there are concerns about the danger to hawks and eagles as turbines expand to wild areas of the Columbia River Gorge.

By year's end, more than 1,500 turbines will be churning out electricity in the windy gorge. Until now, most of the projects have gone up in wheat fields — cultivated land that long ago drove away the rodents that raptors hunt. But as wind energy developers move into wilder areas along the ridge of the gorge, near canyons and shrub-covered rangeland, birds could be at risk from the 150-foot blades of giant turbines.

I wanted to enjoy and capture a last glimpse of Fall 2007 so stopped by the second most important battleground in the history of the environmental movement in NEO, after Whiskey Island, being the Shaker Lakes Nature Center, above (see full size here). Were it not for 11 exceptional women from Shaker, including REALNEOan Martha Eakin's mother, a seriously crude, corrupt, foolish Cuyahoga County Democratic Party Chairman, former Cuyahoga County Engineer Albert Porter, would have driven freeways through this exact spot in the Shaker Lakes. The scenario is very much like we have in NEO today, with seriously crude, corrupt, foolish political bosses attempting to do seriously crude, corrupt, foolish things to our region, like demolishing the Breuer, over-bridging and retrenching I-90, and likely the "Opportunity Corridor", which is driving far more than 11 exceptional women to take on the latest generation of seriously crude, corrupt, foolish leaders... and, like the Shaker 11, we are winning.

Driving back and forth between Ohio City and East Cleveland, I often take Euclid... partly to watch the progress of the "Silver Line" and Clinic Complex development. I increasingly find the "Silver Line" and Mid-Town aspects of all this disappointing, but I am fascinated by what I see coming together with the Cleveland Clinic.

This thing better have a regenerative-braking powered mini-fridge. In what has to be one of the weirdest looking things to come out of Canada since our very own Lloyd (j/k Lloyd!), an enterprising Canuck has taken two Priuses, welded them together, and made either what has to be the greenest limo in the world or the most gas-guzzling Prius - depending on how you look at it. However, the Canadian inventor/mad scientist says the car still gets 50mpg even with the added weight. We don't know if that is before or after the limo reaches its 10 seat capacity, but it sure beats the heck out of those hideous Hummer limo monstrosities.