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City park on abandoned rail line gives Manhattan much-needed real estate boom

Locals living in New York City's West Side lobbied to save an abandoned rail line that once ran two stories above the street; now its 22 blocks of rust and decay are being turned into the nation's first elevated city park. The Friends of the High Line formed seven years ago when two Manhattanites, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, developed a sentimental attachment to the old railway. The promise of the elevated park has given the neighborhood a new real-estate nickname -- the High Line -- and raised the value of an eight-by-ten studio apartment from "absurdly overpriced" to "laughably criminal."

The vision thing

Over on Worldchanging, Alex addresses a subject that's dear to my heart, namely what George Bush Sr. famously called The Vision Thing.

He rightly points out that the kinds of solutions being discussed fall absurdly short of what's needed to avoid the worst of climate change. Scientists now say we need to cut global GHG emissions by 70 percent in the next decade or so; Kyoto would cut them by 5.5 percent, and it's the best we've got right now, and the U.S. hasn't ratified it, and the countries that have aren't meeting its targets.

This is to say nothing of the "change a light bulb and properly inflate your tires" school of solutions one often finds in mainstream media outlets.

Why the gap? Alex suspects, as do I, that what's missing is a clear vision: a picture of what a sustainable world would look like. (Regular readers will be familiar with my obsession with this topic.)

Gristmill shameless product placement: Steelcase Think chair

I got my Steelcase Think office chair in the mail yesterday, at long last. As a back-pain sufferer who spends a lot of time sitting in front of a computer, I've been thinking about, researching, and generally fussing over ergonomic chairs for a long, long time, all the while sitting miserably on a cut-rate Office Max chair with a seat that made my butt ache after about 10 minutes.

In the end, I went with the Think, for four reasons:

1. It's aesthetically simple and elegant. There are lots of good ergo chairs out there, but you wouldn't believe how fussy some of them look.

2. It's about as environmentally advanced as any consumer product available today. It's 99% recyclable, easy to disassemble, and best of all, Cradle-to-Cradle certified. In general, Steelcase is an environmentally enlightened company.

3. It's at the lower end of the decent-ergo-chair price scale, at $600. That may seem like a lot for a chair, but amortized over the number of minutes I spend in it, it pays off handsomely. Anyway, the Allsteel #19 is around $1200, and hell, Herman Miller Eames chairs run up to $2200.

4. It's ergonomically sound, but doesn't require 500 adjustments to get up and running. In fact, aside from seat height, there's just one knob, with four settings. There's a weight balance mechanism that automatically adjusts support based on weight and position, and tensors in the back that adjust automatically to shape and posture. It's designed to conform to your movement, and keep you moving, which is ergo task No. 1.

If you buy through Office Environments, you can also choose custom fabric. Mine is "cinnamon," roughly like the one pictured here.

Obviously, having had only one day to test it out, I can't pass full judgment yet. But so far it's a dream. Steelcase, my ass thanks you! And you can quote me on that.

Life’s a Bleach and Then You Die

Caribbean coral reefs hammered by bleaching, disease It hasn’t been a good year for coral. Last summer, reefs from Panama to the Virgin Islands suffered bleaching; now coral in the […]

RGGI or Not, Here They Come

Maryland senator chats with Grist about joining regional climate pact Last week, Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich (R) signed into law the Healthy Air Act, which restricts emissions of common air […]

Why crude is flirting with its post-Katrina high.

If crude-oil production has peaked or is approaching a peak -- an idea that has risen to the status of religious faith at Gristmill and other greenie blogs -- one would expect the "smart money" (i.e., the speculator class) to snap up oil futures.

And that is precisely what's happening, according to today's Wall Street Journal.

A chat with Maryland Sen. Paul Pinsky on the Healthy Air Act

Last week, Maryland passed the Healthy Air Act, thereby joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative -- the eighth Northeast state to do so. (The Baltimore Sun has more coverage.) It was the rare victory for environmentalists.

I got in touch with state senator Paul Pinsky (D), one of the bill's sponsors, to get the backstory. Our exchange is below the fold.

Fair trade palms

Loving thy palm grower as thyself, a growing number of churches opted last Sunday to celebrate Palm Sunday with palm fronds grown in conditions deemed both worker-friendly and environmentally sustainable.

As Brenda Meier, parish projects coordinator for Lutheran World Relief, told Religion News Service:

To have in our hand on Palm Sunday a palm that we know has been harvested in an ecologically friendly way, in a way that's going to benefit the communities and the people who harvested them, adds that much more depth to our celebration of Palm Sunday.

Amen, sister.

A bit of here, a bit of there

With an ever-growing list of things I want to blog about, I'm inspired by Dave's inconsequential post to encourage him to grow his hair long again embark on my own post o' randomness.

So with no further ado:

If I were an artist -- which I most definitely am not, until "adults drawing like six-year-olds" becomes the new rage -- I would want to put my talents to use at something like disappearing zine. The artist renderings of rapidly-disappearing species are very cool, in a depressing-as-hell sort of way.

The Daily Grist Headline Battle Royale: Match 7

Ladies and gentleman, we have a tie! Last week, both "Tiiiiiime Is on Our Side, Yes It Is" and "Bait and Switchgrass" garnered 34% of the vote (until some smart aleck casts another).

Here are the next batch of nominees:

1. Guster's Last Stand: The barnstorming band that's changing the world, one campus at a time
2. Enthuse Your Curbism: Two new nature books for city slickers
3. Good Mennonite, and Good Luck: Discovery of oil in Belize leads to craziness all around
4. Waddle They Do Now?: Global warming also affects -- noooooooo! -- penguins
5. We've Got Poll, and We're Super Bad: Polls find Americans worried about energy and climate problems

Vote!