Our common perception of a graffiti artist is a vandalistic rebel who works through a free venue to spread his message. Although there are many incredible artists who sprinkle our streets and alleyways with colorful, astonishing work, they don’t expect much respect from the common passerby for the work they do- until recently. The public environment, as it always has been, is a venue for artists and people to speak out. Recently artists have used graffiti (or the notion of graffiti) to stimulate thoughtful movement through our public space by addressing topics such as climate change, pollution, and consumerism.

The UK’s Paul Curtis, also known as the "Moose," and Brazil’s Alexandre Orion are taking a new approach to graffiti to convey a sense of "clean," and to inspire pedestrians to keep it that way. Their cue comes from the "Wash Me" message commonly wiped away from the back of dirty semi trucks. They call this reverse graffiti, and they create their work by removing soot, sludge, carbon from exhaust, etc., from the wall to reveal a message.

Moose generated a message in a transport tunnel that reads "Go Gently" to remind drivers of the impact their cars have on the planet. "Once you do this, you make people confront whether or not they like people cleaning walls or if they really have a problem with personal expression."

Orion created a work in a Sao Paolo transport tunnel; his is a series of skulls that also depicts the impact drivers’ emissions have on the planet. As a result of this project, the transit authority washed the wall to remove the public expression. In reaction, Orion created the same artwork on the other side of the tunnel. This resulted in the transit authority cleaning the entire tunnel on both sides. They then continued to resist the public work by cleaning every transport tunnel in the city. Not such a bad idea on all accounts.

Another artist, Edina Tokodi, recently created a work of green graffiti in Brooklyn, New York. Edina saw the idea of graffiti as an opportunity to stimulate positive green thoughts and encourage city dwellers to resurface their connection to nature. She decided to maintain the venue while changing the medium. Her work consists of moss installations adhered to the wall where spray paint might commonly be seen. Using this much less harmful medium, she creates images such as prancing animals, and uses existing imagery to create trees and objects found in nature. The beauty of this medium is that it can continue to grow. As moss receives water from the air, condensation, and rain, it continues to grow as the artwork remains fixed to its site.

A few weeks ago I wrote an article alerting you to an international activity that took place on September 21 called Park(ing) Day. As predicted, the event, in its third year, was an overall hit. From a little over a dozen parks last year, this year’s international event tallied up 180 parks in 47 cities worldwide. San Francisco, Park(ing) Day’s hometown, accomplished 53 parks and 5 sidewalk plazas, LA boasted 45 parks, and NYC came in 3rd with 25 parks. If this isn’t enough to make your toes tickle, then view the images of participating parks and activities.

This year, the event gained necessary traction to make it recognizable and eventful. People remembered it from the year before, and were less hesitant to step out of their shell and visit with strangers, and many even took the day off or a few hours off to set up their own parks. As a statement of activism, the event stands to highlight how much public municipal space is designated for private vehicular parking. "Why can’t we park a bench instead of a car?" Well, that is exactly what many did.

According to the New York Times, the event’s irony lies in the fact that "This, after all, is the city where people, surrounded by 3,500 pounds of metal, have fought duels over who is entitled to park a 189-inch-long vehicle at 190 inches of curb space." But on National Park(ing) Day, participants are able to forget that, and see parking spaces as something new. Not only do they take a new form but also the scale of the 190 inches is put into a new perspective, and the space is used in a new, interesting, and appreciated way. In a space where one would park a vehicle that on a regular basis only transports a single passenger, up to 10 people can relax and visit.

The most appreciated factor of this day is the community participation. People are encouraged to visit, relax, and enjoy a minute or two of their day. In cities, we are under the impression that we sacrifice living space for more public space. Yet the majority of public space is designated for semi-private or privately owned public space i.e.: restaurants… The amount of city-owned public green space is getting more and more sparse.

So let’s imagine Park(ing) Day 5 years from now. We could transform streets worldwide into ballparks, or networking corridors. What if we could take up a lane on all city roads and designate it for eased foot traffic, or a place to notice your neighbors, catch-up, and sip a cup of coffee while observing the passing of time? Oh how community could grow…

This November 7-9, Chicago will host the largest GreenBuild Expo in history. Put on by the USGBC (United States Green Building Council), this year over 18,000 attendees will gather to learn about the trends in green construction and get inspired about future projects. In a city aiming to be the greenest, this is a monumental event. On top of it all, GreenBuild will be held in one of Chicago’s LEED certified facilities, the McCormick Place West Building.

According to the USGBC, "Chicago mayor Richard Daley has pledged to make Chicago the most environmentally friendly city in the world. Building on its legacy as a center of American architecture, Chicago was one of the first cities to adopt LEED. Today it has the most LEED projects of any city in the world."

Included in the Expo is an international conference with headlining speakers such as Paul Hawken (author), Sadhu Johnston (Chicago Commissioner of the Department of Environment),  Thom Mayne (Founder and Principal of Morphosis), Maria Atkinson (Global Head of Sustainability at Lend Lease), and former US President Bill Clinton. USGBC President and CEO Rick Fedrizzi on is especially excited about Clinton’s planned appearance:

"This is an unprecedented opportunity for our green building community to hear from one of the greatest philanthropic and environmental leaders of this century. The William J. Clinton Foundation is facilitating a series of global action plans that are addressing some of the most intractable problems of our times — AIDS, economic sustainability as a way to eradicate poverty, the elimination of childhood obesity. His framework has shown the power that groups of individuals have to effect real change."

"Reducing the C02 emissions that lead to climate change is another key area of focus, and it’s being addressed by the Clinton Climate Initiative, with green building as a cornerstone of that effort,” Fedrizzi noted. “We are making a difference, and President Clinton’s unique ability to inspire individual action will add incredible momentum to this important work."

The event has a full schedule of networking and educational opportunities. Whether you are a homeowner, a builder, designer, architect, engineer, and, heck, even a programmer or a banker, there is something applicable to everyone’s life. With over 850 exhibit booths displaying the newest products and technologies, the expo itself will be an educational and eye opening experience. If you leave thinking, "I still can’t do it," then you didn’t pick up enough tools while in attendance.

More than 70% of outdoor space in the city of San Francisco is dedicated to vehicle parking. That leaves little space for public activity, public play, and public human parking. This very idea sparked an inspiration in a few young men in San Francisco who decided to intervene by paying the meter to create temporary public parks. Rebar group is what they call themselves and the event is called PARK(ing).

The first event took place on November 16, 2005, when these guys and their buddies rolled into town with a truck bed full of sod. They identified a parking spot in a part of downtown San Francisco that was lacking any sort of public outdoor human space, put some quarters in the meter (thus renting the downtown real estate), rolled out their sod, parked a bench, and enjoyed their afternoon in the park (until the 2 hour meter ran out). They invited all passing pedestrians to enjoy a little time in the sun with them, and take a rest. “By our calculations, we provided an additional 24,000 square-foot-minutes of public open space that Wednesday afternoon,” says Rebar member.

The critical issue the members of Rebar intend to approach goes beyond the excessive amount of city surface area dedicated to private vehicles. They desire to display the paucity of public outdoor urban human habitat by way of temporarily renting this private vehicular space.

It is nice to have trees in the city to clean our air and increase our exposure to nature amongst the manmade construct, but oftentimes these small plots of earth are fenced off. Why not include a place to enter and rest your feet right next to these trees?

In its third year, Rebar’s spactacular PARK(ing) event will take place in cities all over the world. Friday Sept. 21st will be a day that no one could miss while tromping around a participating city. The Trust for Public Land is heading up National PARK(ing) day in more than a dozen U.S. cities: NYC, LA, DC, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, St. Paul, Boston, Austin, Salt Lake City, Tampa, and Miami (for more info to get involved or add you city… click). Additionally, a slew of international cities are lined up to participate on this monumental day including: London, Paris, Barcelona, Valencia, Munich, Toronto, Melbourne, and others.

So in response to this information, ReBar, myself, and our community are calling on you — artists, activists, and citizens — to temporarily take over private city parking space and turn them into ephemeral public parks. Get in touch with your local coordinator, invent your perfect mini park, and build it on September 21 along with other enthusiast worldwide…and don’t forget to invite you friends!

A Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement under the Clean Water Act was written in 1972 to set a cap on the amount of crud that could be dumped into Lake Michigan annually. The law set a limit on how much pollution companies could legally dump into the lake. The law also prevented any company that was dumping under the limit from increasing their dumped pollution.

Well, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently made an exception to this law for the $3.8 billion expansion of British Petroleum’s (BP’s) Whiting, Indiana plant. In exchange, the expansion is said to provide 80 more permanent jobs and 2,000 temporary construction jobs. The trade-off for this socio-economical exchange is 35% more sludge (a total of 4,925 pounds), and 54% more ammonia (a total of 1,584 pounds) pumped into Lake Michigan daily. Even though this increase in pollution is still below the federal and state limits, it is the first decision in years that allows a company to dump more toxic waste into Lake Michigan.
For a company that considers themselves "Beyond Petroleum" by supporting alternative energy development and environmental protection, they certainly are not displaying much attention beyond their own petroleum processing?

This Whiting, Indiana plant (currently the nation’s 4th largest refinery) was originally built in 1889 by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. We are happy that they are using the same facility, but due to the extra crude oil coming from Canada, BP can’t process the expanded volume in the same "small" plant. Therefore, the expansion became the obvious solution. The state excused this severe hike in pollution by saying the project will provide more jobs and security of oil suppliers to the Midwestern United States.

This is what the trade-off actually is: this "toxic sludge" is a cocktail of concentrated heavy metals and suspended solids that does not-so-nicely mix with our fresh-water swimming lakes. The ammonia becomes a problem when it provides a habitat for healthy algae bloom, thus killing the native fish, and altering the aquaculture of the fresh water.

Since the public announcement of the EPA permit grant in mid-June, people are also unhappy with the way these events rolled out. An environmental group, the Alliance for the Great Lakes, filed a petition asking Indiana’s Office of Environmental Adjudication to suspend the permit and reopen the appeal process due to inadequate public scrutiny. When the permit draft was made available for review, many organizations submitted comments on it. Yet, when the final permit was made available, these organizations were not informed on the proper date, nor were they informed of the appeal process. Now the Indiana Department of Environmental Management claims that the appeal process is closed because it is 15 days past the post date of the final permit. Over 70,000 people across the Great Lakes and the nation have signed this petition.

Additionally, Great Lakes supporters spread out over BP stations all over the Midwest region handing out flyers explaining the situation and requesting that customers fill up elsewhere. As this momentum builds, awareness speads, and hopefully BP will either change their ways or admit that they are beyond caring about the Great Lakes. We prefer the former to the later.

To sign the petition yourself go to:
Environment Michigan

Ever since the French monk Dom Perignon searched for the perfect closure for his new sparking wine in the early 16oos, the cork stopper has been a cultural staple that is synonymous with the celebration of opening a new bottle of wine. Since the new millennium, worldwide wine production has become a larger and more popular industry. New wine producing regions are moving towards alternative wine closures, therefore putting the entire cork industry at great risk. Can anyone remember why we started putting plastic, rubber, and foam “corks” into our wine bottles? I was always told one of two things: a more controlled (more synthetic) material allows for more stringent product, and that cork was scarce so we don’t want to destroy the cork forests. The former is a problem that has since been solved, and the later is hardly the case. Cork is a naturally sustainable material and therefore commercialization of it is easy on nature- not a single tree has to be cut down.

Cork, as we know it, comes from the outer cell layer of the bark on cork oak trees (Quercus Suber). The stopper layer is easily separated from the mother cells when the connecting layer (phelogen) becomes brittle. Once the bark (cork) is stripped off the tree in the late string and early summer, it renews itself naturally. An added bonus: each time cork is harvested, the tree stores more CO2 as a result of regenerating. It is reported that the tree stores 3-5 times more CO2 when harvested regularly.
The cork industry has found its home for centuries in the Mediterranean. Portugal has the world’s largest cork industry, yet it is an important forest crop to Italy, Spain, Algeria, France, Tunisia, and Morocco. The forests cover nearly 2.7 million hectares in total, and produce over 15 billion cork stoppers.

What’s the news? Due to “cork” alternatives, the cork industry is losing its intrigue as a cultural staple for wine bottle closures. The World Wide Fund reports that cork sales in the wine industry fell 20% between 2000 and 2005. Portugal has reported a severe drop in cork stoppers exported to Australia and the U.S. “New consumer trends and winemaking techniques, as well as more competitive markets, have led producers to look for more technical or cheaper closures – plastic ‘corks’ and metal screw tops”. Despite the optimal performance of cork as a stopper material- high elasticity, natural insulatinsulating qualities, light weight, and durability - the plastic and metal screw tops are becoming more accepted as standard wine closures to us consumers.

This increase in market share is leading to a decline in the global cork market, and thus degradation of cork oak forests that have (and could for years to come) provided one of the most diverse ecosystems and community-based industries of the region. They report that this could potentially lead to a loss of 60,000 jobs, and thus could severely harm the biodiversity of the forests.

Although the market demand for cork is slowly shifting to flooring and wall coverings, wine stoppers still account for about 70% of the industry profits. Whatever the reason might be, there is a reason that we still call a cork a cork, synthetic or woody. "We’re fighting back,” says Antonio Amorim, third generation owner of one of Portugals largest wine stopper producers. "We may have lost market share in some places but we are gaining in others.” "The shares, which shot up 79 percent in the past two years, are set to rise more as he wins back customers by virtually eliminating cork taint," said analyst Sonia Baldeira.

To help: do your best to find wine bottles that sustain the true cork community’s integrity and unscrew the cork.

To see more intensive case studies and future scenarios, view this pdf file.

For more information:

Amorim Corkfacts

WWF: Changing Markets

Amorim Cork

Images source: Amorim Corkfacts

U.S. National Bird: image courtesy of Ackerlund's Guide ServiceYesterday, June 28, 2007 the Interior Department took the American Bald Eagle off the Endangered Species List. After 40 years of living threatened and lonely, the Center for Biological Diversity released a report stating that there are over 11,000 pairs in the contiguous U.S. This is a startling number when compared to the all-time low of only 417 pairs in the 60’s. This population's decimation was always said to be due to hunting, habitat destruction, and the use of DDT on our agricultural crops. For so many years it was an honor and a surprise to spot a Bald Eagle and know you were in the presence of such a survivor, but what will happen to their flourishing population when asked to remove their “Federally Protected Property” sign from their nest?

From an FWS press release June 28, 2007 Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne states:

After years of careful study, public comment and planning, the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are confident in the future security of the American Bald Eagle," Kempthorne said. "From this point forward, we will work to ensure that the eagle never again needs the protection of the Endangered Species Act.

The good news is that earlier in June, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service implemented the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and published a set of National Bald Eagle Management Guidelines. These rules protect the birds from developers who might be tempted to destroy their nests. Also, to stabilize this healthy, flourishing population, the Service is establishing a permit program that will allow a limited take of bald and golden eagles. This means we can still remove some from the wild by permit, but without permit we are prohibited to take, sell, kill, or harm eagles.

More good news is that we have a month to adjust to the fact that there are more Bald Eagles out there than most of us thought. The removal of the Bald Eagle from the list will be official thirty days after publication.

The original weakened population was due to widespread use of DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), the first modern agricultural pesticide used widely after World War II. The eagles began laying eggs with weakened shells, which put a great stress on the population. When it finally reached the low point of 417 pair, protection was set in place in 1967. The Endangered Species Act followed, and was initiated in 1973, headlining the Bald Eagle as one of the first species.

The fact that the population has risen due to this protection is a national model for cooperation with environmental protection laws. Yet the question is, if we were doing so well, why stop protecting them? And, I hate to say it, but if we take them off the list and dilute the penalty, will the population continue to flourish? Certain states with a lower population are requesting to keep their state protected under the Endangered Species Act, but they have been denied thus far. Arizona governor Janet Napolitano requested their exemption, saying Arizona's native populations (which use eagle feathers for ceremonial purposes) were not adequately consulted. That request was denied, saying the region had "the appropriate number of eagles" and that Arizona's eagles did not meet the criteria to be protected as a distinct population segment.

What will happen? We will have to find out, but there is a way to communicate with the top dogs in charge. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is currently accepting public comments on this topic.
Comments on the monitoring plan must be received 90 days after publication in the Federal Register. Comments may be sent by mail to Bald Eagle Post-Delisting Monitoring Plan Comments, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Rock Island Field Office, 1511 47th Avenue, Moline, Illinois 61265. Comments may also be transmitted electronically to baldeaglePDM@fws.gov or by following the instructions at the Federal eRulemaking Portal: .

A little history on DDT, I thought you might like to know:

• In World War II it was used as a mosquito repellant the prevent the spreading of disease like malaria and typhus
• Paul Hermann Muller won the Nobel Prize in 1948 “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against arthropods”.
• Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, which catalogued DDT as the most detrimental pesticide in terms on environmental impacts. Her
• Silent Spring let to a public outcry that eventually got DDT banned in the U.S.

See also:

Environmental Defense, "Eagle's Return Shows Species Law Works"

Devils Lake installation: image courtesy of Green Museum

There is a little family of asexual plants commonly known as duckweed, and otherwise known in the botanical world as lemnaceae. These smallest flowering plants are lean, lime-green, clean, eating machines. Lemna is the most common of this family, and has quite a profound impact for its size. Each plant has one paper thin leaf the size of the tip of an eraser. They thrive in freshwater lakes, streams, and ponds high in nitrogen, ammonias, and phosphorus. As they feed on these “excess nutrients” the tiny plants help remediate the water on which they live atop.

Though these lime-green plants are tiny, there is no need to call them fragile. They can grow in full sunshine or dense shade, and they endure a challenging range of ph levels. They hibernate during the cold months at the bottom of their watershed and, come May, the plant “springs” up and gets to work cleaning its ecosystem. This tiny plant has been known to cover bodies the size of football fields in just a couple months. It goes unsaid that these tiny soldiers are friend and not foe when it comes to water remediation.

When artist and engineer Viet Ngo established a company back in 1983 called Lemna International that applauds and utilizes the capabilities of these mini soldiers, we weren’t surprised. Ngo, a first-generation Vietnamese immigrant, and his colleagues got a little fame when they designed a carefully engineered art installation in 1990 on Devils Lake, ND. Funded by the EPA, they designed and implemented the beautiful 50 acre, 9 channel, intestine-like system that extracted all detrimental phosphorus, nitrogen, and algae from the wetland before the water reached a bay of Devils Lake. This $50 million project encouraged the group of designers, artists, and engineers to combine the profoundly simple yet complex water remediation technology with other environmental infrastructure problems to clean up the earth. Over 25 years later, the company is managing its success with innovation, consciousness, and integrity.

Lemna International designs environmentally responsible and economical wastewater treatment technologies that naturally clean our polluted waterways. They design for everything form dams to freshwater remediation to drinking water treatment plants, pipelines, and distribution systems. Based in Minneapolis, MN the company has designed and implemented over 300 projects in 16 countries.

The company does not stop at only providing us with clean water. They make sure our water stays clean by removing any harmful waste and either safely putting it in landfills built to international standards, or incinerating it to generate electricity and heat in facilities equipped with air pollution control systems. Their impressive profile of clients ranges from industrial food manufacturers and tire plants to hospitals. They additionally serve a number of cities worldwide.

As the company gained momentum with their patented water remediation technology, they have branched out into additional sectors of environmental infrastructure including transportation, alternative energy, and general infrastructure. Like the lean, lime-green, clean, machines that duckweed are, Lemna International is actively seeking to fix any environmental problem a private or public client might have with an ingenious and unique solution!

Recent headlines have been telling us about a class of chemical detergents or surfactants (nonylphenol ethoxylates, NPE’s) found in many industrial and household cleaners that have been reported to cause male fish to develop female characteristics. This hormone instability is commonly due to foreign “hormone disruptors”. The hormone instability occurs when a foreign chemical is introduced to the body and imitates our natural hormones. The toxins bind to the same sites in our body where natural hormones bind, therein blocking the site from our natural hormones.

This chemical disruption is not going to facilitate spawning! Do we dare to question what these chemicals are doing to us? A World Wildlife Foundation Briefing on the chemical states that "NPEs has been shown to mimic the action of the female hormone oestrogen, and it is a potential factor in the increasing incidence of reproductive organ disorders and decreasing sperm counts in men."

The Sierra Club has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to ban this compound in areas where wastewater treatment plants are not equipped to extract it. The greater question is, how is it getting into our waterways and estuaries and effecting wildlife? In this I respond with: water is the most abundant molecule on earth, it is also referred to as the universal solvent. Combine these two facts and we get a lot of water that is not clean.

The World Wildlife Foundation report on how NPEs are reaching our water environment:

• 37% NPEs via the sewer system
• 46% via sludge spreading on agricultural land

Chemical pollutants that cause hazardous runoff come from lawn fertilizers, industrial pesticides, household cleaners, leaky tailpipes, industrial waste, store byproduct (such as a drycleaners), this runoff is not good. If you take this information inside with the newspaper, you realize that the pollution in your home is due to off gassing from materials you bring in that were treated with chemicals (everything from carpet to magazines) and cleaning products.

So here is the simple solution: just read your labels. We can’t eradicate chemical pollution immediately, but we can start acting consciously by purchasing safe and simple cleaning products, fertilizers, and food. A rule to shop by, if you can’t read it, don’t eat it (remember that 46% of this stuff is spread on our industrial farms-buy organic), and if you can’t pronounce it, don’t spray it on your counter (when you wash your hands this water goes down the drain to the treatment plant…).

One of the scariest commercials on TV right now is for a cleaning company whose products contain compounds we should not come in oral contact with. It shows the mom cleaning the countertop with this product then her child eating cookies from a box that just tipped over onto the same countertop. The mom is relieved because she just cleaned the counter from harmful bacteria, but simultaneously she could have put harmful chemicals on it that are equally as disrupting to her child’s health.

One sixth of the world’s population does not have access to safe drinking water. Most water born problems are due to bacteria that cause them to contract harmful diseases. We don’t need to add chemical hormone disruption to this list. In purchasing safe cleaning products, food, and supporting safe practices we are creating a safer living environment, reducing pollution in our waterways, enabling biodiversity, promoting natural reproduction, and helping to provide safer drinking water for the entire world.

WWF: Nonylphenol Ethoxylates (NPE)

The Green Report: Ban Sought on Detergent Ingredient

Image Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Editor's note: Please welcome Green Options' newest writer, Elizabeth Redmond. Elizabeth is a sustainable designer working in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her past experiences include working with her sister Sara Snow on a Discovery Health TV series called Get Fresh with Sara Snow, where she researched sustainability and built environment content.

I asked Elizabeth to give me an "elevator pitch" of her focus here at Green Options. Her response:

Today's green products and services seem to be an eclectic collection of "lighter tread". I propose that we begin to design and interact with products and systems that encourage heavy treading, where a heavy active footprint is one step in the right direction without a half step in the other. My objective is to tell you how things work, and enable you with the information to make responsible, and conscious decisions about society, lifestyle, health, and sustainability.

More than tornadoes, hurricanes, snow, or cold weather itself, heat is the number one weather related cause of death in the United States. So urban dwellers (that means half of us in this world) beware! Much of our urban heat is due to a phenomena called the Urban Heat Island effect. An Urban Heat Island is a metropolitan zone that is warmer than the surrounding, less developed area. The EPA reports that "On hot summer days, urban air can be 2-10°F [2-6°C] hotter than the surrounding countryside”. What does this mean? It’s going to be a hot summer, but luckily we can do a couple of things to help cool your stroll down the sidewalk.

First, how does this phenomena work? It is all about the energy transfer of solar radiation to our built environment. Lets go back to high school physics and review. All you need to know is that heat from the sun (radiation) gets stored in our constructed impervious and dark surfaces such as concrete and pavement (insulators). During the day these surfaces of high heat capacity collectively act as a massive heat energy reservoir. (I.e.: concrete can retain nearly 2000 times the heat as an equivalent volume of air). Next, the heat on the surface of these materials mixes with the already hot air and you experience a hot gust that feels dense enough to chew on (convection).

About 5 hours after sunset is when we experience the greatest heat discrepancy. The stored heat seeps out of the concrete to be relieved by the cool air (conduction) and dissipates into the environment to raise our nightly air temperature. As you can tell, these thermally insulating materials that dominate city surface construction make it really darn hot for us.

What are the consequences?

1. We pump up the air conditioner and demand more electricity from the grid.
2. We sweat more and have to cool off, so we take more showers increasing our demand on the municipal water supply.
3. We opt for quick and comfortable transit- our car or a cab instead of the subway
4. We drink more ice- demanding more energy to cool that freezer down enough.

You can see where this is going. More heat equals more energy consumed for the comfort of our urban habitat. The Urban Heat Island Group estimates that the Los Angeles Heat Island costs the city $100 million in energy annually. According to the UN, close to half of the worlds population is living in urban areas today. So for that half of us living in cities, here are a couple of things we can do to control the city heat and why!

1. Plant More Plants: living plants inhale CO2, use it in photosynthesis to make sugars aka "fuel", and exhale O2 into the air. They are nature’s fuel cell and luckily they like our exhaust (but this is no excuse to emit more). Plants also intercept solar radiation and cool the air through evaporitization.
2. Raise the Green Roof: Green roofs benefit our environment as the aforementioned plants do; and, since they are so high up they intercept the heat before it can even reach our sidewalks. Encourage green roof development in your city, or just go do some guerrilla plant parenting on the roof of your building. Plus, what could better accompany your rooftop BBQ than some friends, beverages, and plants.
3. Say no to Freon: Turn your thermostat 2°F. I do live in Michigan so I feel you, Houston: just try adjusting your thermostat by 1°F and help the city out. You will actively be reducing the risk of another black out or severe heat wave.
4. Install a Rain Barrel (in your back yard or on the rooftop): It gives you free water from nature! You will conserve energy by not demanding it from the city municipal supply, and mitigate the erosion of harmful pesticides and fertilizers into the water table.
5. Plant a Bioswale or Rain Garden: These are essentially green roofs on the ground. They filter rainwater and help to return clean water to the water table. In return our lakes, rivers, and oceans are cleaner, creating a cleaner evaporitization cycle, and thus cleaner air.
6. Lay Pervious Pavement: This pavement allows the ground to breathe! It also filters rainwater as the aforementioned rain gardens. This might not be something you install on your own but it can certainly be encouraged at your office, or in your city.
7. Take Public Transportation, or even better, Ride a Bike: Every bit of carbon dioxide we can keep out of the air this summer will make a big difference.

With these eco-effective tools to cool and clean the air this summer, you are on your way to an enjoyable commute to work, walk in the park, and rooftop BBQ.