by admin | Sep 1, 2014 | Books, Climate, Environment, Government, Political philosophy, Science, Urban Planning
In an era of congressional gridlock, with so little productive activity coming out of Washington that many people have begun to wonder if federal government is good for anything, the best models often work quietly in the shadows—and they may not even work primarily...
by admin | Aug 9, 2014 | Activism, Chicago, Environment, Urban forest, Urban Planning
Would you imagine that the trees in the metropolitan Chicago region provide compensatory value of $51.2 billion? This is the calculation produced through i-Tree, a free software program provided by the U.S. Forest Service to estimate tree canopy and the ecological...
by admin | Aug 7, 2014 | Disaster, Disaster policy, Public safety, Urban Planning
I’ll keep this short because it’s really all about listening to a half-hour video from Google Hangout produced by the Salt Lake Tribune yesterday, if you care to watch and listen. There was a landslide in North Salt Lake, Utah, earlier this week, so the...
by admin | Jul 15, 2014 | Disaster, Disaster policy, Environment, Urban forest, Urban Planning
For the last two or three years, if not longer, I have been engaged in an ongoing discussion with people from the U.S. Forest Service and the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) about the role of trees in post-disaster recovery. Phillip Rodbell, an urban and...
by admin | Jul 10, 2014 | Disaster, Disaster policy, Environment, Public safety, Urban Planning
I won’t go into great detail, just enough to entice you to click the link below to watch the interview I conducted with Scott Davis, formerly director of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Recovery regarding Sandy recovery operations and...
by admin | Jun 29, 2014 | Activism, Chicago, Urban Planning
Bridges come in many forms. There are 37 viaducts along the Bloomingdale Trail, the centerpiece of The 606 Project. It’s a northwest side Chicago project whose progress I have featured on this blog more than once in the past. Those viaducts are physical bridges that...