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Re: [lofo List] NYT: A Drawback to Urban Green Spaces (really?)
Just to let everyone know that Clear Creek Organics portion of Dad's Organic
Market is open as of 1:00 pm Jan 25th. We have local meat and deli products
for sale there and look forward to having everyone visit and give us feed
back as to where we can expand our line.
Gene Kessler
----- Original Message -----
From: "Daryl Hepting" <hepting@cs.uregina.ca>
To: "Local Food Directory Project" <lofo@cs.uregina.ca>
Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 10:53
Subject: [lofo List] NYT: A Drawback to Urban Green Spaces (really?)
Hi;
I read the following from last week in the NY Times. This article and the
comments online seem
to miss the point: not that green spaces are not invaluable, but we cannot
create "green space"
like that alone will make it a good thing. If we manage it in a non-green
way, the space becomes
less green. In Regina, I wonder how the Wascana Centre Authority approaches
this. Anyone care
to add to this? I think that irrigation is done with lake water, but riding
mowers are certainly
present in summer, keeping the grass looking neat. What about assigning
lawn maintenance to some
herbivores - eating more local plant species instead of the modern grass
species (which is native
to where?).
Best regards,
Daryl
--
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/a-drawback-to-urban-green-spaces/A
Drawback to Urban Green Spaces
By SINDYA N. BHANOO
While city dwellers are always clamoring for more green space, urban parks
may not always be as “green” as they seem.
A study on urban green space says that the irrigation, fertilizer, mowing
and leaf blowing all add up, emitting more carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases than the spaces absorb. The study has been accepted for
publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American
Geophysical Union.
“Lawns weren’t initially invented to store greenhouse gases — they have a
lot of other purposes such as recreation,” said Claudia Czimczik, a
researcher at University of California, Irvine, and a co-author of the
study. “But there is a lot of recent political discussions about lawns as
carbon sinks, and if that is the case we need to consider the whole
package.”
Dr. Czimczik and her colleagues analyzed the grass in four parks in Irvine,
which include both open lawns with picnic tables and athletic fields.
They found that in open lawns, the use of fertilizers, which emit
heat-trapping nitrous oxide, offsets 10 to 30 percent of the carbon dioxide
captured and stored. And the fuel used in mowing and leaf-blowing releases
four times more carbon dioxide than the lawns soak up.
Athletic fields fare even worse because they require more maintenance.
Dr. Czimczik cautioned that her study was a small one conducted only in
Southern California, an area where water has to be transported from afar and
lawns have to be maintained year-round because of the warm climate.
Further research will have to be done, she said, to understand the dynamics
of lawns nationwide.
“California is an exception,” she said. “But it does make a case to
understand that while there are a lot of positive things that come from
green space, maybe we don’t need as much, or maybe it doesn’t have to be
perfectly green.”
Or maybe, she added, “we should use push mowers.”
Homeowners interested in “greening” their own lawns can learn more from the
Environmental Protection Agency’s GreenScapes program, which encourages
people to consider land, water, air, and energy use in their lawn
maintenance.
The E.P.A. has also set standards requiring new lawn mowers and other
machines with spark-ignition engines to produce 35 percent fewer emissions
starting in 2011.
--
Daryl H. Hepting, Ph.D.
Associate Professor * Computer Science Department * CW 308.22
University of Regina * Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada S4S 0A2
dhh@cs.uregina.ca * http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~hepting
tel: (306) 585-5210 * fax: (306) 585-4745 * cell: (306) 596-6312
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