I just returned from a weekend visit with our two sons who live in Brooklyn. On first glance I'm one of those tourists New Yorkers disdain, looking around, taking notes and pictures, slowing down sidewalk traffic. But If they look close they see that I'm not just a tourist. I'm an ethnographer of green space and ideas. What catches my attention mostly is ways this great world city has become more sustainable in the forty years I've been coming there. I'm willing to stretch the meaning of sustainability and for that I'll look in the urban nooks and the crannies for garden spaces, in the bars and restaurants for local and organic products, for small public arts projects along the street, and this time I had some interesting observations. Here are a few notes from my visit:
The Whitney Biennial
Biennials are always a crap shoot, but this time there were two instillations that caught my ears and eye.
In the stairwell from floor to floor there were a set of speakers by Charlemagne Palestine adorned with dirty recycled stuffed animals broadcasting a durge ("sparse, repetitive, ritualistic...") which had been recorded in the stairway itself. It sounded like monks. It sounded like a basement prayer meeting in Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD.
Then there was this great video piece about a commercial an artist named David Robbins made and broadcast on local Milwaukee public access TV. It was a guy sitting at this recycled "open air writing desk" talking as people gathered and drifted away. I liked the desk, which was reconstructed in the Whitney Gallery. I particularly liked his tag line: "The renewable wilderness is within," which became my mantra as I walked the city's streets for four days.
I was glad to see the museum recycling its programs, and, when they move downtown to a new building I understand this one will be recycled as well. I left the Whitney feeling renewed and sustained for my weekend in NYC.
Citi Bike
This was my maiden voyage but I hope not my last. We rented bikes in Fort Greene and rode to Williamsburg. It was very pleasant and maybe only a little more expensive than a cab for three. (One son had his own bike.) There was a dedicated bike path for part of the way, and I wondered if Citi Bike survives whether it will actually drive some of the design of streetscapes and infrastructure in the future. It's hard to understand some of the cultural complaints against Citi Bike, and I'm glad it exists. It calms things down. As for profitability, no one expects the sewer system to make money, and the government subsidizes it. Why not green transportation?
Farming in Brooklyn
The Williamsburg one-acre vacant lot meets all the criteria of a park: people seem to congregate there, there are colorful plantings, public art, interesting spaces to sit (including a tee pee). There's also an impressive raised-bed garden and a farm stand on-site. I talked for a while to one of the creators of the project, a bearded young man thinning the radishes, and he said they hope to maintain the space until the inevitable high rise rises. He says they hope to expand the idea into vacant lots all over the city, and are even pushing for tax breaks for lot owners who allow use. One of my favorite discoveries was the what I'll call "the brick ruin playground," about forty feet of low exposed brick foundation where kids piled loose bricks like legos. As play ground equipment, it's low cost and 100% recycling!
Organic beer
I'm an IPA fan, and when I found Peak organic beer at a bar on Bedford in Williamsburg I settled in to let a Saturday afternoon rain squall pass. Peak's an organic brewery from Maine and it doesn't make it to South Carolina.
Murals
These aren't "green," but they do keep questions about how unsustainable our economic system appears to be (as outlined in Thomas Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century) before the larger public. There are a large number of these political murals around town right now. I saw one on a riverside building as I rode the train from Manhattan back to Brooklyn crossing the Manhattan Bridge, "The French Aristocracy Never Saw it Coming Either," and another large mural on Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene used artwork to make a point: "Achtung baby, here comes the next Great Depression."
Trees+Fences+Little Benches
This project is all along Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene, little metal fences, some with benches on top of them securing tree squares. The sign explains the project. I sat on many of these, as did scores of locals. Sustainable rest. Sustainable hanging out.
John Lane is Professor of English and environmental studies at Wofford College where he also directs the Goodall Center for Environmental Studies. He is the author of 12 books of poetry and prose, including Abandoned Quarry: New & Selected Poems published by Mercer University Press in 2011 and chosen as the SIBA (Southeastern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Poetry Book of the Year. His latest prose books are My Paddle to the Sea (The University of Georgia Press, 2011) and Begin with Rock, End With Water (Mercer University Press, 2012).
