Category: Environment

December 7, 2012 / / Environment
February 8, 2011 / / Environment

Crown Heights lies at the center of Brooklyn’s Caribbean community, home to one of the largest expatriate populations in the US with immigrants from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Haiti, and elsewhere. Nostrand Avenue, running north-south through Crown Heights, is dotted with roti shops and groceries, making it an ideal place to shop for West Indian ingredients.

November 15, 2010 / / Environment

The increasingly-popular CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, is a method by which members buy into a farm’s harvest before the season begins. In exchange for their funding, they receive a portion of the farm’s produce, eggs, or other products throughout the year. But what do you get in the winter? And how does one go about joining?

August 13, 2010 / / Environment

Signs advertising government food subsidy programs dot the awnings and windows of the small and decrepit mini-grocers that line poverty stricken streets throughout Brooklyn, where rotting produce and goods packed with corn syrup collect dust. With a new federal cut to food stamp subsidies signed into law this week, how can Brooklyn retailers provide better food to it’s most vulnerable citizens rather than just continue to cut corners?

September 22, 2009 / / Environment
July 8, 2009 / / Environment

At first sight it’s obvious that the Gowanus Canal is filthy. Yet, residents continue to congregate around it, canoe across it, build vessels to tour it, and wonder if its beauty will ever again surpass its usefulness as an industrial center. Efforts to revitalize expansive industrial lots in the area have advanced, with bars, restaurants and music venues opening along Second and Third Avenues. Artists work in nearby studios, and the BKLYN Yard, a venue alongside the canal, draws young people from all over the city to afternoon dance parties, barbecues and swap meets on summer weekends. However, over 150 years of heavy industrial activity combined with sewage and storm water run-off, and its proximity to factories and gas refineries have made the canal a site of controversy since the Environmental Protection Agency announced in April that the waterway is a candidate for the Superfund National Priorities List.

July 4, 2009 / / Environment

Thirty years later, on our Independence Day Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech is still apt. The televised warning to Americans was given just shy of 30 years ago on July 15, 1979 and quickly derided by republicans for attacking American values, government and way of life.