Bluebird

Back in the Fog

We be back in the summer NoCal fog after those steamy 90-plus temps of Wisco. When traveling back east, I always say we're on Barcelona time, as we get up and stay up later, which is about the time we do the same at home. It makes it easier upon reentry to the Pacific Zone, except when there's a 6:00 am flight like yesterday. Waking up at four just about did me in.

Life writ large in the vastness

January 24, 2012, 6:11 PM

In Winter Weather, Flying to Find Wolves

By JOHN VUCETICH

John VucetichApproaching Isle Royale in winter snow and fog.

John Vucetich, a wildlife ecologist from Michigan Technological University, leads the wolf-moose Winter Study at Isle Royale National Park.

Friday, Jan. 20

“Dispatch, Beaver 1, departing Shagawa Lake, eastbound for Washington Harbor, Isle Royale, two aboard, four hours fuel,” said Pat Lowe, a United States Forest Service pilot. We were supposed to fly to Isle Royale on Jan. 17, but for three days, low clouds, snow and then high winds kept us waiting impatiently on the shore in Ely, Minn. It was clear, calm and cold (minus 18 degrees Fahrenheit) this morning as Pat and I lifted off from Shagawa. Rolf Peterson, a co-researcher, and Don Glazer, our Winter Study pilot, were 30 minutes ahead in the Flagship, our tiny research plane. In an hour we landed on Lake Superior ice.

The island was loosely veiled by low gray clouds — a collaboration of the west wind and moist lake air. Waves lapped on ice-covered rocks that separate Lake Superior from the forest. That forest has insights to share, if we pay attention.

 

JOHN VUCETICH

Posts From Isle Royale

• Preparing to Live With Wolves

The Forest Service plane dropped our gear on the ice and took off. It’s been six months since I was last here, and it is good to be back. It is comfortable and familiar — the feeling of being alive that only minus 5 degrees Fahrenheit can bring, the feeling of openness that comes from standing on several square miles of frozen ice, and the feeling of content from being among so many spruce and cedar trees. Wilderness is not just part of the world in which we live — it is a part of us.

There is a great deal to do. Knock holes in the ice for water. Secure the Flagship to the ice. Bring a snowmobile and several generators to life. Fire up the communications systems. Make sure the refueling system is working. Start a fire in the cabin. Haul gear from the harbor up to the cabin. The chores will keep us busy all night and into the morning. We can’t begin to make observations until we’ve prepared at least some of the essential gear.

John VucetichUnloading supplies on the ice of Washington Harbor at Isle Royale.

Saturday, Jan. 21

We worked diligently because the weather was deteriorating, and we wanted to get a flight in before the snow clouds we could see building began to unload their contents. By noon we were ready to fly.

Where do you begin when you don’t know what you may find, when you know you won’t have much time and when you need to keep an eye on the weather? We began with the south shore, where wolves spend a great deal of time looking for moose. In the flat light filtering through thick clouds, we strained to spot wolf tracks. Finally we saw the tracks of a lone wolf at Long Point. Several miles to the northeast, they hooked up with tracks of what seemed to be three wolves that had spent the night on a rocky crag near Atwood beach. They didn’t look particularly fresh, so we left seeking better prospects. At Senter point we found more tracks, most likely from the same group of wolves.

We flew northeast, listening through headsets for telemetry signals from the radio-collared wolves and staring out the cockpit window for wolf tracks that might cut across any creek, drainage or inland lake. An hour passed without another clue. Plenty of time to wonder: Are three wolves all that remain here in what had been Middle Pack (MP) territory? If they are MP wolves, none of them is collared. It could take days to find them.

Then comes a beep, and another and another. Within a few minutes we were circling over the alpha male of Chippewa Harbor Pack (CHP). He is traveling southwest through a swamp near Lane Cove with four other wolves.

John VucetichWolves of Chippewa Harbor Pack following their alpha male.

Last year CHP had nine wolves. One of them, Romeo, was not among them today. He’d tried to disperse from his natal pack during the winter of 2010, but returned home without success and spend the winter of 2011 with CHP. Had he now taken control of territory that once belonged to Middle Pack? Or was he just temporarily away from CHP? Even though Romeo wears a radio collar, we were unable to find him before having to land as falling snow began to blanket the forests.

Sunday, Jan. 23

Big, wet, heavy snowflakes let us sleep in. We won’t be able to fly again until the snow clears.

 

PDX Electric Avenue

November 7, 2011, 4:39 pm

In Portland, Ore., Being an E.V. Pioneer Brings Unforeseen Challenges

By KEN BELSON

Don Ryan/Associated PressVisitors at the dedication of Electric Avenue on Aug. 16.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Sightings of the Nissan Leaf are a regular occurrence here on streets and freeways. Residents are retrofitting their older cars to run purely on electricity. D.C. fast chargers are being installed. And in August, a block on the campus of Portland State University became Electric Avenue.

Nearly three months on, the academics, city officials and company executives who built and are monitoring the Electric Avenue project, consisting of a one-way street with six chargers and parking exclusively for electric vehicles, have started to tally the many challenges to promoting electric transportation.

At E.V. Roadmap 4: Getting to a Million, a two-day workshop on electric vehicles held here last week, a five-person panel outlined issues large and small.

Charlie Allcock, the director of economic development at Portland General Electric, the utility that helped build Electric Avenue, said that more direct lighting was needed to ensure that users could see the plug ports on their cars when recharging. The designers, he said, did not factor in that people would be plugging in at night and in the rain and fog.

They also did not expect the chargers to be easy targets for graffiti artists or the pigeons that perched along a sky bridge that paralleled the street. After the chargers became dirty, the board realized that it had not assigned a specific person to look after them. A worker in the parking lot across the street has since been deputized with keeping them clean.

“It was so obvious, we missed it,” said George Beard, who helped spearhead the Electric Avenue project and organized last week’s conference, which was attended by government and industry officials from Georgia, Indiana and Colorado, among other states. “No one had operational responsibility for this, so we had to keep an eye on it.”

Mr. Allcock added that while there was a widely acknowledged industry standard for electric chargers, each company interpreted it differently. Each charging unit, for example, had a different interface, so drivers had to learn how to use them all. The chargers also synched with the vehicles in different ways and, when the units were in sleep mode, had different ways of rebooting.

Rani Boyle, a planner in the Planning, Sustainability and Real Estate division at the university, said that the charger manufacturers were asked not to put any advertisements on their machines or issue any member cards to consumers.

“In essence, we were asking them to make the machines dumber than the companies wanted,” she said. “It didn’t fit all the business models out there.”

Katya Dillman, a transportation policy adviser for Portland’s mayor, Sam Adams, said that the city was starting to track parking violations by type to determine whether and how often drivers of gasoline-powered cars parked illegally in spots reserved for electric vehicles.

Mr. Allcock of Portland General Electric raised another issue: how to notify drivers that the chargers were there. The utility is trying to determine where to place signs on Interstate 5 and other major roads to guide drivers to Electric Avenue. The project’s chargers also do not yet register on many GPS systems.

“Once you install them, you have to figure out how to get them up,” he said.

Taking our temperature

Pine Trees Help Reconstruct a Long-Ago Drought

November 7, 2011, 1:26 pm

By JUSTIN GILLIS

Daniel Griffin/Laboratory of Tree-Ring ResearchA cross section of a bristlecone pine with its annual growth rings.

As they struggle to understand modern climate change, scientists have long realized the importance of reconstructing past climate variability. That’s the only way to gain a sense of perspective, to understand how anomalous modern climate events are or aren’t.

Yet the field of “paleoclimatology” has been plagued by controversy, with reconstructions of past temperatures emerging as a particular target for climate-change contrarians.

The essential problem, of course, is that the temperature record that tells us the Earth is warming goes back only to about 1850, when observation stations systematically began keeping such data, and most other climate records are even shorter and spottier. Reconstructing climates prior to 1850 requires the use of “proxies” for temperature and rainfall, like tree rings and pollen grains in lake sediments.

Now comes a new installment in this literature that may be sobering for many people, particularly in the American Southwest. Led by Cody C. Routson, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, the paper supplies strong evidence of a half-century “megadrought” in the Southwest that occurred in the second century, with the driest stretch being a 25-year period from A.D. 148 to 173. (A summary of the paper is here, and readers with American Geophysical Union credentials can get the full paper here. A news release about the paper is here.)

Mr. Routson and his co-authors, Connie A. Woodhouse and Jonathan T. Overpeck, focused on bristlecone pines, the longest-lived of all trees. They found a stand near Summitville, Colo., covering more than 2,000 years, and were able to obtain specimens of dead wood and thin cores from living trees. (The trees were not harmed by the research.)

Analyzing tree rings and matching them with previous work, they found what they consider to be compelling evidence a long dry spell in the Southwest stretching through the first four centuries of the Christian era and punctuated by more acute dry stretches.

Scientists already knew the Southwest was prone to long, severe megadroughts far worse than anything that has happened there since European settlement of the region began. Some of the same scientists involved in this work helped document such a drought in the medieval era. And some previous research had already pointed toward the likelihood of a second-century megadrought. But with the fresh evidence, the Arizona scientists believe the case is nailed.

“Our record brings these previous studies together to show that is event was indeed real and widespread,” Mr. Routson told me by e-mail.

Evidence of the causes is of course quite thin, but the scientists speculate that one factor may have been a broad pattern of warmth in the Northern Hemisphere, possibly caused by an uptick in the sun’s energy output. This warm spell is often called the “Roman Warm Period,” and while it has not been definitively proven to exist, evidence for the idea is growing.

Climate-change contrarians love to cite the Roman Warm Period and its counterpart, the Medieval Warm Period, as proof that there is nothing unusual about today’s rising temperatures. But mainstream climate scientists say these earlier episodes, while intriguing, do not necessarily shed light on the question of whether modern-day human activity is causing the climate to warm, as their evidence suggests it is.

“The evidence for human-induced warming is overwhelming, but not the focus of this study,” Mr. Routson said.

Scientists expect temperatures in the coming century to rise substantially compared with these earlier warm periods. Since the earlier periods were associated with severe droughts and climate disruptions in some parts of the world, they warn of a potential replay — except that the coming megadroughts could be worse.

For people in the Southwest, living through a severe drought and its consequences right now, that cannot be good news. “Showing that the most extreme droughts in the Southwest have predominantly occurred during warmer intervals in our past raises important questions about what we should expect in an even warmer future,” Mr. Routson said.

Iceberg calving

 

Massive new iceberg forming -- right now -- in Antarctica

November 4, 2011 |  4:36 pm

 

A new iceberg is forming in western Antarctica -- set to break off from the Pine Island Glacier -- and it's a big one. When the massive chunk of ice is finally fully separated from its even more massive parent chunk of ice, it will measure about 308 square miles, scientists say, about the same size as New York City.

The formation of an iceberg is called "calving," and while it's a semi-regular event -- and likely not related to global warming -- it's still pretty cool. After all, icebergs this big calve off only about once every 10 years.

So what would it be like to see an iceberg up close in the process of calving? In an interview with The Times, Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, said it would be noisy and dramatic.

"When icebergs calve off, it's actually quite a loud noise," she said. "It would definitely be something you would hear — like a loud cracking sound — and visually it would be interesting too because there would be different pieces calving off at the same time and some of them would end up turning upside down and sideways."

She added that it would be fun to see only if one were watching a significant distance from the crack.

"If you were standing in the midst of it, you would be in a great deal of danger," she said.

The people at NASA are especially excited about this iceberg because they happened to catch it in the midst of its calving.

In mid-October, a team of scientists flew to the Pine Island Glacier as part of a project called Operation IceBridge, which NASA describes as "the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown." The scientists were planning to take regularly scheduled measurements of the ice shelf in western Antarctica, when they happened to notice a giant crack in the ice.

"A lot of times when you’re in science, you don’t get a chance to catch the big stories as they happen because you’re not there at the right place at the right time," John Sonntag, instrument team lead for Operation IceBridge, said in a statement. The operation is based at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "But this time we were."

The crack, which formed between the end of September and early October, is fairly dramatic. It's 18 miles long, with shoulders about 820 feet apart at the rift's widest. The crack is about 260 feet wide along most of its length.

In the video above, Sonntag explains that the process of an iceberg calving is a discrete event, and it takes place over just a few weeks. "We just happened to be here at the right window of time to capture it," he says.

Say it isn't so!

Climate change could shrink chocolate production: report

October 12, 2011 |  8:00 am

 

Scientists say climate change will eventually claim many victims -– including, according to a new report, chocolate.

As temperatures increase and weather trends change, the main growing regions for cocoa could shrink drastically, according to new research from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture.

Ghana and the Ivory Coast –- which produce more than half of the global cocoa supply –- could take a major hit by 2050.

Currently, the optimal locations to grow the crop are about 330 feet to 820 feet above sea level, with temperatures of about 72 degrees Fahrenheit to 77 degrees. That range will soar to 1,500 feet to 1,640 feet in four decades to compensate for hotter weather.

Cocoa production, which reached about $9 billion from 2008 to 2009 and accounts for 7.5% of the Ivory Coast’s gross domestic product and 3.4% of Ghana’s, could be in for a heavy slide.

Peter Gleick, a MacArthur fellow and chief executive of the Pacific Institute, bemoaned the potential decline of the sweet treat last week in an open letter to climate change skeptics in Forbes.

Many farmers will need to find alternative crops such as cashews and cotton. But researchers pointed out that as temperatures phase out some fields, others could become prime growing spots.

“Climate change brings not only bad news but also a lot of potential opportunities,” according to the report. “The winners will be those who are prepared for change and know how to adapt.”

Fluctuating weather in the United States alone has already wreaked havoc with harvests for peanuts, wine grapes, pumpkins and coffee beans.

 Tiffany Hsu

Photo credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

On locavores and soapboxes

Findings

Fresh and Direct From the Garden an Ocean Away

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: August 29, 2011

Charles C. Mann has faced up to the locavore’s dilemma. At his home in the Berkshires, he likes to eat food that has traveled directly from his own garden: heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, kale, chard, lettuce and other foods for his table. He and his family belong to a farm-share program in which they advance money each year to a farmer a few miles away in return for the farm’s crops. He loves local food, but he knows too much about it to be a truly devout locavore.

 

Viktor Koen

 

Mr. Mann realizes that none of the foods in his garden or at the local farm originated within 1,000 miles of his home. They grow today in the Berkshires only because of farmers and plant breeders and traders throughout the world. While today’s locavores worry about the sustainability of the globalized modern system of agriculture, Mr. Mann sees today’s food system as nothing new.

The foods we consider local are results of a globalization process that has been in full swing for more than five centuries, ever since Columbus landed in the New World. Suddenly all the continents were linked, mixing plants and animals that had evolved separately since the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Pangaea.

What resulted, Mr. Mann argues in his fascinating new book, “1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created,” was a new epoch in human life, the Homogenocene. This age of homogeneity was brought on by the creation of a world-spanning economic system as crops, worms, parasites and people traveled among Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia — the Columbian Exchange, as it was dubbed by the geographer Alfred W. Crosby.

“The Columbian Exchange,” Mr. Mann writes, “is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in the United States, chocolates in Switzerland and chili peppers in Thailand. To ecologists, the Columbian Exchange is arguably the most important event since the death of the dinosaurs.”

The consequences were devastating for many ecosystems and people conquered by Europeans. Before the exchange, Beijing was the world’s largest city, and nearly all the other large ones were in warm regions outside Europe. Columbus was seeking a new route to Asia because of the technologically advanced economies that were thriving there.

After the Columbian Exchange, the cities of Europe became the planet’s boom towns, and it wasn’t just because of the Europeans’ culture and guns. Europeans prevailed by changing ecosystems, often in inadvertent ways that have only recently been measured by scientists.

The earthworms that traveled with the English settlers to Jamestown played havoc with the forests and the crops of the Indians. The island of Hispaniola was overrun by fire ants after the Spanish arrived. Throughout the Americas, the settlers introduced organisms that spread horrific epidemics of malaria, yellow fever, smallpox and other diseases.

Meanwhile, people in Europe were reaping nutritional benefits from the Columbian Exchange. Europeans’ diets improved radically from the introduction of potatoes and what Mr. Mann calls the first green revolution: the widespread use of fertilizer, made possible by the importing of guano from Peru.

As always, there were trade-offs. In China, the introduction of maize and sweet potatoes to the highlands provided vital sustenance — and erosion that flooded rice paddies. A ship carrying guano fertilizer to Europe was probably also the source of the organism that blighted the potato crops in Europe and led to the great famine in Ireland in the 1840s.

Mr. Mann has come to sympathize with both sides in the debate over globalization. The opponents of globalization correctly realize that trade produces unpredictable and destructive consequences for the environment and for society, he says, but globalization also leads to more and better food, better health, longer life and other benefits that affluent Western locavores take for granted.

“There are these huge catastrophes that constantly threaten the gains, but I think they only threaten the gains,” he said in an interview. “The lesson of history is that the costs are high — and higher than the advocates of free trade often admit — but the gains are higher still.”

That lesson, though, has always run counter to the intuition of people all over the world. Like today’s locavores, monarchs in Spain and China during the 16th century were deeply suspicious of becoming dependent on foreign food (although the rulers kept failing in their attempts to restrain trade). The monarchs also resented parting with their own crops, a feeling that persists today.

“People in Brazil still talk bitterly about the Brits stealing their rubber seeds and planting them in Asia,” Mr. Mann said. “Brazilians will denounce this horrible ‘bio-piracy’ while they’re standing in front of fields of bananas and coffee — plants that originated in Africa.” Two other leading crops in Brazil, soybeans and sugar, he noted, are from Asia.

Of course, the 19th-century rubber barons of Brazil had good personal reasons to resent losing their monopoly. But those seeds transplanted to Asian plantations increased the world’s supply of a product essential for the belts and gaskets in machines.

“There’s no way the Industrial Revolution could have so occurred so quickly and so widely if the world had depended solely on Brazilians tapping rubber trees,” Mr. Mann said. Indeed, the Asian plantations proved crucial when Brazilian trees were struck by blight.

“On the whole, there are lots more winners than losers from the Columbian Exchange,” Mr. Mann said. “I don’t want to tell Italians they can’t have tomatoes, or people in Sichuan they can’t have peppers. People have a way of taking things and making them their own. I know nothing in my garden is native, but I still have this idiotic feeling that it’s my home.”

How does he reconcile this feeling with this book? What’s a locavore to do? Mr. Mann doesn’t presume to dictate anyone’s food preferences, but he does offer one piece of advice for locavores: go easy on the preaching.

“I’m willing to pay more to get fresh vegetables grown by nice people farming nearby,” he said. “It’s incredible to eat lettuce an hour after it was picked.

“But if your concern is to produce the maximum amount of food possible for the lowest cost, which is a serious concern around the world for people who aren’t middle-class foodies like me, this seems like a crazy luxury. It doesn’t make sense for my aesthetic preference to be elevated to a moral imperative.”

Recycling 2.0

Design Notebook

Making Design Out of Rubbish

By PENELOPE GREEN

Published: August 10, 2011

TRENTON

 

Robert Wright for The New York Times

From left, Brad Sherman, Tiffany Threadgould and Lori Anselm, TerraCycle's design team.

Related

• Green Blog: A Facebook Game Teaches 'Upcycling' (August 11, 2011)

 

Robert Wright for The New York Times

The design team “trashed” the company's offices in Trenton, creating walls out of plastic soda bottles and tables out of old doors.

ON a blazing hot weekday late last month, 6 of the 82 summer interns at TerraCycle, a “waste solution development” company, were shoveling mortar into a trench in the company’s scrubby courtyard and layering it with beer and wine bottles, nearly 2,000 that they had plucked in the previous week or so from the Dumpsters of neighborhood bars.

The interns, students in product design, marketing and architecture, were overheated but cheerful, sorting bottles by color, hosing one another down as the temperature rose into the triple digits and comparing notes on which bars had the best bottle harvest. By midday, however, that harvest had been largely depleted, though the retaining wall the crew was building — a swoopy napoleon of trash — was still only a foot high. Max Gilbert, a 21-year-old product design student from Lehigh University, spoke for the group now huddled damply in the trapezoid of shade thrown by an umbrella when he said solemnly in his best Roy Scheider imitation, “We’re going to need more bottles. A lot more bottles.”

Welcome to Garbage Camp, a highly collaborative effort from the design studio of TerraCycle, which was started 10 years ago by a Princeton dropout, Tom Szaky, with a single product, Worm Poop, a plant food made from just what you’d think. (Garbage Camp is this reporter’s phrase, not the company’s.) Now, TerraCycle collects garbage from companies that make juice pouches, chips, candy and single-serve espresso tins, to name just a few of the waste streams it has a toe in, and turns them into items like tote bags, portable speakers and notebooks that are sold at big-box stores like Target and Wal-Mart.

More specifically, TerraCycle collects the overruns of a company’s packaging — reams and reams of it — and upcycles it into festive and useful objects ablaze with product names, a relatively cheap and feel-good brand extension.

It also collects post-consumer waste — from used juice pouches to toothbrushes harvested by schools and charities — that it sells to recycling companies, which turn it into plastic pellets that can be made into driveway pavers, Adirondack chairs or building materials.

This summer, TerraCycle’s R & D department has been shredding diapers, looking for a way to recycle used ones. “There is no limit on gross here,” said Tiffany Threadgould, who runs the company’s design team, grinning broadly.

Ms. Threadgould, 37, is a product designer and writer who Make magazine once described as “the Martha Stewart of garbage.” She has been TerraCycle’s chief designer for the last three years, fashioning “upcycling” prototypes like pencil cases from Capri Sun juice pouches and clocks made from circuit boards, and leading workshops on how to weave pet-food bags into wallets and totes, for example, as she did last year for the 700 employees of a Hungarian pet-food company.

She is also something of a trash evangelist, preaching the crafty value of society’s discards for nearly a decade, selling trash-into-craft kits — like a wine-bottle lamp kit — through her company, RePlayGround. And she is gently exhorting readers to make their own clocks out of paint-can lids in a new book, “ReMake It!” (Sterling). “I want to change the way people think about garbage,” she’ll tell you earnestly and often.

TerraCycle, which collects a billion pieces of waste every few months, is mostly in the business of recycling or “garbage dealing,” said Albe Zakes, the company’s director of publicity.

But Ms. Threadgould’s upcycled designs, which represent about 10 percent of the business, are its most visible products, the bait that attracts companies like Kraft, the maker of Capri Sun juice pouches, into partnerships with TerraCycle. (Since its founding, the company has lurched about a bit, fending off a lawsuit from Miracle-Gro, which saw Worm Poop’s packaging as imitative of its own, and reorienting its business model, which originally focused on upcycling. This year, the company enjoyed a modest profit for the first time, Mr. Zakes said.)

And Ms. Threadgould’s activities, like her recent “trashy redesign” of TerraCycle’s offices and her deployment of those eager interns as wall builders — the wall being part of Ms. Threadgould’s landscape design for the courtyard — continues to burnish TerraCycle’s image. Her design efforts are marketing tools and propaganda materials that reiterate and amplify a single message: garbage can be fun.

 

Robert Wright for The New York Times

Last month, summer interns built a retaining wall out of mortar and bottles harvested from Dumpsters at neighborhood bars.

Robert Wright for The New York Times

A wall clock made out of pregnancy tests.

 

Robert Wright for The New York Times

An office chair in the TerraCycle offices has been re-covered with a selection of Capri Sun juice pouches.

“Waste Does Not Exist” reads the spray-painted manifesto on the vintage sofa in TerraCycle’s lounge, which owes a lot, style-wise, to “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” It’s appealingly off-kilter.

On the walls: clocks made from the keys of a computer keyboard, scissors, a bike wheel; vintage mirrors painted red, blue and gold; and the company’s logo, which looks like an infinity symbol, writ large in juice pouches. The floor is covered with Astroturf discarded from a nearby soccer field. Tables are made from used fire extinguishers and salvaged wood, and wine barrels topped with a door.

The main workroom, where most of TerraCycle’s 65 young employees toil, has walls covered in graffiti and a checkerboard of rug remnants. Vinyl records serve as desk partitions; desks are old doors. Conference tables made from more old doors, some embellished with doorbells, stretch out in “rooms” with walls made from clear plastic soda bottles. There are Nerf guns everywhere.

“We want to do more interior design projects,” Ms. Threadgould said. “Offer our services to our partners so they can have their space ‘TerraCycled.’ ” She described a new project with Dennis Foy, the New Jersey-based restaurateur who has asked the team to invent a Philadelphia restaurant concept, from the branding to the décor.

Ms. Threadgould’s studio, which she shares with Lori Anselm, 48, a textile designer who commutes daily from Bucks County, Pa., and Brad Sherman, 26, a designer with a master’s degree in sustainability, looks like design studios the world over, except that its shelves are lined with boxes labeled variously: Cheerios boxes, Yak Paks, Pepsi bottle caps, Colgate containers, Burberry tie scraps and pregnancy tests.

Pregnancy tests? “Yeah, we get all sorts of things from our partners,” Ms. Threadgould said. “Brad made a really cool clock out of those.”

At a table, Laura Simons, 21, and Ashley Santee, 22, interns on loan for six months from the design and marketing program at Drexel University, were sewing fabric they had made by fusing Lunchables packaging. Kraft had asked for an art piece for its Lunchables conference room, Ms. Simons said, so they had made a plaque out of “techno-vomit,” Albe Zakes’s nickname for what is otherwise known as “wrapper board,” or shredded and fused packaging (it’s quite pretty, like silvery confetti), and enormous techno-vomit facsimiles of the contents of a Lunchables — cheese and lunch meat. Meanwhile, Mr. Gilbert, the intern from Lehigh, had built a lamp out of used glue sticks. It felt like visiting a Montessori preschool.

Next was lunch, ordered each day from a different restaurant (Mexican food on this day), that the whole staff partakes of, lining up like summer campers in the main room. After the meal, Ms. Anselm, the textile designer, offered a tour of TerraCycle’s garbage warehouse a few blocks away. The sickly sweet odor of rancid juice boxes, stacked in waist-high bales, made a visitor’s eyes water. It smelled like virtue.

There were also bales of chip bags and yogurt cups and circuit boards, and little hills of U.P.S. freight packs, sent by schools and community groups that form “brigades” to collect used packaging.

“We come over here to get inspired,” she said, gazing fondly at a berm formed by canvas mailbags, 20,000 of them. “We love the non-branded garbage,” she added. “There’s only so much you can do with an M & M wrapper.”

No ice for Russians

August 3, 2011, 9:30 pm

Why Do Russians Hate Ice?

By ALINA SIMONE

 

 

A Russian acquaintance of mine who grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, recently told me that her father microwaved his orange juice. Her grandmother also used to heat her ice cream in a saucepan on the stove. She remembers once asking her grandmother why it was even called “ice” cream, when by all rights it should be called warm cream, or maybe hot cream. “Things have all kinds of crazy names,” her grandmother snapped back. “How should I know?”

If you were born in the Soviet Union and are of a certain age, ice is your enemy. As the daughter of émigrés from Ukraine, I was raised on room-temperature beverages and always associated ice with a raft of great American stuff other kids were allowed to have but I wasn’t: puppies, sheet cake, fun. My own grandmother would cringe from a glass of ice water as if it were a syringe of Ebola virus. To this day I have no idea what disease she associated with the consumption of cold liquids. Pneumonia? Athlete’s foot? Chlamydia?

As the daughter of émigrés from Ukraine, I was raised on room-temperature beverages and always associated ice with a raft of great American stuff other kids were allowed to have but I wasn’t: puppies, sheet cake, fun.

 

Why do Russians hate ice? I called my dad and posed the question.

“Ice? I don’t hate ice,” he began. “It’s just that when these Americans hand you a can from the freezer, and it is already so cold that just touching it practically turns your hand into a claw, I don’t really see the need to add ice.”

Yeah, I thought to myself, you don’t hate ice. You just think the cold war was a literal attempt to freeze you. I quickly abandoned this line of inquiry and decided to take my investigation to the streets instead. What better place than Brighton Beach on one of the hottest weekends of the year?

To maximize my chances of getting any Russian over the age of 50 to talk to me, I put on a dress and more makeup than I thought I owned. But then I sort of handicapped myself by inviting my friend Amanda, who long ago shaved her eyebrows off and replaced them with black squiggles that look like Arabic writing. She tried hiding them behind sunglasses and a straw hat, but they peeped out insidiously nonetheless.

The air out on Brighton Beach Avenue hit us like a plume of dragon breath as we quickly made our way toward our first destination, a cafe. Although the heat outside was an Ecuadorean 101, it must have been at least 85 degrees inside as well. The wings of moths could have turned the air faster than the air-conditioner. Perfect, in other words, for our purposes.

Unlike the Russian restaurants on the boardwalk, the cafe was free of day-tripping tourists. A television mounted to the wall blared the Eurovision Song Contest, and talk at every table was reliably in Russian. We watched as a burly man in a red tank top poured a can of Coke into an ice-free glass. At a table near the front of the cafe, a dozen Russian men rose to make a toast and knocked back drinks that were assuredly not on the rocks. A pair of women next to us prodded their juices and we failed to hear a telltale clink. Meanwhile, I ordered us a selection of starch-based dishes, vareniki with potatoes, blintzes with cottage cheese, and — here was the test — two glasses of water. Moments later, they arrived. Sans ice.

“A mozhno eto s l’dom?” (Can we have it with ice?) I asked in Russian.

The waitress gave me a look of pity.

“We don’t have any ice,” she said.

“You can’t even buy it,” Amanda whispered, impressed. “It’s not for sale.”

Angie Wang 

Later, I asked one of the waitresses, why the no-ice policy.

“Over in Ukraine, they put ice in their drinks,” she explained. “But not in Russia.”

“Really? My family’s from Ukraine, and they don’t use ice.”

“Well then I guess we all don’t use ice.”

“Yes,” I persevered, “but why?”

“That’s just how it’s always been,” she shrugged.

This circular logic, though undoubtedly true, left me unsatisfied. So having filled our caloric quota for the week, we hit the streets again. A Chechen named Ahmed, whom we chatted up in an antiques store, insisted that Russians kept ice out of their drinks as a precaution. “Who knows where that ice came from? It’s probably dirty.” A Russian woman filling out a lottery ticket down the street concurred. “Unlike other nationalities, Russians are very clever. You can’t fool us,” she warned.

I had never considered this theory before, that ice was a riddle whose origin demanded to be solved, a potential form of drink pollution. It’s true that the tap water in many Russian cities, like St. Petersburg, can contain giardia and other contaminants. But New York City is known for having some of the cleanest drinking water in the world. I rejected this hypothesis. My gut told me that even if I made ice out of San Pellegrino before their very eyes, these Slavs would keep clinging to their tepid drinks.

At Oksamit Liquor, we found ourselves admiring a glass Kalashnikov full of vodka. I posed my ice question to the guy behind the counter, but a beefy man buying some whiskey interjected.

“Ice dilutes your drink,” he said, waving his bottle. “I put ice in it? It’s not as strong.”

“O.K.,” I said, “but then why don’t Russians use ice in their water?”

And on the shoals of this tricky question, our conversation stalled.

Back home, I decided my Siberian friends, with their heroic tolerance for cold, might help me gain some clarity on Russian ice aversion.

“We’re already surrounded by ice for most of the year,” my friend Vanya, who lives in Novosibirsk, replied via e-mail. Ice in his drink? “Thank you, but no.”

My friend Konst, a Siberian who recently relocated to Los Angeles, seconded this argument with the addition of an intriguing coda: “Or it could be that we have bad teeth.”

Moving west, a long soliloquy on the subject was provided by my cousin Kolya, from the also frigid city of St. Petersburg. He explained that although Soviet citizens did have the means to make ice (most Soviet-produced fridges came with “ugly aluminum devices included to prepare ice cubes,” he reminded me), Russian drinks weren’t customarily amenable to it. Most Westerners would agree, he argued, that beer, wine and vodka don’t go with ice. He also pointed out that in the years before, and immediately following, glasnost, Russia did not have a cocktail-mixing tradition. I was almost convinced, but then his cogent analysis veered abruptly toward conjecture: “Traditional Russian cold beverages, like kvass and mors,” he continued, “also do not require ice.”

Well, nothing really requires ice, does it? Ice — like most of the drinks it enlivens — is optional. And having drunk my share of lukewarm mors, a sweet berry-based concoction, on a hot summer day, I can say without reservation: a little ice wouldn’t hurt.

But in what might be construed as a sign of cultural global warming, my friend Sarah, a former New Yorker who has lived in Russia for over 20 years, relayed the following anecdote. Two 20-something couples, one American, one Russian, were sharing a meal at a Starlite Diner in Moscow when Sarah overheard the male of the Russian pair order a drink, emphasizing to the waitress that he wanted it “s l’dom.” It was a weighted gesture that seemed to signify a new kind of worldliness. Perhaps the new generation has learned that, love it or hate it, one thing is always true about ice — it’ll help you stay cool.

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Global warming in the UK

Climate change brings tea and apricots to Britain

Blossomed apricot trees are seen in an orchard in Nicolae Balcescu village, 248 km (152 miles) west of Bucharest, April 9, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Radu Sigheti

By Tasim Zahid

LONDON | Thu Jul 28, 2011 12:38pm BST

LONDON (Reuters) - British farmers are experimenting with crops such as olives and nectarines which have traditionally been imported from southern Europe while the first British tea plantation has opened with a changing climate set to transform the nation's countryside.

Flowers will bloom early and crops will be harvested sooner as Britain marches towards what the government describes as a "wetter and warmer" UK.

Britain's first tea plantation has opened in Cornwall, the country's warmest region and the centre of much of the current crop experimentation.

"We had an opportunity when temperatures in Cornwall turned warmer and we started a farm in 1999 but we had our first harvest in 2005 and our yield has improved every year," said Jonathan Jones, commercial director at the Tregothnan Estate.

Tregothnan now grows 22 varieties of tea and is expecting a record harvest in excess of 10 tonnes this year. The estate has also been experimenting with growing edible flowers.

Mark Diacono, a farmer in neighbouring Devon has been trying to grow a wide array of crops including olives, pecans, szechuan pepper and apricots and also lists vineyard on what he calls "climate change farm" on his website.

"I just made a list of all the foods I liked, knocked out all the things others grow perfectly well locally or are cheaply available. I researched and found out that some that had not been grown here before might be possible given new varieties and climate change... so I planted," Diacono told Reuters.

NEW VARIETIES

David Leaver, Professor Emeritus and former Principal of the Royal Agricultural College, said the potential for new crops in Britain will depend not only on the degree of global warming but also on the extent to which plant breeders are able to develop new varieties able to withstand lower temperatures.

"Maize, for example, was not grown in this country but is now increasingly grown, mainly because of plant breeder achievements in breeding earlier maturing varieties rather than due to global warming. This may be achievable for other crops - so climate change is not the only factor affecting cropping patterns," Leaver also told Reuters.

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Britain's farming and environment ministry, said his department was closely monitoring the impact climate change was having on crops.

"There is no question that climate change will have significant effect on crops. Climate change might be beneficial for the UK at least because we will have a larger growing period with shorter winters and earlier springs," Watson said.

"By 2050, the impact will largely be positive for crop growers but that will depend on where you are in the UK."

Watson cautioned, however, that climate change does also raises serious concerns for a country such as Britain that relies heavily on food imports.

"If we take the world as a whole, with an increase of 2-3 degrees the overall impact will be negative. We are 65 per cent food sufficient and the rest 35 per cent is imported, mostly from Europe," he said.

"So far, the supplies have been secure but the question is will the international markets be a secure food source? And at the same time, with the economic growth in China and India, will they push hard for increased food supply?"