The New York Times documents a rise in university programs focused on sustainability, especially regarding the urban environment.  The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education lists nine universities with master’s and doctoral programs in urban sustainability studies.  Most of these programs are interdisciplinary in nature, like the new graduate program at the City College of New York that will focus on sustainability in the urban environment, incorporating the approaches of architecture, engineering and science. 

A lecture on the biology of salt marshes, tonight at the Arsenal.

Natural habitats and ecosystems are delicate things, and in this lecture, you’ll learn the natural history of salt marshes and their plants and animals, along with the “unnatural history” of how humans have altered and damaged them physically, chemically, and biologically.

The New York Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects is hosting a panel discussion on Restorative Landscapes tomorrow evening, January 14th.  The panel will be comprised of:

• Jack Carman, founder of Design for Generations, LLC who specializes in the design of therapeutic gardens, particularly for the elderly;
• Nancy Chambers, director of the horticulture therapy program at the Enid Haupt Glass Garden within the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine;
• Naomi Sachs, founder and director of the Theraputic Landscapes Network and principal of Naomi Sachs Design.

Renewable energy company Beautiful Earth Group has unveiled a containerized solar-powered charging station for electric vehicles (EVs) at a site in Red Hook, Brooklyn.  The station is built from recycled shipping containers and is topped with an array of 235-watt photovoltaic panels, which reach a total capacity of almost 6 kW. 

A recent New York Times piece features a valuable piece of NYC Parks property: the Alice Austen House, a National Historic Monument located in the Rosebank section of Staten Island.  Accompanying the story is an audio slide show narrated by caretaker and curator Paul Moakley, a freelance photo editor and photographer who maintains the house, museum and grounds in exchange for free accommodation in the house’s upstairs apartment.  

MIT students have developed a roofing tile that saves energy and heating and cooling costs by changing color depending on temperature.  The tile turns white to reflect heat during the summer and becomes transparent during cool months, revealing a heat-absorbing black backing. 

The post-holiday season can result in a lot of waste.  Groups around New York City are offering a host of upcoming recycling and composting events to ensure that not everything simply ends up in a landfill.

• Parks all over the five boroughs will be participating in MulchFest this weekend, allowing you to bring your Christmas tree to a designated location to be chipped into mulch. 

Plans have been announced by Bio Energy Investments Ltd (BEI) for the construction of BEI-Teesside, a biomass power station to be built on a brownfield site on the banks of the River Tees in the UK.  The striking design is by British firm Heatherwick studio. 

Landscape architecture and urban design firm James Corner Field Operations has prepared three new design proposals re-imagining Cleveland’s Public Square.  The downtown park is bisected by two roads and perceived, in its current state, as a dead zone between skyscrapers. 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkmDZpNKnms&w=507&h=370]

A new documentary called Garbage Dreams will be screening at Manhattan’s IFC Center for one week starting today, January 6th.  The film follows three teenage boys who grow up in a “garbage village” on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, where residents are referred to as Zaballeen, Arabic for “garbage people.” 

The New Yorker has published a list of the Ten Most Positive Architectural Events of 2009.  Highlights from the NYC-focused list include:

• the opening of the High Line on Manhattan’s west side;
• the pedestrianization of Broadway, a project transforming public space spearheaded by Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn;
• the publishing of two books on architecture and the city: 1) Wrestling with Moses by Anthony Flint on the historic struggle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, and 2)Twenty Minutes in Manhattan by Michael Sorkin on the author’s changing experience of the city as manifested in his daily walk from his home in Greenwich Village to his studio in Chelsea;
• Cooper Union’s opening of 41 Cooper Square, a new academic building making Cooper Union NYC’s first LEED Platinum certified school.

In 2002, a year after the Department of Sanitation and and the Municipal Arts Society announced the design competition for the reuse of the Fresh Kills landfill, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) embarked on an investigative project called Garbage Problems aimed at understanding the processes behind waste management in New York City. 

We’ve uploaded a new flickr photo set of the Freshkills Park site in the glorious aftermath of the weekend’s snowstorm.  In most parts of New York City, snowfall is beautiful for the first hour and then gets plowed and turns gray and hangs around for two months, but, for the most part, it stays pretty pristine here on top of the mounds. 

A new study by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is underway to assess the role US forests and soils can play in limiting emissions through carbon capture. The first phase of the study found that forests in the lower 48 states currently store about 90 billion metric tons of carbon and continue to capture about 30% of the country’s fossil fuel emissions each year.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=f09lQ8Q1iKE&w=507&h=370]

Photographer Chris Jordan makes staggering representations of human waste, consumerism and cultural practices, focusing on the immense environmental impact of collective consumption.  Jordan illustrates daunting statistics–4 million plastic cups used each day on airline flights alone, 166,000 overnight packages shipped by air in the U.S.

As part of the Bureau of Land Management‘s Seeds of Success project, The Dixon National Tallgrass Prairie Seed Bank at the Chicago Botanic Garden is preserving the seeds of thousands of prairie species–1,500 by 2010 and 3,000 by 2020–that are native to the Midwest, as far west as the Rockies. 

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/6389929&w=507]

58 billion non-recyclable coffee cups are used and thrown away each year.  BetaCup aims to fund a design contest geared toward reducing or eliminating that waste.  Ideas and donations for sustainable alternatives are accepted.

Philosophy in the Land II, an exhibition featuring photography, drawings and prints by artist Agnes Denes spanning the last 50 years, is on view at the Leslie Tonkonow Gallery in Manhattan until January 16th.  Denes is a pioneer of the environmental art movment whose ecological and philosophical interests surfaced in her 1968 piece Rice/Tree/Burial, which has been described as “the first site-specific piece anywhere with ecological concerns.”

The NYC Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation (MOER)  is sponsoring a free workshop this Thursday on “Green Remediation and Sustainability.”  The workshop is the third in a series of events aimed at encouraging brownfield redevelopment and will include an introduction to MOER’s Local Brownfield Clean-up Program, quantitative tools for measuring sustainability at brownfield sites and presentations on remediation projects at both the local and national level. 

e-cycler connects people who want to collect recyclables for cash with people who need recyclables picked up, often in areas that lack municipal curbside recycling service.  Providers of recyclables can request a 40% cut of the collector’s profit or can allow collectors to receive the full rebate at recycling centers (though e-cycler takes a small cut, regardless).