Real food makes a comeback

Here's a brief history of civilization:

First 5,000 years, almost everybody is a farmer.

Last 50 years, almost nobody is a farmer. The 2 percent of Americans who farm are exotic, largely invisible pixies who magically turn petrochemicals into grocery-chain products encased in plastic wrap.

Last couple of years: Everyone wants to be a farmer. Or hug a farmer. Or at least buy and eat local food that isn't sprayed, injected, modified, adulterated and transfatted into inedibility.

People are revolting against tomatoes with the resilience of tennis balls, strawberries that ship like Styrofoam, farmed salmon injected with dye, chickens that have never seen the sun, pet food from China stretched with melamine and fast food that speeds the way to a heart attack.

Our food system has become the poster child for all that seems awry in American life — the frenzy and mediocrity, the cheap, the homogenized, the excessive and the bland. Instead of food being the highlight of the day, as it is for most animals, it has become a gobbled distraction in front of the TV, on the way to work or after soccer practice.

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Weak laws

If the Chesapeake Bay were a hospital patient, it would need major surgery, not just a tweak to the medicine it's been getting. After 25 years of cleanup efforts, the bay is barely holding its own against the tide of people who have moved into the region - drawn to the very body of water they're fouling.

The prognosis is not encouraging, with Maryland's population expected to grow by another million-plus people in the next 20 years.

The Chesapeake is so large, its ultimate recovery depends on actions by all the states whose waters drain into it. But scientists and advocates say there are steps Maryland could take on its own to revive its rivers - and thus the bay.

Most experts agree, for instance, that there must be a sharp reduction in polluted runoff from farms.

Tough limits on suburban sprawl also are needed, they say, to preserve the forests, meadows and wetlands that naturally filter out pollutants before they can reach the bay. And as part of that, the proliferation of household septic systems that leak pollution into creeks and rivers has to stop.

It's unclear whether those measures will get much consideration in the State House next year, even though no one disputes that they would help the bay. State and local officials have flinched in the past at ordering such steps because of what they would cost. Not just in dollars, but in the restrictions on farmers, builders and homeowners.

Farmers don't want to be told what to do with their land, saying tough regulations will drive them out of business. Builders say restrictions will put housing prices out of reach of working families.

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This Old Recyclable House

Brad Guy started taking apart Cleveland a little after 8 o’clock on a Monday morning in June. Standing in the vandalized dining room of 6538 Lederer Avenue, he bent to the bottom of the wall and drove the end of a crowbar through the plaster with his hammer. He shimmied the bar behind the oak baseboard, feeling for nails. He was teaching his crew how to pry the wood loose without splitting it. Many of the workers who showed up that morning did not know what “deconstruction,” as this kind of work is called, actually was. Some assumed it was another word for remodeling — not realizing, or maybe not allowing themselves to believe, that no bulldozer was coming, that they would be disassembling this house by hand, down to the foundation, one piece at a time. They watched Guy wrestle with the baseboard for a while. He put down the crowbar and picked up a heavier one. “This is some old nice work that they did,” he said.

Guy is 49, with a round face and soft, nasal voice that’s mostly monotone but rises unsurely at the end of sentences. (When he hollers, “Break time, 15 minutes,” the worker next to him, thinking this is a question, will check her watch and say, “I guess so.”) He was a dancer and choreography student before being lured into architecture and is now the president of the Building Materials Reuse Association, a nonprofit in Pittsburgh that supports the fledgling deconstruction industry. He has spent the last 14 years as a journeyman architectural academic, conducting meticulous studies on how to efficiently dismantle the American house to reuse its materials instead of just clobbering it with a backhoe and sweeping it into a landfill.

In that time, Guy has deconstructed about 30 buildings, from row houses in Philadelphia to a 9,000-square-foot Army warehouse at Fort Campbell, Ky., where attack helicopters flew overhead and artillery went off as he stood on the roof dissecting it. While many deconstructors have far more hands-on experience, he is gathering scrupulous data about the process and organizing it all into research papers and spreadsheets that he describes as “five miles long.” Last year, he went back to school for a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon. “I’m basically an office worker,” he told me. He trained for this project in Cleveland with long walks and dumbbell exercises.

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‘White Flight’ Has Reversed, Census Finds

The proportion of New York City residents who are white and non-Hispanic rose slightly last year, reversing more than a half-century of so-called white flight from the city, according to census figures released on Tuesday.

The share of non-Hispanic whites in the city had been shrinking since at least 1940. As the overall population grew, their ranks declined by 361,000 in the 1990s alone. Since 2000, though, their number has increased by more than 100,000. Half of that increase was recorded from 2006 to 2007.

“The fact that it is not going down is the news,” said Joseph J. Salvo, director of the population division at the Department of City Planning. “The increase is small, but the relative stability of the number and percent is meaningful.”

He described the turnaround as a testament to the city’s “diversity and ethnic heterogeneity” and said it “sets New York apart from many other older cities where this is not the case.”

Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, called the apparent trend a potential “harbinger of racial equilibrium.”

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For good neighbours, live in a quiet, car-free street

Mrs A lives in Dovercourt Road in north Bristol and considers five people on her street as friends. But Mrs B, who is roughly the same age and lives round the corner in a very similar house in Muller Street, has only one friend.

The difference, says a study, has nothing to do with personality, but is because of the weight of traffic. Fewer than 150 vehicles a day pass down Dovercourt Road, compared with more than 21,130 a day on Muller Street.

New research, based on interviews with households on three Bristol streets, has found that people who live with high levels of motor traffic are far more likely to be socially disconnected and even ill than people who live in quiet, clean streets.

It confirms a study done by a British academic in San Francisco in 1969. This found the weight of traffic in urban areas largely determined people's quality of life and also identified a major erosion of community on busy streets. The Bristol study is the first time that research has been conducted in Britain.

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Tribal chief on Isle de Jean Charles says it's time to leave

Chief Albert Naquin is tired. Tired of seeing his community flooded. Tired of begging for help.

More than a week after Hurricane Gustav pushed water over the ring levee protecting the island in south Terrebonne Parish, where descendants of several American Indian communities still live, Naquin, chief of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians, declared: "This is my last one. I'm not going to keep doing this."

Naquin says it is time for the island's remaining residents to move farther inland, surrendering their way of life to the twin threats of storm surge and coastal erosion.

Even as he spoke, another reminder of the island's vulnerability was closing in. Hurricane Ike brought a 9-foot storm surge a little more than a week later, overtopping the island's 6- to 7-foot levee and swamping homes again. The exasperated chief reiterated what he said after Gustav: This is the last hurricane season he will seek relief for those who refuse to move off the island.

People on the island do not give up easily. For generations, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians have lived on the low-lying ridge, which they jokingly call "the bathtub." Their community has flooded in so many hurricanes that some residents regard hurricane season as an annual test, an ordeal they endure so they can remain connected to the land.

But storm surges are not the only enemy. The island is slowly eroding into the Gulf of Mexico. Most residents do not have the money to continually rebuild, and the community already knows it will never get stronger levee protection.

So, Naquin and tribal leaders once again will try to rally the community of 150 to 175 people to move to higher ground. This time, he hopes tribal leaders will be successful.

"How much beating can you take before you give up?" asked Naquin, 61. "I'm getting too old to be fighting and trying to help people that don't want to be helped."

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Eco-friendly efforts land some Jerseyans in court

John Dragona thought he was doing everything right in his backyard garden. The blind, 69-year-old Cliffside Park man, who weeds and plants by touch, buries in his soil a compost of decaying egg shells, coffee grounds and other kitchen scraps most folks send to the landfills as trash.

His neighbors weren't as impressed by the 12-by-2 foot backyard patch bursting with tomatoes, cucumbers and pepper plants or his environmental sensibilities.

Over the summer Dragona was yanked into municipal court, cited by the borough health department after neighbors' complaints of odors wafting across from the garden.

He refused to back down, hired a lawyer and prepared for trial. Dragona is one of a growing number of New Jersey residents whose efforts to protect the environment or reduce dependence on non-renewable sources of energy have landed them in court fights, municipal hall battles and threats from neighbors in deed-restricted developments.

Even as New Jersey attempts to reduce its carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and works to make the goal realistic for residents and businesses, it's not easy being green in the Garden State, some environmentalists say.

"The irony is that these are the people trying to do the right thing, and the people criticizing them are probably getting (chemicals) which puts more toxins on their lawn into the environment than a golf course," said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club.

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Evacuation drains scant reserves

Like thousands of New Orleanians, Karen Glapion said she was just barely making it economically when, two weeks ago, Hurricane Gustav barreled into her budget and capsized the delicate equilibrium that had kept her just above water.

It didn't take much.

In Glapion's case, it was just $350 -- the cost of an unplanned, six-day evacuation to a stepsister's house in Sugar Land, Texas. It was cheap compared with others' motel-driven evacuation costs.

But it was enough.

"Now I'm stressed," Glapion said. "Before, I could see my way (forward). But this put me behind.

"I spent my next car note getting out of town."

So Wednesday, Glapion took time away from her job at an eastern New Orleans day-care center to stand in line at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center to apply for food stamps under relaxed emergency standards put in place after Gustav.

She said she left with a plastic charge card that entitles her to $298 in food assistance.

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'Lucky' Louisiana unprepared for Gustav

Hurricane Gustav, which made landfall just west of New Orleans on 1 September, had far less devastating effects than Hurricane Katrina three years earlier — on either the people or the land on which they live. But the third major hurricane to hit Louisiana's fragile wetlands in three years has made it clear that, although coastal recovery is high on the state's agenda, little has been done on the ground since 2005.

Just last month, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal announced that the state would chip in $300 million of its surplus funds for coastal restoration and flood protection. It is "the largest single commitment to coastal restoration ever made by any governor in Louisiana", says Chris Macaluso, a spokesman from the Governor's Office of Coastal Activities.

The funding swelled a pot of post-Katrina restoration money that had been secured, but mostly not spent, in time for Gustav. "Money started coming in, and what happened was another freakin' hurricane hit the coast," says Mark Kulp, a coastal geologist at the University of New Orleans in Louisiana. "Three years is not a lot of time to implement with all the bureaucracy."

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100 goats turned loose on a downtown L.A. plot

The hills were alive with the sound of munching.

In fact, the only things that seemed missing Monday when a herd of goats climbed up a weed-choked lot in the Bunker Hill high-rise district were Julie Andrews and the Von Trapp family singers.

Leaders of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency hired 100 goats to nibble away thick weeds on a steep slope at the corner of 4th and Hill streets, next to the Angels Flight funicular.

Agency officials said the goats were cheaper and more environmentally friendly than two-legged brush-clearers armed with gasoline-powered weed-whackers.

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With Hanna, Flood of Bad Memories in Huntington

What caused Fairfax County's working-class Huntington neighborhood to flood again over the weekend is easy enough to understand: The local waterway was moved closer to homes decades ago during a Capital Beltway construction project and has filled with silt. Development upstream has also sped the onrush of runoff.

Harder to grasp -- or at least, for many residents, to accept -- is the flow of political decisions that have left hundreds of residents of one of the nation's richest counties unprotected from even moderate storms.

"Most of us that are in it feel like the government has really done diddly squat," said Kate Wersinger, a secretary at a District law firm who bought her home south of Alexandria four years ago. Her retaining wall held back the water this time, but the $60,000 in damage from a 2006 storm was still weighing heavily yesterday.

Residents could still see the silty residue of Tropical Storm Hanna on their roads and sidewalks yesterday, signs that, yet again, brown storm waters had rushed over the banks of Cameron Run and into their lives. The damage was minimal -- four basements flooded, and sheds full of equipment and mementos were drenched.

But also left behind was the fear and frustration that comes with the perpetual threat of flooding, and the realization that, even in the sunniest of scenarios, a fix could still be years away. Studies since the 1970s have called for major improvements.

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Gustav Was No Katrina, but Next Time ...

From the triumphant tone of some public statements and news coverage after Gustav passed through, it would be easy to think that the upgraded hurricane protection system in New Orleans had passed its first big test and that it’s all bon temps from here.

But complacency is as big a threat as wind and storm surge to a city that still has a long way to go — especially in light of rising oceans and a subsiding landscape.

Gustav had looked like a monster on its way toward land. On Saturday, Aug. 30, the National Hurricane Center described Gustav as an “extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane” that could become a Category 5, and was on a track that would take it slightly to the west of New Orleans. Mayor C. Ray Nagin ordered an evacuation for what he called “the mother of all storms,” and an estimated two million people got out of southern Louisiana before the storm hit on Monday.

By landfall on Monday morning, however Gustav had weakened considerably and its track had slipped a bit farther west. The impact on New Orleans was blessedly slight.

Lt. Gen. Robert L. Van Antwerp, the commanding general of the Army Corps of Engineers, said last week that good news about the storm could leave officials who had urged evacuation open to criticism of crying wolf — the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t conundrum that comes with any hurricane. “I would hope this wouldn’t cause people to say, ‘next time, we’re not going,’ ” he said. “You were taking a real gamble if you don’t do exactly what people did.”

After all, he said, “what if the track had been 30 miles different and had gone east? And it could have.” When it comes to evacuations, better safe than sorry, the general said. “That was a big lesson of Katrina.”

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Gustav's Lessons for New Orleans

Let's start with the good news: Hurricane Gustav was a much ballyhooed bust. It arrived in Louisiana as a relatively mild Category 2 storm, not the Category 4 nightmare forecasters had feared, and it missed New Orleans. The fatal failures of Hurricane Katrina were not repeated: levees and flood walls didn't collapse, pumps didn't break down, and most residents fled the coast before Gustav's landfall. There was much better preparation and cooperation, much less finger-pointing and obfuscating. And for all the TV footage of downed power lines and uprooted trees and windblown reporters, there were just a few reported deaths, and probably just a few billion dollars in damages.

But this is no time to declare victory. The evacuation of 2 million residents was less a triumph of coordination than a reaction to disaster; nothing says "Get out of Dodge" like the fresh memory of a city under water. It's even more jarring to watch Army Corps of Engineers officials hailing their hurricane defenses just three years after their tragic errors and warped priorities drowned New Orleans. The sad truth is that the Big Easy--while slightly less vulnerable than it was before Katrina--is still extremely vulnerable. And eventually the region will face the Big One, a storm far larger than Gustav or Katrina. "We got lucky this time," says law professor Mark Davis, director of Tulane's Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy. "I like being lucky. But at some point we have to get smart."

The brunt of the storm passed directly over the coast's best-preserved barrier island, Grand Isle, which sapped its power; Gustav also seems to have passed over another speed bump in the form of a rare swath of healthy marshes. "It's really incredible; a slight variation of the track either way could have meant six more feet of storm surge," says Louisiana State University coastal scientist Robert Twilley, who studied Gustav's track. "I hope nobody gets a false sense of security." The barrier islands that once protected New Orleans have eroded, and most of the city's nearby marshes are gone. Every hour, Louisiana loses more than a football field's worth of the wetlands that once provided natural hurricane protection. The lesson of Gustav, in other words, is that the lessons of Katrina still apply. "Coastal restoration is one of those things politicians say, like 'I owe it all to my lovely wife,'" says Tulane law professor Oliver Houck, who has been warning about land losses for decades. "Meanwhile, we keep building up the coast, no matter how many times we get hit in the chin. At some point the American public is going to stop paying for chin surgery."

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As Gustav evacuees return to New Orleans, a varied homecoming

As Gustav evacuees return home, and as those who stayed put survey the terrain, it's apparent how much a hurricane's unpredictability can cause varying degrees of damage.

For Francis "Big Mama" McShane, who had evacuated to Natchez, La., the homecoming to New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Gustav brought an unrivaled sense of relief.

On Wednesday afternoon, she turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door of the house she'd lived in for 22 years – the one that had been left under 12 feet of water after Katrina. She paused, peered in, and said, "Thank you, Jesus, thank you, God."

The house was dry and the electricity was on.

But 80 miles away in the town of Plaquemine, outside Baton Rouge, Stephanie Boudreaux woke up to what she called "total devastation." The area took the brunt of Gustav's winds.

"The winds, the tornadoes, there's never been anything like this here. Trees, poles are down, there are huge electrical wires twisted in the cane fields, and the hospital had its roof ripped off," said Ms. Boudreaux, standing at dawn Wednesday with a small crowd outside the local hardware store, hoping it would open. "Katrina was nothing compared to this."

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Assessing the Value of Small Wind Turbines

With the California blackouts of 2001 still a painful memory, Chris Beaudoin wants to generate some of his own electricity. He marveled the other day at how close he is to that goal, gazing at two new wind turbines atop his garage roof. They will soon be hooked to the power grid.

“I don’t care about how much it costs,” said Mr. Beaudoin, a flight attendant with United Airlines. That would be $5,000 a turbine, an expense Mr. Beaudoin is unlikely to recoup in electricity savings anytime soon.

No matter. After shoring up the roof and installing the two 300-pound, steel-poled turbines in January, Mr. Beaudoin found himself at the leading edge of a trend in renewable energy.

Fascination with wind turbines small enough to mount on a roof is spreading from coast to coast. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York last month proposed dotting the city with them. Small turbines have already appeared at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, atop an office building at Logan International Airport in Boston, and even on a utility pole in the small New Hampshire town of Hampton.

These tiny turbines generate so little electricity that some energy experts are not sure the economics will ever make sense.

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LA assesses storm damage to protective wetlands

Though Hurricane Gustav seemed to spare New Orleans a repeat of 2005's catastrophic damage, it is likely to have done irrevocable damage to the area's wetlands.

State officials still were conducting flyovers and assessing damage to the miles of natural cypress marshes in Gustav's path, but the storm likely destroyed acres of valuable wetlands, said Garret Graves, head of Gov. Bobby Jindal's office of coastal activities.

"We're going to lose miles and miles of coastland," Graves said. "We consider this to be critical."

Besides breaking up marshes with its powerful waves and winds, Gustav could destroy miles of wetlands by depositing Gulf of Mexico saltwater into the freshwater marshes, Graves said. The salt quickly desecrates the freshwater marshes.

"It's like pouring salt on your front yard — it's going to kill your grass," he said.

Louisiana's wetlands and sandy barrier islands are buffers against hurricanes. The cypress swamps break up tidal surges and slow a storm's speed, said Aaron Giles of the Gulf Restoration Network, a New Orleans-based environmental group.

Louisiana loses about 15 square miles of coast a year, according to the National Wetlands Research Center in Lafayette. An additional 217 square miles were mauled by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, according to center statistics.

An estimated 10,000 miles of transport canals dug by oil and gas companies over several decades have also contributed to coastal erosion and accelerated the vanishing of cypress marshes, Giles said.

Jindal recently announced a $1 billion plan to restore wetlands and build up the levee system. The state needs $30 million to $50 million to restore lost wetlands, Giles said. "The last thing on anyone's mind during a hurricane is how the wetlands are going to do. But wetlands are a critical piece of keeping coastal Louisiana safe. We need to be treating coastal restoration efforts as urgent as hurricane protection efforts."

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