The city of Detroit is moving towards a land deal with Hantz Farms, an urban agriculture venture with big plans and lots of critics with in the urban farming movement. (Flickr: MattBerggren)

submitted by Theresa Bernardo

huffingtonpost.com - July 7, 2012

Detroit's urban farmers have been waving their pitchforks indignantly over it for years, but a controversial agriculture deal between the city of Detroit and a wealthy investor looks like it may finally be heading to market.

The Detroit Free Press reports that mayor Dave Bing's group executive for planning and facilities, Karla Henderson, is close to finalizing a sale that would allow the Southfield-based financier John Hantz to transform 175 acres of vacant east side lots into a commercial lumber farm.

The mayor hopes to close on the transaction -- estimated to be in the realm of $600,000 -- with his business, Hantz Farms, when city council gets back from its summer recess, according to the Free Press.

submitted by Samuel Bendett

Credit: ThunderKiss Photography on Flickr

americancity.org - Michaela Krauser - June 28, 2012

Detroit Mayor David Bing has promised to demolish 1,500 abandoned and unsafe houses within the next 90 days, according to the Detroit Free Press.

The decision is one facet of Bing’s greater plan to “rightsize” Detroit, encouraging residents of low-density, failing neighborhoods to move to healthier areas with larger populations. Bing plans to focus the city’s attention and funds on those areas identified as healthy, while slowly decreasing city services to other areas as a means to lower costs.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

submitted by Albert Gomez

www.plasticstoday.com - by Heather Caliendo - June 22nd, 2012

While much talk and discussion centers on plastic waste in the Pacific gyre, a new study will be conducted this summer on the Great Lakes, including Lake Erie.

This study will assess for the first time the potential effect plastic pollution has on these bodies of water. It's expected to provide data regarding the levels of discarded plastics from trash to tiny particles found in the lakes, as well as examine their impact on food supplies, according to an article on Cleveland.com.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Poisoning the Great Lakes: Mercury Emissions from Coal-Fired Power Plants In the Great Lakes Region (54 page .PDF file)
http://www.nrdc.org/air/files/poisoning-the-great-lakes.pdf

switchboard.nrdc.org - Thom Cmar's Blog - June 8, 2012

This week we released a report, Poisoning the Great Lakes: Mercury Emissions from Coal Fired Power Plants in the Great Lakes Region, which highlights the impacts of mercury emissions from Great Lakes power plants on the people, fish, birds, and wildlife of our region.  EPA recently issued new nationwide Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that require power plants to cut their mercury emissions by 90% on average, as well as to make similar cuts to their emissions of arsenic, lead, acid gases, and other toxic air pollution.  

submitted by Janine Rees

Stream Gaging Station by Beige Alert, on Flickr

by John Farrell - energyselfreliantstates.org - February 27, 2012

In a New York Times SundayReview piece last week – Drawing the Line at Power Lines – Elisabeth Rosenthal suggested that our desire for clean energy will require significant tradeoffs . . .

I disagree.

The future of American electricity policy is not about tradeoffs, but rather a chance to trade-in an obsolete, centralized paradigm for a local, clean energy future.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

First, there is great value in a systems approach as a heuristic for understanding interlocked social-ecological-technological processes, and in analysis across multiple scales. Yet we need to move beyond both systems as portrayed in resilience thinking, and the focus on actors in work on vulnerability, to analyse networks and relationships, as well as to attend to the diverse framings, narratives, imaginations and discourses that different actors bring to bear.

For More:

http://resilienturbanism.tumblr.com/post/7573475902/reframing-resilience

There are many definitions of resilience from simple deterministic views of resilience anchored in Newtonian mechanics to far more dynamic views of resilience from a systems perspective, including insights from quantum mechanics and the sciences of complexity.  One baseline perspective of resilience sees it in terms of the viability of socio-ecological systems as the foundation for sustainability.  For those that are ready to look beyond resilience as the ability to return to the "normal state" before a disaster, take a look at:

http://www.resalliance.org/