The bowels of New York City's electricity system.Often referred to as "the world's biggest machine," the North American electricity grid as a whole is an integrated network of generators and millions of miles of wires that crisscross the United States and Canada. It snakes across fields, over mountains, through tunnels, along highways, beneath sidewalks, under rivers and seas. If you live anywhere in Canada or the continental United States, this mega-machine "reaches into your home, your bedroom," as one writer put it, "and climbs right up into the lamp next to your pillow."

The grid is designed as a hub-and-spoke system, in which large centralized generators supply electricity to thousands of end users. All told, the U.S. grid has about 300,000 miles of  high-voltage transmission lines and 5.2 million miles of local distribution lines. When one cable in a network short-circuits, others nearby will automatically pick up the burden. But if the surrounding cables are also overstressed, they too can fail, causing a cascading effect that can knock out major portions of a network.

In recent years, the U.S. power grid has become increasingly prone to such interruptions. Average temperatures have risen, homes have gotten bigger, and so have air-conditioning demands. Thanks to our technology-rich lifestyles and the inefficiency of our buildings and power plants, Americans consume, per capita, at least 50 percent more electricity annually than the citizens of Europe and Japan.

But we don't have the infrastructure to support our lavish habits. We've seen almost no expansion or evolution of the grid that struggles to sustain our skyrocketing demands. Former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has explained the problem this way: "We're a major superpower with a third-world electricity grid." The average age of the equipment that makes up our grid infrastructure is more than forty years, and many components were designed and installed before World War II. If we're to see a major shift toward greener, more reliable power sources, we need a simultaneous upgrade in grid transmission technology.

*

I got a firsthand look at the challenges our power system is facing when I climbed inside the New York City grid. Con Edison's chief of underground grid maintenance, Dennis Romano, had agreed to accompany me down below with his crew of electrical engineers to explain what I was seeing. A jovial man with a permanent five o'clock shadow, Romano seemed amused if a bit baffled at my excitement over this brief trip.

Amanda Little, ready to go down the manhole.In spite of what I'd learned about the grid's fragility, I had a fanciful notion of what I'd encounter: a vast, orderly chamber 50 feet underground containing thousands of gleaming wires all labeled and mapped according to the neighborhoods and buildings they fed, gauges glowing to indicate the volumes of current coursing on each line -- as clean and intricate as the innards of the world's biggest iMac.

Instead, my descent into a manhole on lower Broadway lasted all of 17 feet-and the shallow tunnel I crouched through opened onto a chamber roughly the size of an average walk-in closet. The floor was covered with a murky pond of street runoff, crumbled asphalt, and garbage fragments, and the air was clammy and foul. The walls revealed a gory cross section of the grid: emerging from dozens of cement ducts was a spaghettilike tangle of grimy wires pulsing with so much electric current I could see them vibrate, like hoses with liquid gushing through them.

The New York City grid encompasses more than 80,000 miles of cable-enough to circle the globe four times. Peel back the sidewalks of Manhattan and you'll find a larger concentration of copper than anywhere else on the planet-more, in fact, than in the world's largest copper mine. All that metal can be found within 15 feet below street level, sandwiched in with water mains, sewage pipes, and telephone lines. (These pipes and tubes are constantly in need of repair, so they have to be placed close to street level for speedy access.) There is no large central chamber where all the wires are organized, labeled, and monitored; instead, there are some 260,000 manholes throughout the city, each one providing access to the wires feeding just a handful of buildings.

Many of these cables are over fifty years old. As the wires age, they degrade under a battery of stresses. The combination of sweltering heat in the summer and freezing cold in the winter causes them to expand, contract, and weaken. The constant vibrations of the city and its underworld-rumbling subways, feet pounding on pavement, incessant traffic-can wreak havoc over time. When water mains break and sewage lines overflow, they can soak and erode grid equipment. When salt is scattered on snowy streets, it often eventually drips into street cracks and manholes, eating away at the cables' insulation. Equally common is a nick in a cable from a construction worker's jackhammer or backhoe.

Any one of these burdens can overstress and shut down a wire. But the biggest challenge facing New York City is its outsized electricity demand, which is growing at a rate of nearly 2 percent a year. That doesn't sound like much, but it translates to an additional annual load of 200 megawatts-enough to power nearly a quarter million homes or a midsized city. "It's like moving Albany onto the New York City grid every year," Con Edison's president later told me. That's a big challenge when you have a system as congested as Con Ed's.

"See what I mean? The grid is running out of room," Dennis Romano said as we huddled in the dank manhole, gesturing at a mass of wires so dense it was like a Friday afternoon traffic jam at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel. "There's just no space down here to put more copper." The lines, he added, can only carry a finite amount of electricity: "You can't put ten pounds of baloney in a five-pound bag." Romano was describing gridlock in the most literal sense-the grid in its current form is reaching a physical threshold, meaning it can't be built out any further.  

"At the rate our demands are growing," Romano said, "we could outgrow the grid in under ten years." When we ventured back up to street level, I could see why: New York was voraciously guzzling power. Bank machines were whirring, flat-screen monitors were flickering, and an Old Navy store had flung its doors wide open, sending a misty plume of air-conditioning out into the stifling 90-degree heat. Across the way, Banana Republic and Bloomingdale's were doing the same. "That right there," said Romano, nodding toward the open doors, "is why the grid gets hammered in summer months. People assume we can air-condition the streets. They just don't think about it."  

Lou Rana, Con Ed's president, did offer some encouraging news about the direction of the energy industry today when we discussed his plans to renovate New York City's complex, aging grid. For nearly two hours, Rana excitedly discussed the "smart grid," which he described as a "high-tech, superefficient, ultrareliable, self-healing, ... clean, green electricity machine."

Con Ed has already been experimenting piecemeal with some components of a smart grid, which Rana mapped out for me, drawing squiggly lines on a whiteboard. He's been testing superconductor wires that carry far bigger loads than do the current copper cables and reduce the energy lost in transmission from 10 percent to less than 2 percent.

Rana's engineers are installing nanosensors that can monitor electrical current flows remotely, allowing grid operators to track and contain power surges before they begin to cascade. Rana is also developing a plan to obtain 20 percent of New York's City power supply from small-scale distributed power sources -- solar panels and clean-burning microplants fueled by natural gas, for instance -- installed on apartment and office buildings. This would help address the problem of building big new power plants and transmission lines on extremely limited real estate.

None of these ideas can be implemented on a large-scale basis without a major investment. A full smart-grid conversion would cost tens of billions of dollars for New York City alone. It remains to be seen who, if anyone, will be willing to pay for such a change. New York consumers famously resist rate hikes, and the state's coffers are running low. Even with sufficient funds, it's not clear whether the system could be installed in time before the grid's demands finally outgrow supply, as ever more of its aging components collapse under pressure. The easier path would be to continue replacing the grid piecemeal., copper wire by copper wire. But this won't do in the long run. Without the smart grid, more and bigger blackouts could lie ahead as demand grows in a system with limited capacity for expanded supply.

The United States is expected to see a 29 percent growth in electricity demands between now and 2030. But that number doesn't take into account a vast new market that could open up: electric vehicles. As hybrid cars are growing in popularity and new plug-in models are soon to be introduced, the futurists of today are envisioning a century in which all transportation is powered by electricity. The  whole energy system, they believe, will be unified under the flow of electrons.

This seems almost laughable given the current fragility of the U.S. electricity supply system. How, I wondered, can we confidently move toward an all-electric future if we're operating on a Third World electricity grid? One way or another, by necessity if not by choice, the archaic system of plants and cables has to be rebuilt. Will it be replaced with the same old twentieth-century fossil fuels, mechanical switches, and copper wires? Or will we opt for a smart grid and usher in a generation of clean, sustainable technologies?

"The mind can not conceive," said Thomas Edison in 1916, "what man will do in the twentieth century with his chained lightning." And a lot we did, to be sure.

But now it's time to start conceiving what we'll do in the 21st century -- and there's no time to waste.

This piece was excerpted from Amanda Little's book Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells—Our Ride to the Renewable Future.

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Courtesy Climate SOSGlobal warming activists endorsed by the preeminent climatologist James Hansen are working to defeat the climate and energy bill in Congress, and they’re using some provocative stunts to spread their message.

Briefly:

At least three groups worked together on last week’s events—Climate SOS, Rising Tide North America, and “Greenwash Guerrillas,” which pied Thomas Friedman last year. They all hold a “no compromise” philosophy on climate-change action, opposing carbon markets that allow polluters to buy and sell pollution credits and arguing that larger environmental groups such as NRDC have compromised too much in working with businesses and Democratic lawmakers.

“It’s an awkward position to be environmentalists working on climate change but opposing a climate bill,” said Climate SOS organizer Rachel Smolker, a Vermont ecologist and author. “Especially with a new administration that we want to support. But we felt we need to take a really strong position because this [bill] is so inadequate.”

The campaign is awkward for “establishment” green groups too. They’ve been preparing to battle fossil-fuel interests over the energy bill introduced in the Senate this week. Now they must figure out if and how to respond to this attack from the far left.

“It’s troubling,” said Daniel J. Weiss, director for climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank with close ties to the Obama administration. “No one believes that the clean energy bill that will come out of Congress will address the threat of global warming in a single step. But we have to start.”

“The real enemies are Big Oil and Big Coal and the right wing attack machine,” he said. “For them to mock [Gore] in the way they did shows that they don’t understand you need to attack your enemies and not your allies.”

Hansen’s involvement is especially troublesome. The director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies wasn’t involved in the New York stunts, but he endorsed Climate SOS’s recent tour against a climate bill. The $2 trillion bill includes his statement that a cap-and-trade program “would be worse for the environment than doing nothing.”

The opposition by Hansen and Climate SOS is unlikely to influence Washington policymakers, in Weiss’s opinion, but it’s got the potential to make everyday Americans think the situation is hopeless.

“If they hear from such a respected scientist as James Hansen that what Congress is doing won’t matter, then why would they bother to call their senators to say ‘Act on this’?” he said.

Climate SOS activists at NRDC's headquartersCourtesy tanukiAside from the stunts last week, other moves by the “no-compromise” camp are downright perplexing. Last week Greenwash Guerrillas launched a website in response to Cleanenergyworks.us, a three-month-old diverse coalition supporting a comprehensive energy bill. The similar-sounding Cleanenergyworks.biz was a replica of the real Clean Energy Works site, with two notable changes: The phone number and email address for spokesperson Josh Dorner had been changed. His name was left the same. The site changed to a more innocuous version over the weekend and is currently down. (Have a screen grab? Send it in and we’ll post.)

Dorner had no interest in speaking about the site that took his name. “I don’t send too much of my day worrying about a website,” he said Thursday. “There are considerably more important tasks before us to get this bill across the Senate floor.”

NRDC spokesperson Michael Oko shared Dorner’s reluctance to give attention to the stunts. “There are a lot of different groups out there,” he said in regard to the banner hung at NRDC’s office. “Everybody has the right to express themselves.”

About the replica website Oko said, “Frankly, I was a little confused about what their intention was.”

Smolker of Climate SOS said the idea was “to provide a spoof, to reveal the emptiness of the claims Clean Energy Works provides. For them, it’s green jobs and clean energy and everything’s a smiley-face, you know? Our goal is to tell people to look deeper and take the smiley faces off.”

At Environmental Defense Fund.Courtesy tanukiShe said she contributed ideas for the mock site, but individuals from Greenwash Guerrillas, who did not want to be identified, created the idea.

The 51-year-old Smolker has seen firsthand how environmental groups can evolve, professionalize, and grow in wealth and influence. Her father was one of the founders of Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), another group targeted by Climate SOS last week. EDF met in her childhood home when it was still a “ragtag group,” as Climate SOS is now, she said. (Smolker, who works for Biofuel Watch, declined to give funding information for Climate SOS but said all members were volunteers.)

“We’ve played that compromise game for a long time,” she said. “There’s too much at stake right now.”

The compromise question—whether to sacrifice what is ecologically necessary for what seems politically possible--has been around as long as the green movement itself. The naturalist-and-mystic John Muir and the politician-and-forester Gifford Pinchot clashed over the same tensions in the early 20th century.

As for Hansen’s “worse than nothing” remark, there has been plenty written about the failings of the House climate and energy bill—it gives away too much to dirty-energy backers, it even protects coal-plant pollution from further regulation. But there is historical precedent of legislation that is deeply flawed at first evolving into something effective and durable. The original Clean Air Act did not address the acid rain crisis, an omission not corrected until 1990. The original Social Security Act did not include domestic or agricultural workers, effectively excluding many Hispanic, black, and immigrant workers, as Democratic strategist Paul Begala notes.

“If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist,” writes Begala. “Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start.”

Most progressives, including many major green groups, would gladly embrace an imperfect climate bill as a start.

“Those who see the House clean energy bill as somehow tainted by deals, and therefore want a carbon tax, have to understand that no tax proposal would ever emerge from Congress as we know it without similar or worse deals being made,” said Weiss. “Unfortunately the moral high ground of ‘we must act for our children’ is necessary but not sufficient for our political process.”

Smolker said Climate SOS would continue on a different tack, insisting on an acceptable bill from the get-go. She expected the group would pause to take stock of the bill released in the Senate this week, then regroup.

Here's Cap'n Trade delivering his message to Danish climate and energy minister Connie Hedegaard:

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First, Colin Beavan donned a superhero nickname and gave up electricity, fossil fuels, un-local food, and buying stuff. He blogged, he wrote a book, he let filmmakers follow his family around (his wife and daughter were roped in too). The New Yorker criticized the stunt, er, experiment. Grist weighed in. Beavan responded to, um, the New Yorker. Whatever, that’s cool.

The dialogue continues--here’s an edited transcript of our recent conversation.

Grist: The movie leaves viewers wondering, how are you living now that the No Impact experiment is finished?

Beavan: We’ve tried to keep the things that actually make sense in our life, because so many of the resources we use end up hurting our quality of life. For example, it made sense for us to save $1,200 a year by not having an air conditioner, so we gave it away. On those five or six really hot summer nights, Michelle, Isabella, and I go down to Washington Square Park and play in the fountain and talk to our neighbors, instead of huddling inside with the air conditioner.

We kept our bicycles, but we also each have a rickshaw so we can take Isabella [TK-year-old daughter] around. And it makes sense to eat food that isn’t processed and full of chemicals, so we continue to eat locally as much as we can and shop at the farmer’s market.

And you’re traveling now?

Oh geez. I haven’t flown for personal reasons yet but I will be flying to talk about the book. The publishers have very kindly offered to make substantial donations to developing world renewable energy projects. The one in particular that we’re supporting at the moment is SELF (Solar Electric Light Fund). They bring solar panels into sub-Saharan villages, which isn’t about having reading lights, it’s about running the medical refrigerators. So it becomes important in the fight against AIDS.

You’ve taken flack for focusing on lifestyle choices--where you get your food, shutting off the electricity in your apartment, and what-not. Was it inevitable that people would get hooked on the personal stunt and not on the message in the book of civic engagement?

It’s not inevitable at all. I think there are two main arguments on individual lifestyle change. One is that we have to change our way of life no matter how much technology we get, no matter what regulation we get, because we have to get to 350 [parts per million of carbon dioxide] and because Americans generate five times the carbon emissions per capita as the Chinese. Our consumption-based economy, I would argue, doesn’t work for the planet. It doesn’t work for the people either.

Second, there are gigantic groups of Americans that we can’t meet directly through environmental politics. They’re just not going to call their congressperson and tell them to support the climate bill. But they do understand that there’s a problem and they are willing to begin to change their lives. If we’re going to get the legislation we need and then keep it next time there’s a Republican administration, then we have to go beyond just using our political power to leverage the rest of the country into doing what we want. We have to change the culture. And you can’t change the values of the culture through legislation.

Let me repeat that: I don’t believe in individual action over collective action. I believe in both. It’s what I call engaged citizenship, a combination of both living your values in your own life and also living those values in your community life, volunteering for nonprofits and putting pressure on your political representatives.

There’s a pervasive idea that we can start with lists of ‘10 easy things you can do’ and they will serve as a stepping stone to get people involved in more intensive work.The idea that people will start with their light bulbs and move up to calling Congress members and organizing. But Americans have been offered lists of easy green things for years, decades even, and they’re still not politically engaged on climate change. Do you have any faith in this strategy? Or does it teach people to think of themselves as consumers and not citizens?

I completely do not believe in the 10 easy green things. The problem is when people stop at using canvas bags or changing their light bulbs. I believe in robust lifestyle change instead.  For people who aren’t yet involved, who aren’t already in the choir, I find that the two big ways to start are with local food and bicycling. Once you get people to make those changes, then you can start getting them involved in politics. If you get somebody to cycle here in New York because it’s fun and healthy, they’re more likely to get involved with Transportation Alternatives and to push for changes in the cityscape.

But that sounds like the green tips thing again. It sounds like starting with the small things, and they’re going to bring people into local transportation planning. I’m just not sure that happens with enough people.

I’m not arguing that it happens with everybody. I’m saying that this is a way of doing things that reaches a certain population. And at this stage, the last thing we should do is sit back until we find the one thing that works. We need to all of us put our shoulders at the doors of change and push and not worry about criticizing each other as much as supporting each other in all the various methods. Somebody will have a breakthrough, and we all need to be cheering each other on.

We have to find an on-ramp into environmental politics, because it’s just not growing fast enough. The more attempts at on-ramps that we can think of the better.

That’s a nice way of putting it. I like that. It does seem like a lot of the reviews of your book mention that either/or mentality, as if the focus on lifestyle takes away from the civic stuff.

No impact family: Michelle, Isabella, and Colin.Photo courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories

I didn’t realize it when I started the project, but part of the reason is this: collective action is at the root of liberal ideology and individual action is at the root of conservative ideology. To straddle individual and collective action feels like, whichever side you’re on, you’re betraying your political heritage. To suggest that we should do both is strangely radical. It’s almost like you need a whole new political party.

I mentioned in reviewing the film that your project is getting much more attention than traditional environmental health groups like Sustainable South Bronx. What do you make of that?

Let’s talk about 350.org. What 350’s doing on Oct. 24 [the International Day of Climate Action] is in some ways a spectacle, right? Somebody dives under the ocean and unrolls a “350” sign by a coral reef. The spectacle itself is not important. What is important is that the number of spectacles happening around the world will gain enough attention for people to begin to think about this policy number 350. It’s unfortunate, but so much of our media is entertainment-based. We have to create spectacles in order to get the attention that we need.

The truth of the matter is that it’s awful that No Impact Man got more attention than Sustainable South Bronx. The South Bronx has one of the highest asthma rates in the country, and it’s caused by trucks passing through the neighborhood carrying our trash to garbage transfer stations. It’s insane! Let’s take this back to individual action. It’s important that people understand this and say, “I’m throwing out so much stuff that kids are getting asthma? Maybe the way I live and the way that my culture lives is not so great.”

So what’s next for you?

I’m concentrating now on starting a nonprofit called No Impact Project. It’s a portal, in the web sense of the word and the larger sense of the word, where people can get involved and ask themselves whether they might be able to find ways of living more environmentally, in ways that also make their lives better.

One of the centerpieces of the project is a one-week experience where you get led through a bunch of different environmental adaptations while being asked all the time, “Is this making your life more or less good?” Our three main partners are 1Sky, Food and Water Watch, and Alliance for Biking and Walking. The idea is we attract people to the idea of lifestyle change and then take that energy and loan it to the existing environmental nonprofits, who can feed them into the legislative process.

Let’s end with a very important question: What’s the deal with the Will Smith rumors? Is he going to make a feature version of No Impact Man?

Sony has optioned it on behalf of Todd Black, who did Seven Pounds and Pursuit of Happiness, both of which were Will Smith films. I have no idea what talent they’re hoping to attach to the film. But I do know they’re planning for it to come out in 2012.

Is this the kind of thing where they buy lots of these rights just in case, or are they really going to make it?

I mean, rumor in the street is that they’re really going to make it. They’re not in production yet, so we can’t know until they’re in production. But what I’m told is that they are going to make it.

Find out when No Impact Man, the documentary, is showing near you, and watch the trailer:

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Harrison Ford’s new earring, origami rainforests, flash mobs, crackdowns, Survivaball-wear, and so much more! Umbra Fisk does NYC’s Climate Week. Don’t miss her 10 Best Moments from the Big Apple’s climatic extravaganza.

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Around 30 people gathered at Union Square in Manhattan at 12:18 pm on Monday to make simultaneous cell-phone calls to President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking them to support a strong international treaty to slash greenhouse-gas emissions and stop global warming.  The event, organized via text messaging, was part of a global Climate Wake-up Call to world leaders, with similar gatherings happening at 12:18 PM local time in more than 2200 locales in 128 nations.

Many of the callers at Union Square encountered busy signals and full voice mailboxes -- suggesting that calls were being made from hundreds of similar "flash mobs" up and down the East Coast at the same time.

The time is symbolic of the date December 18 -- the last day of this year's international climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen.

Advocacy group Avaaz.org has been getting live reports on Wake-up Call events around the world.

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Photo: drivenbyboredom The “culture jamming” prankster troupe The Yes Men contributed to the Climate Week excitement in New York City this morning by distributing fake copies of the New York Post. The illicit special edition of the tabloid warned that climate change could unleash heat waves, flooding, and other disasters over the next decades.

The fake paper (also online) contains actual non-fake information, the group says:

The group says nearly a million copies were distributed by more than 2,000 volunteers.

And there’s one bona-fide non-prankish plain-old-journalism scoop:

Not bad. Does this mean it takes a fake newspaper to get out the real version of the news, with the urgency the story requires?

Here’s the group’s video:

"SPECIAL EDITION" NEW YORK POST from The Yes Men on Vimeo

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While the evidence continues to mount that taxes alone aren't enough to significantly reduce junk food consumption, the political prospects for passing a federal soda tax appears to be dim. Well, New York City has decided that if they can't tax your soda, they'll go after your appetite instead.

...New York City’s public health officials opened a new front in their struggle against high-calorie beverages on Monday, unveiling an ad campaign that depicts globs of human fat gushing from a soda bottle.

“Are you pouring on the pounds?” asks the ad, which urges viewers to consider water, seltzer or low-fat milk instead, and warns: “Don’t drink yourself fat.”

Take a good look at that image, folks. Ah, the pause that nauseates.

It's easy to dismiss the effectiveness of this kind of ad campaign. Really easy if you're the American Beverage Association -- a spokesman told the New York Times that the ads would "do more harm than good." Whether the spokesman was referring to the debate over soda consumption or to beverage companies' bottom lines is unknown.

Yet with kids now drinking more soda than they do milk, it's entirely possible that many parents simply don't connect the dots between soda consumption and obesity. Compare any shock the above image may cause to the shock that comes with the revelation that liquid candy has now become a top beverage choice in households across the country -- and given that fact it's hard not to marvel at the shamelessness and outright disingenousness of beverage companies. At this point, anything that gets people looking at soda as an item that simply shouldn't be part of an everyday diet has a role play.

The fact remains that, as with all policy interventions, the goal is not to end soda consumption entirely -- just to reduce it enough to have an impact on obesity rates. Obviously, a single ad campaign isn't going to do that -- but getting government explicitly behind the message that soda isn't just another drink is a good place to start.

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In November 2006, Michelle Conlin began a year-long experiment in extreme sustainability, resolving to burn no fossil fuels, produce no trash, and eat only food grown within 250 miles of her Greenwich Village home. She gave up nearly all shopping and learned to use cloth diapers for her 2-year-old daughter. She took up bicycling and rode a scooter to work. Describing her earlier self as “espresso-guzzling, retail-worshipping” and a “take-out junkie,” she gave up coffee (with some lapses) and to-go food. Eventually she gave up electricity at home, relying on candles in her 9th-floor apartment and lots of stair climbing.

Michelle, Isabella, and Colin, still smiling.Photo courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories

Conlin, a 42-year-old reporter at Business Week, had no blog, book deal, or film project to send her on this journey of sacrifice and self-denial. What she had was a husband.

By fortune or misfortune, Conlin is married to Colin Beavan, the self-described No Impact Man. He cooked up the No Impact Man stunt as fodder for a book of the same name, out Sept. 1. He keeps a No Impact Man blog. And a film crew recorded his year for No Impact Man the movie, also released next month.

Beavan, 45, says he undertook the project to learn if his own lifestyle could become part of a solution to the world’s environmental crises. In writing about his motivation, he says he was afraid of becoming “that brand of liberal who whines about the world but doesn’t actually do anything about it.”

“If I were still a student, I’d probably march against my adult self,” he quips.

Hence, the bathtub full of laundry and the winter dinners of local cabbage. Also, because of the deforestation crisis, no toilet paper.

While Beavan gets all the attention and the superhero nickname, his wife and their 2-year-old daughter, Isabella, are dragged along for the un-motorized ride. That’s a good thing for the film, because Conlin emerges as the most vivid character for the simple reason that she struggles to make such drastic changes in her life.

Beavan, despite his claims that he was a do-nothing liberal, seems like he was just waiting for a reason to build a kitchen compost bin, mix up natural cleaning supplies, start buying groceries at the Union Square farmers market, etc, etc. The movie shows him reflecting on and defending the project, it shows him visibly losing weight over the year, but you don’t really see him struggle.

Conlin is more sympathetic because she misses coffee and tires of eating local root vegetables. She thinks, understandably, that a year is a long time to go without buying new clothes. While No Impact Husband devotes much of his day to cooking, cleaning, and making the experiment work, she keeps her day job. The filmmakers play up Conlin’s “espresso-guzzling, retail-worshipping” characterization, but it’s still clear this is difficult for her.

The movie opens with Beavan backstage at The Colbert Report, practicing different ways of explaining his shtick. This is telling, as a lot of the movie is about the couple explaining the project. A New York Times profile about them serves as a plot development, because they’re shocked at how strongly and negatively readers react to their project.

“I didn’t quite get why people hated us,” says Conlin. She visits Eating Liberally blogger Kerry Trueman, who wrote a scathing post about No Impact Man before softening her view of the enterprise.

“This really touches a nerve for people,” Trueman says. “Aside from making people feel guilty and defensive about their consumer habits, people are very traumatized if you suggest that they should make do without something.”

Others weren’t angry but dismissive, leading Beavan to complain about the Times profile headline, “The Year Without Toilet Paper.”

Beavan holds Isabella at the Union Square Greenmarket. Photo courtesy Oscilloscope Laboratories

“What if we called it the year I lost 20 pounds without going to the gym once?” he says. “Or the year we didn’t watch TV and became much better parents as a result? Or if we called it the year we ate locally and seasonally and it ended up reversing my wife’s pre-diabetic condition?”

But if the project is meant to get people talking—and Beavan says it is—it succeeded. Colbert, Good Morning America, and a slew of other media called to get his story. Sony/Columbia bought the right to rework the story as a drama that could, reportedly, include Will Smith. (Weird, I know.)

At some point toward the end of his project Beavan makes the discovery that he isn’t alone in working toward sustainability. He visits a project to reintroduce oysters in the Hudson River and an industrial cleanup project in the Bronx and says, “There is this network of people who have been working on this stuff forever.”

It shouldn’t have taken a year-long experiment to figure that out, but Beavan understands that the publicity gods reward stunts like No Impact Year. To my knowledge, the Bronx cleanup people haven’t been invited on Good Morning America.

Beavan undertook the project expecting that it would launch a more politically engaged stage in his career. (He has a Ph.D. in electronic engineering and wrote previous books about the history of forensics and D-Day.) After learning that 12,000 diesel trucks a day pass through the Bronx neighborhood he visited, he reports, “The diesel particulates in the air are causing asthma in kids, causing brain damage in kids … I’m not talking about the polar bears, I’m not talking about people in faraway island communities who are going to be hurt when the ocean levels rise. I’m talking about people who are already feeling the effects of our over-consumptive society.”

I hope his work keeps moving in this direction. In explaining why he flipped off his apartment’s circuit breakers earlier in the film, he says, “I can’t change the way that electricity is delivered to my house.” I wanted to tell him that a lot of engineers, activists, and citizens are working hard because of their conviction that—together--they can change where electricity comes from.

He seems to sense this when he installs a rooftop solar panel and says, “For the first time I’ve realized that it’s not about using as little as I can possibly use, but finding a way to get what I need in a sustainable way.”

It might be an artificial revelation at the end of a patently artificial “experiment.” Then again, even Thoreau’s shack at Walden Pond was a stunt, with a book deal always in mind. Walden proved both deeply irritating and useful to those who were unsettled by it. No Impact Man (the movie) inhabits that tradition well.

One more note: It’s a thoroughly fun movie to watch, with great music. Watching Beavan reading Gawker comments about himself gives a sense of how hard it can be to dramatize a story about not doing things. But filmmakers Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein make the most of the Manhattan setting, using traffic jams, overflowing trash cans, and belching exhaust pipes as foils to Beavan and Conlin’s clean living. They got into the no-impact spirit, shooting from a bicycle rickshaw while filming the couple on their bikes.

Find out when the movie is coming to your city, and watch the trailer:

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Courtesy Brita Climate RideHow far would you go to fight climate change? How about 300 miles? Hundreds of cyclists will pedal from New York City to Washington, D.C., in late September to do just that.

The Brita Climate Ride is a multi-day bicycle ride that raises money and awareness for climate change action. The riders will depart New York City on Sept. 26 having raised $2400, the proceeds of which will go toward three climate/bike advocacy charities: Focus the Nation, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, and Clean Air - Cool Planet.

During their five-day ride, they'll hear from experts like climate scientist James Hansen, No Impact Man Colin Beavan, Lazy Environmentalist Josh Dorfman, and Friis Arne Petersen, Denmark's ambassador to the U.S. and the host of the COP15 U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen this December.

On Sept. 30, they'll cycle past the Washington Monument to arrive on the steps of the Capitol building. Once there, riders will have a chance to sit down with their senators to discuss what they learned on the Climate Ride and why they want to see them supporting climate-change legislation.

But the Climate Ride isn't meant to be all pedaling and politics. Along the way, riders will be joined by The Great Salt Licks, the first bluegrass band on bicycles. They'll also have the chance to hang out in a solar-powered eco-lounge each night and check out a sculpture made from empty plastic bottles, which will be towed by one team for the length of the trip.

Want to make change while changing gears, to add some power to your pedaling? Join the Climate Ride -- there are still 40 spots left!

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Seattle is the most sustainable big city in the nation, according to a list compiled by Smarter Cities, an NRDC project that looks at the progress American cities are making toward going green. Not surprisingly, San Francisco and Portland are the runners-up.

Using data from the EPA and the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as some voluntary survey responses from city governments, the project identified the top 15 large, medium, and small cities according to 10 different environmental criteria, from air quality to recycling to transportation.

Here's a look the top 15 large cities (population of 250,000 or more):

It's hard not to be environmentally minded in a city with views like this.Photo: Simonds1. Seattle
The Emerald City gets props for its brand-new light rail system, reliance on hydroelectricity (and the resulting good air quality), Mayor Greg Nickels' U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Agreement, and two global warming initiatives: Seattle Climate Action Now and Seattle Climate Partnership. Seattleites are described as "highly educated and environmentally minded." Think it's just a coincidence that Grist is headquartered here?

San Francisco is one of the most densely populated cities in the country.Photo: ATIS5472. San Francisco
San Francisco's dense population, walkability, plastic-bag ban, city-created carbon offset fund, solar power program, and booming local food movement propelled it to the No. 2 spot. (Read more about Mayor Gavin Newsom's green efforts.)

Portland has always been a leader in big-city sustainability.Photo: Ben Amstutz3. Portland
Seattle's neighbor to the south got its light rail up and running more than 20 years ago, and the city has always been ahead of the curve on controlling urban sprawl and suppressing greenhouse-gas emissions. Portland's residents also recycle more than half their waste.

Oakland is making a green comeback.Photo: satanslaundromat4. Oakland, Calif.
This once-struggling city has a Green Jobs Corps, a New Urbanist 10K Downtown Housing Initiative, a Zero Waste Plan, and a growing local food movement (as urban farmer Novella Carpenter explains). It also gets 17 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. Sounds like there is a there there.

How green was my Silicon Valley?Photo: the_tahoe_guy5. San Jose, Calif.
Always on the cutting edge of the high-tech world, this capital of Silicon Valley is fast on its way to leading the green-jobs revolution. Its Green Vision includes plans for bringing 25,000 new clean-tech jobs to the area.

Austin's new smart grid will light up the night -- sustainably, of course.Photo: Visualist Images6. Austin, Texas
A liberal outpost in red Texas, this city owns its electric utility (meaning voters elect the utility's board) and plans to adopt a smart grid in the near future.

Sacramento aims to be green while it grows.Photo: kla40677. Sacramento, Calif.
The Golden State's capital, while suffering from the side effects of rapid population growth, has a progressive, publicly owned utility that, in addition to offering a 100 percent renewable power option, provides free trees to residents hoping to cool their homes with natural shade.

Boston stands out among less-green East Coast cities.Photo: werkunz18. Boston, Mass.
Boston's push toward wind and solar energy, its efforts to become more bike-friendly, and its LED traffic lights make it a leader on the environmentally lagging East Coast.

Denver conserves water like nobody's business.Photo: kla40679. Denver, Colo.
The Mile High City is already way ahead of its goals for reducing water consumption. Its new bike-sharing and composting programs and extensive system of city parks also helped it make the top 15.

Chicago's city hall has its own green roof.Photo: Smarter Cities10. Chicago
Always famous for its architecture, today Chicago has more LEED-certified buildings than any other U.S. city and boasts 300 green roofs. (Read more about Mayor Richard Daley's green efforts.)

San Diego is growing smart.Photo: Smarter Cities11. San Diego
Parks and open spaces make up almost a quarter of this city's land area, and its smart growth program has led to impressive developments.

The Big (Green) Apple.Photo: mikeleeorg12. New York City
What it lacks in air quality and renewable energy it makes up for in density, walkability, and Mayor Bloomberg's commitment to reducing the city's carbon footprint. (Read more about Bloomberg's green efforts.)

L.A. works to clear a path through the smog.Photo: Storm Crypt13. Los Angeles
Infamous for its smog and clogged freeways, L.A. is making admirable efforts to switch to renewable energy and conserve its water supply.

Big D: Greener than you'd think.Photo: dherrera_9614. Dallas
Dallas gets 40 percent of its electricity from wind, has seen a huge spike in public transit usage in recent years, and cracks down on lengthy truck idling during the "ozone season" from April to October.

Columbus hopes for an urban resurgence.Photo: jpmueller9915. Columbus, Ohio
A perhaps unexpected entry on the list, flat Columbus lends itself to bike-friendliness. The city has also been working hard to revitalize its downtown core and combat sprawl.

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Photo: Ralph HockensReason No. 137 that I love commuting by bike in New York City: I get to watch baby hawks go to flight school.

Last year, I was fascinated and then heartbroken by a pair of red-tail hawks that built a precarious-looking nest over the West Side Highway, produced a trio of hatchlings, then lost their offspring before they got a chance to take flight, apparently to rat poison.

So I was happy -- but concerned -- this year when the hawks returned to Riverside Park and took up in a new tree, this time just off the West Side bike path that I frequently ride to work. (New York real estate experts would no doubt call this new nest an upgrade -- it has great views of the Hudson River.)

I didn't watch the pair as closely as I did last year, because I had a newborn of my own that took up most of my attention this spring. But I did check the updates occasionally at blogs that obsessively follow urban hawks, and I always looked up at the nest when I passed by their tree.

Riding home last week, I noticed more commotion than usual. Photographers -- call them hawkarazzi -- were pointing their lenses skyward, and parks employees were surrounding the hawks' tree with a temporary fence and signs warning dog walkers to keep their pooches at bay.

The baby hawks were learning to fly.

I pulled my bike over and craned my neck up with everyone else. I quickly spotted mom and dad high in the branches, watching as their new trio of youngsters tested out their wings. As a new father myself, I felt a shared sense of pride with the plucky birds who -- like me -- call Riverside Drive their home.

Much has been written about the connection that New Yorkers feel with their hawks -- particularly the famous Pale Male, who nested for years on a Fifth Avenue co-op overlooking Central Park that he shared with Mary Tyler Moore. (The Riverside Park hatchlings are likely his descendents.)

For my part, I think it's a sense of validation and connection to nature -- that even here on the island of Manhattan, one of the most densely packed cities in the world, I can see hawks building nests and raising their offspring, and I can do it from the back of my bicycle while riding alongside the majestic Hudson River.

It's one of those hidden treats, those shared experiences that make life in New York so rewarding and exhilarating, despite its daily hassles and challenges and the constant queries from non-New Yorkers along the lines of: "You've got a kid now. When are you going to move out of your tiny apartment and into a real house in the suburbs already?"

If the hawks can make it here, they can make it anywhere -- and so can the rest of us.

I think there's another appeal to hawk watching, as well: A sense that if nature survives and thrives in an environment like New York City, surrounded by all the concrete and chaos, then maybe things aren't as bad as we sometimes fear they are. Maybe the world as we know it will shrug off the pollution of our atmosphere, the changes in temperature, the loss of thousands of species, the massive shifts in climate that science tells us are coming. Maybe nature -- and we -- are tougher than we think.

Of course, that kind of hope can also bring disappointment.

I stopped by the nest again on my ride home last night and learned from my fellow hawk gawkers that one of the three fledglings had been hit by a car and killed. Reports say that it was flying low while carrying a dead rat in its talons -- probably the first meal it had caught on its own. Nature may be resilient, but there are dangers around every turn.

Still, the dead fledgling's siblings hadn't given up. There they were yesterday evening, up in the trees, taking short flights from limb to limb and following their father as he enticed them farther away from the nest with a dead squirrel in his grasp.

I wished the fledglings luck and continued home. Soon, if they survive, the young hawks will fly off for good, leaving an empty nest behind. Surely there are safer places for the adult hawks to raise a family than this busy spot on New York's Upper West Side, but selfishly, I hope they continue to return year after year.

I want to bring my own son here one day, to point up into the trees and hope that he shares my sense of wonder and inspiration at what's learning to soar just above our heads.

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Could. Not. Resist. From NYT's City Room Blog:

The sustainable garden with the most exclusive real estate in Washington is no doubt the one at the White House. The sustainable farm with the most exclusive view in New York City is the one that opened on Governors Island last week.

Oh. Yeah. Governors Island is an island in New York Harbor not far from the Brooklyn waterfront. It was an army base for almost two hundred years and then a Coast Guard base for a few decades after that. It was decomissioned in 2001 and since that time various redevelopment plans have been proposed for it. But this is the best plan yet.

The organic three-acre farm, one of a handful of commercial organic farms within the five boroughs, is a collaboration between the corporation and a Brooklyn nonprofit group called Added Value, which teaches teenagers about sustainable and local food by training them to work on urban farms.

The Governors Island farm is expected to produce tens of thousands of dollars in organic produce annually, and as much as $25,000 this year — mostly though sales at a farm stand and to a soon-to-be-opened Water Taxi Beach on the northern part of the island. Among the offerings, the earliest of which is expected to be ripe in late July, are squash, tomatoes, sunflowers, eggplants and groundcherries (a relative of the gooseberry).

The farm will have close ties to New York Harbor School, which is scheduled to move from Bushwick, Brooklyn, to the island in 2010. The farm will provide produce, and students can volunteer and do science work there.

This is just all good. The more urban gardening the better and what better way to promote it than through such a high-profile project as this -- and the money-making part isn't bad either. Again, that school/farm connection is crucial since putting kids into gardens (i.e. improving education surrounding food and farming) is fundamental to food system reform. Score several for NYC.

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New York City took a baby step recently towards a state role in distributing healthy food. It significantly expanded a program to bring fruit and vegetable "carts" to low-income neighborhoods that lack good food options -- so-called "food deserts." And if the early response as reported by the NYT is any indication, the program looks to be a rip-roaring success:

The crowds who appear to be turning out for the carts should give some pause to elitist opponents of such programs who often doubt that low-income residents will put down their sodas and fast food and pick up apples and carrots. Indeed, a member of the USDA's dietary guidlines panel (i.e. the people who brought you the food pyramid) recently speculated -- as paraphrased by US Food Policy -- "whether people would really eat much differently if healthy food were free." The NYT provides a hint of an answer:

If the avid buyers at Decatur Avenue were any indication, residents of produce-poor neighborhoods may welcome the green-umbrella invasion. “Research has demonstrated that the greater the access, the more the consumption,” said Elliott S. Marcus, an associate commissioner of the city’s health department.

And New York didn't just address access. While the program doesn't officiallly subsidize fruit and vegetable prices (for which I've advocated before), it does subsidize the overhead of the vendors. As a result, they can offer aggressively low prices. According the article, produce was half the price (or even less) of the same stuff at local markets.

In some ways, this is such an obvious program that it's painful to think that even this modest fleet of up to 1,000 produce carts could have failed based on opposition from brick and mortar vendors. While it did pass, it was a tough fight. As the NYT described the original city council proposal back in early 2008:

The measure had the backing of antihunger and child-advocacy groups, and when it was introduced it appeared to have strong support on the Council. But support began to waver amid heavy lobbying from the retail food industry, leading to a flurry of late changes and compromises.

And even now, not everyone is happy about the new competition.

“It may be good for health, but it’s bad for business,” said George Katehis, manager of the Splendid Deli Restaurant at 387 East Fordham Road. “A guy might buy a piece of fruit there instead of coming in here for a soda.”

Yes, George. I believe that's the point. I've written before about our mind-boggling tendency to privilege the needs of business-owners over the general public in public policy debates. But the fact is that current businesses simply aren't meeting the demand for fresh food in marginal neighborhoods -- and this is true across the country. So who cares what they think?

This one small program isn't going to solve the core problems of food deserts, or obesity for that matter. But it certainly suggests that government policies aimed at providing an adequate supply of healthy food at a reasonable price to low-income people have a good chance at succeeding. I can't think of any reason why this shouldn't be replicated in communities across the country. It's cheap, quick and effective. And while cities like Philadelphia have had success with public/private partnerships to bring supermarkets in to underserved areas (a model which NYC is planning to emulate), building or renovating stores takes time and still relies to some extent on the good intentions of supermarket chains. Why should low-income folks have to wait for all that? Let's roll some produce trucks, people!

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We've all heard that eating locally is one way to reduce your environmental impact. But what about donating locally? In the urban wilds of New York City, a new non-profit is betting that locally based, small-scale giving can have a big eco-impact.

Ioby, whose name stands for "in our back yards," connects people working on neighborhood-level projects with community members who can physically and financially support them. At ioby.org, launched this month by co-founders Erin Barnes, Cassie Flynn, and Brandon Whitney, individuals or groups post project descriptions and budgets, and interested donors contribute to the project of their choice. Here's their introductory video:

Within its first 10 days of existence, ioby successfully facilitated the funding of the first three of its 40 listed projects: a Boy Scout proposed and executed an environmental awareness fair, a community garden got a compost education class off the ground, and another grassroots group undertook a park cleanup and revegetation project in Queens. It's all part of an effort, says Barnes, to get people connected to their surroundings and invested in the future.

The concept that powers the organization's work is known as microfinance. As a philanthropy model, it's not new, but in recent years it's gained momentum online, with popular sites focusing on education and international development projects. Ioby is the first microfinance site to focus on funding local environmental projects.

Fueled by their successes so far, ioby's founders -- who met at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and have called New York City home since graduating in 2007 -- hope to expand the model to other communities around the country, though they acknowledge that it will take a lot more work than they first realized. They recently got together to answer a few questions about where the idea came from, who's using ioby.org, and how it works.

Organizers of "It's My Park!" day asked ioby followers to help them raise awareness.ioby.orgQ. Do you think ioby's small-scale model is the future of environmental activism?

A. Barnes: A lot of environmental work comes from national campaigns, and all of those efforts are really important. But I think one of the things that we miss is the groups themselves in the neighborhoods, recognizing their own environmental problems, proposing their own solutions. Ioby helps small, community-based groups like neighborhood associations and block associations. It gives them a website, it gives them a storefront, it gives them a cash register, a place where they can talk about these issues to the general public.
I actually think that this is a pretty powerful tool for grassroots organizing. You can reach a lot of people - that's what social networking does. You engage them by telling them the stories about projects that are happening in their own neighborhoods. You ask them for $20 or three hours on a Saturday afternoon. And I think at that point you have a dedicated lifelong member who wants to make sure that half a block of green space is protected into the future.
Flynn: The people that go onto ioby.org, they get to see what's going on in their neighborhood and they get to choose a project that is meaningful to them.
Whitney: Ioby really is about local places and helping people either rediscover or discover for the first time that the environment isn't something that's abstract or far away, and that it's mostly about what's right around you.

Q. How do people get projects on ioby?

A. Whitney: You go to ioby.org. It's very easy to find the application there. You create a login first, and it's a pretty short series of questions. It's not a very onerous process, we don't think. We take about two weeks to review [the project] and make sure it meets all of our criteria, and then we get back to you with our answer and we post it. We have worked with groups to make an initial idea that didn't completely meet our criteria, or had a huge budget, into something better suited for our site.

To help residents explore the undiscovered trails of northern Manhattan, Hike the Heights sought funds and volunteers.ioby.orgQ. What kind of projects are you most excited about?

A. Barnes: There's so many. The Rockaway Waterfront Alliance is a good one. It's a rainwater harvest system that they want to install, and that's actually just $345. It's about storm water management, reducing non-point source pollution from flooding. The All People's Garden on the Lower East Side needs $2,000 to remove some serious concrete debris. There's a CUNY-Baruch honors student who is proposing to build a green roof on his school's building. Groups are composting at McCarren Park in Brooklyn, gardening in abandoned lots, boating in the East River, and hiking through Northern Manhattan. There's just so many projects on the site I can't keep track of them.

Q. Who's using ioby so far?

A. Barnes: The project groups that are using ioby are really various. Some of them are 501(c)3s, some of them are not. One group is Columbia University's public health department, and another is Sustainable South Bronx, and one is a school teacher in Washington Heights. There's a lot of community gardens, and there are some that just focus on one neighborhood, like Trees Not Trash Bushwick.

Q. How do you ensure a funded project gets completed?

A. Barnes: Our project groups do the fundraising [at ioby.org] and then, as the project is underway, they post updates. They post photos and they talk about when volunteers come out and plant some trees and clean up some debris ... At the end, when the project is completed, they submit a report and write about lessons learned, or what they would have done differently, or advice to other groups, and they put that on the website [where it's available to the public].

Q. How did you come up with the idea for ioby?

A. Barnes: We copied already successful models and applied it to the idea of doing local environmental work. A lot of the other wonderful, fantastic, online micro-philanthropies that are hugely, wildly successful are about someone really far away giving money to something that they're really far away from. We were thinking that with the environment being something that people have a personal connection to, if we encourage people to donate to something locally then they're investing in the future of their own neighborhoods.

Q. Do you have plans to expand ioby to other cities?

A. Whitney: The short answer is yes. Although we've found over the past year that it takes an incredible amount of work to build the capacity to engage with the hundreds of groups that we've talked to thus far just in one city. And so it's going to be a process of expanding city by city, and sort of picking some key places first.

Q. Do you really think small, local environmental projects can make a difference when we face such vast environmental problems?

One teacher is seeking support so students can test soil and water quality.ioby.orgA. Barnes: You're talking about New York City. You're talking about a city with the carbon footprint of Ireland. You're talking about this massive place where if all these people make a small individual effort it can make a huge, huge impact. All you have to do is get one eighth of all of New York City residents to help plant a tree each and then you have a million trees.
Flynn: I think one of the things that ioby really believes in is that a lot of small actions can lead to big change. We hear a lot about these huge environmental problems. "An Inconvenient Truth" came out, and a lot of people learned there's this big problem going on out there. Now that we have this information, what's the next step? People want to know how to get involved. And these are people that don't come necessarily from an environmental background. They want to learn more, and they want to get involved, and they can go to ioby and they can do these smaller projects that do add up to big change.

Q. It sounds as if you're equating environmentalism with community building.

A. Flynn: Ioby tries to tap into this idea that environmentalism can be what you care about. A lot of people, especially in New York, are very connected to their space. We're very proud of our borough ... And I think ioby is providing this space where you see all the great things that are going on around you in a place that you really care about.
Barnes: I think that environmentalism has always been about the things that are immediately around you. It's the streets and sidewalks we walk on every single day, it's the subway we take to work, and it's that poor little tree that's barely able to sprout out of the sidewalk. It's hotdog stands and soccer fields. That's our environment. If you clean it up, and you put your blood and sweat into that, and you plant some trees, you are going to become a steward of that for the rest of your life. This is about transformational environmentalism, where we become environmentalists for life.

Editor's note: Stephanie Paige Ogburn attended graduate school at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies along with the three founders of ioby.org. She is not involved in ioby.org in any way other than writing about it as a new model of environmental activism.

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Last fall, the New York City theatre community launched a remarkable industry-wide initiative, Broadway Goes Green, to "reduce Broadway's carbon footprint, adopt environmentally sustainable practices and promote environmental awareness in the creation and presentation of Broadway shows."

In collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office, "Act I" of the initative called on theatres to "conduct a carbon impact inventory and to set up an action plan to lower their carbon footprint using a wide range of actions, including the conversion of all exterior theatre marquee lights to more efficient bulbs." Within a month, nearly a quarter of the Broadway marquees switched to more efficient lighting. Fourteen other conversions are underway; over 10,000 exterior bulbs have already been changed.

With a revival of Tennessee Williams' first full-length play (about Alabama coal miners) under their belt, an extraordinary Brooklyn-based theatre group -- New Mummer Theatre Collective -- has just announced their plans for "Act II" in making Broadway truly green.

They want to take Off Broadway, off coal -- at least, off mountaintop removal coal.

The New Mummer Theatre Collective will kick off the New York Loves Mountains Festival on Friday, May 29th, 8pm, at the Philip Coltoff Center in Greenwich Village, 219 Sullivan Street, with a reading of "Light Comes," the first national-touring original theatre production to explore the dramatic stories behind New York City's birthplace of the coal-fired electrical plant, and its contemporary connection to mountaintop removal strip mining in Appalachia.

Written and directed by Steinberg-Award-winning playwright Sarah Moon, with a cast that includes actress-director Stephanie Pistello, founding artistic director of the cutting-edge environmental production company, Headwater Productions, "Light Comes" is a green epic in scope, and a spellbinding and timely event in contemporary theatre.

Accompanied by acclaimed cellist Ben Sollee, "Light Comes" ranges from the invention of electricity in Thomas Edison's historic lab, to today's ravaged hills and hollows in eastern Kentucky, to the backroom finance deals of King Coal on Wall Street. The play untangles the web of our modern-day coal-fired electrical empire, revealing the truth behind why America runs on coal, and why the fathers of electricity never imagined its reckless duration. In the end, "Light Comes" explores the nightmare connection of mountaintop removal coal that fuels the marquess along Broadway.

The play doesn't end with the last scene. As part of the New York Loves Mountain Festival, a weekend of theatre, music and activism promoting an end to mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia and natural gas drilling in the Catskills, both Moon and Pistello plan to take their "Light Comes" production on the road as part of a national clean energy campaign.

More than 240,000 tons of coal stripmined through mountaintop removal operations are consumed by New Yorkers every year. Thirteen power plants in 11 counties burn mountaintop removal coal. When the marquee signs on Broadway light up, a signal will most likely be sent from the New York Independent System Operator grid to the Lovett coal-fired plant, where the facility service will shovel in coal strip-mined from West Virginia mountains that have been clear cut, detonated with tons of explosives and toppled into the valleys.

For Moon, Pistello and their New Mummer Theatre Collective, the first step toward a Green Broadway is to promote a switch to renewable energy sources in New York. Moon and Pistello answered a few questions on their cutting-edge theatre collective and "Light Comes" play.

Jeff Biggers: Light Comes is the first national-touring original theatre production based on a mountaintop removal family saga and Thomas Edison's first coal-fired plant in New York City. How did you happen to approach and develop a play based on these themes?

Sarah Moon: The first production we did as a company was an early play by Tennessee Williams called Candles to the Sun about a 1930’s coalmining family in Southern Appalachia. We took this play down to Louisville, KY and met a lot of great people along the way. One of them remembered us a few months later when musician Randy Wilson was seeking performers to do street theatre for a media action outside the UN and a concert at Riverside Church to raise awareness about mountaintop removal in NYC. We took the opportunity and began researching the subject. We used song, movement and excerpts from interviews with victims of the 1972 Buffalo Creek disaster to create a 10 minute performance piece. That experience, combined with meeting activists like Judy Bonds and listening to an electrifying speech by Bobby Kennedy Jr. convinced us that mountain top removal had to be the subject of our next play.

When I began researching the subject, I realized there was no way I could do it justice simply by presenting the current situation. I needed to go back to the invention of electricity and examine the choices since then that led to an electrical system so successfully privatized that local or national interests, in fact, relentless cries of protest in the governmental halls of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Washington D.C. to stop mountain top removal and preserve our nation's oldest forest, second most biodiverse region and home to Appalachian culture could be utterly ignored in favor of fast, easy money.

Stephanie Pistello: I'm originally from Appalachia, and when I founded the New Mummer Theatre Collective with Sarah in 2006, the point was to create a collaborative theatre company, based in New York City, that would forge a conversation between artists in urban and rural communities. We wanted to talk about things out there in the world that were affecting our lives, for good or for bad. Our first play, Candles to the Sun, was a beautiful first place to start, because it opened up the idea that Appalachia is the home of incredibly strong, resilient people and some of the most beautiful scenery you will every see in your life. It also exposed the incredibly dramatic truth behind the behavior of the coal industry and it's oppression on coal mining communities for the last one hundred years.

At that time, no one was talking about mountaintop removal. In fact, the Sago mining disaster happened just two weeks after our first reading of the play. The familiar face of the underground miner was all over the news. Our cast of 13 traveled through Appalachia in preparation for the Louisville premiere, rehearsing, gathering props and dining with locals along the way. By the time we arrived at Actors Theatre of Louisville, the coalfields of Appalachia held a special place in all of our hearts. The characters we met enriched our performance and stayed with us long after we left. In the spring of 2007, I could still hear the voice of the young woman who, when told we were doing a play about underground miners efforts unionize during the depression, blurted at me "Do you know about mountaintop removal?!" "Yes", I said. "But right now, we have to stay focused on the past..."

So, when Randy Wilson asked if we would perform street theatre about mountaintop removal at a media event at the United Nations, I said, "Of course!" Creating those pieces was liberating, because we were creatively exploring themes that anyone can relate to: family, home, your relationship to nature, the need for clean drinking water, experiencing a bomb going off, and then - electricity. The theme of electricity, to a theatre maker, is an incredible treasure chest of possibilities. The moment Sarah decided she had to include the history behind this invention we are so absolutely addicted to, so much so that we as a society place access to it over access to clean drinking water, we knew we had our story.

JB: How has the play evolved over the past two years?

SM: I think it has gone from being more presentation and broad to being three-dimensional with deeper emotional roots, especially in the story of the family. It has also progressed from being highly didactic with an actual professor character who spoke to the audience about mountain top removal to being more implicit in its message and letting the story carry the play. Our process started in a rehearsal room at Brooklyn Arts Exchange in February of 2008 with a 10-page script and an ensemble of actors. We explored the themes of addiction to electricity and connection to the land being sacrificed for it.

By the end of a month, we had the seed of our play. We presented a first act of the play in July of 2008 in the first New York Loves Mountains Festival. We received great feedback from that performance that led to the cutting of the professor and a re-orientation around the family story. In September of 2008, we presented our first full-length version at Dixon Place, a home for experimental theatre in New York. Based on feedback, we felt like we had the key ingredients of our story and could move on to enrich and clarify the storyline. In February of 2009, we did a workshop read-thru with a group of actors and designers. The discussion that followed inspired further rewrites to heighten the drama in the play. One actor suggested the addition of a parallel character to J.P. Morgan which led to the birth of Major K, owner of the coal company. Along the way, several readers assisted in asking questions and making suggestions. The development of this play has truly been a collaborative endeavor.

SP: The dynamics between characters and the driving actions of the story have evolved in tandum with the local and national movement to end mountaintop removal. We began this journey in 2007 in New York City alongside nearly one hundred coalfield residents and college students who had come to tell the world about mountaintop removal, and we have tried very hard to walk with them ever since. Sarah began her research by interviewing leading activists such as Teri Blanton of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and Researcher Tammy Horn, and took a flyover with Southwings. In 2008 I attended End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington, we both led a workshop on Theatre of the Oppressed at Mountain Justice Summer Training in KY, and Sarah attended Mountain Justice Fall Break in West Virginia.

We've not only become activists, we're friends with the coalfield residents and Americans who want to see an end to this egregious human rights injustice, and we've taken the truth of their lives and made it a part of our story. For example, when the Coal River Wind Campaign began, the family in our play also found hope in the possibility of a wind farm on their mountain instead of mountaintop removal, and several lines in the play are inspired from real conversations we've had.

There's also the fact that two years ago, no one would have thought energy would be one of the top three issues for a new Administration. Americans are starting to learn the truth about coal, about where their energy comes from, but we still have a long way to go in understanding the real costs associated with it versus other available, truly clean resources. We've found this awakening helpful in that have been able to take out, for example, the role of a professor who has to tell the audience what mountaintop removal is. Because the grassroots movement has taken good care of that, and the world is listening.

JB: Can you explain Thomas Edison's role in the first coal-fired plant?

SM: Thomas Edison was in charge of building the first "dynamo" or large power plant in America meant to service electricity needs for a large area. J.P. Morgan financed the endeavor and Edison worked like a dog, often sleeping in the partially finished plant even though his family had gotten an apartment in Manhattan for the duration. He was a notoriously hard worker and I believe that was because hard work was his salvation as a child, living in a small-town Midwestern family that had trouble making ends meet. As a kid, he worked as a newspaper salesman on the railroads. I think as some children find emotional succor from mother, Edison found it from hard work. It lifted him up from fear and uncertainty and...it was reliable. I don't think he ever could have let anything "come to him", he went out and got it. He talked about wrestling with Nature to get her to give up one of her secrets. Just from that description, you can see that labor in a physical sense was central to his identity. I imagine that when he thought of himself thinking, he visualized gears actually turning in his brain.

JB: Your play is also centered around a family in the eastern Kentucky coalfields that must defend its family property for mountaintop removal operations. What are some of the dynamics of this conflict?

SP: This play attempts to challenge the idea that the corporations rights to the land, air and water do not trump the people's rights to the same. In Appalachia, King Coal Rules. If you have coal under your property, they have the right to take that land from you whenever they're ready. Sixty years ago, they would dig a mine. Now, they literally blow it up, dig the coal with a giant machine, and dump what's left over the other side into the valley. Many, many people have watched as their family cemeteries, some dating back before the Revolutionary War, were bulldozed up in the name of cheap electricity.

The people of Appalachia are being told that their lives, the lives of their children and their rich cultural heritage are worthless compared to the need for someone in Miami or New York or Sioux City to charge their ipod or microwave their dinner. It's literally a sacrifice zone down there. People are so, so sick from drinking water contaminated with lead, arsenic, selenium, mercury, and chemicals used to wash the coal once extracted. In some areas cancer rates are 70% higher than the national average. Young children are dying of brain cancer, entire neighborhoods of women can no longer get pregnant. But, this is one of the only industries in the region that provides decent paying jobs.

So here you have one half of the people relying on this abomination to feed their families, and the other half dying from it or being terrorized to the point they need drugs to stay calm or sleep or not be depressed. It's a real mess. And when those that are oppressed speak up, their lives are threatened, their dogs are shot, or coal trucks start trying to run them off the road. It takes a tremendous amount of courage to stand up and fight, but that's one thing Appalachians aren't lacking! Just as they did at the turn of the century, they are organizing for a healthy, free, sustainable future in Appalachia. They are using their inventiveness and resilience to look at the mountains and see wind instead of coal, and to convince Washington and Wall Street that it's time for Appalachia to fuel America's NEXT industrial revolution.

JB: Another character takes a job with an investment firm that actually funds mountaintop removal and coal mining operations. Did you want to explore the role of New York's financial community in bankrolling mountaintop removal?

SM: Yes. Without corroboration from financial institutions, mountaintop removal could not exist. When we bank with Citi, we give money to a company that supports mountain top removal. People don't want to have to make these hard choices so they stay ignorant, but the play demands that if they do so, they do it knowingly. I also wanted to draw a parallel with history. The electrical industry is the largest industry in America. How did it become that? Not by accident. Creativity in the financial sector is nothing new. Samuel Insull, who built the electrical empire, but ultimately over-leveraged his holding company, was tried for fraud and decried by Roosevelt as a symbol of all that was wrong in the American financial system. Yet he did such a good job privatizing electricity and fueling it with massive coal fired power plants, that's what we've still got today.

Today, now that we know so much more about the effects of coal extraction and burning, do we really want to continue his legacy or can we change tracks? To change tracks, we will absolutely need the cooperation of the financial industry. They will need to be willing to take risks just like they did in the late 1800's when electricity was first being harnessed. We need investors for the new electrical system. But investors need to think about the welfare of the public and future generations as well as themselves. To these people, the play is saying, "Have honor as well as wealth by doing something that leaves a positive legacy for your children."

JB: What role do you see theatre playing in raising awareness about coal issues, mountaintop removal and climate change?

SP: Theatre can help spread awareness simply by finding stories to tell that exist within these issues. I think part of the reason why it's so hard for people to get engaged in or even notice what's going on out there is because they are so complicated, so tangled, and so outside of our everyday thinking. We are so focused on our own individuality, that unless someone turns to you and says, "Hey, this is ruining my life, man, you gotta help me," we aren't likely to notice. It's important for theatre artists to start looking at the climate issues, including coal and mountaintop removal, and creating work that examines the lives at stake and the future we could be creating for ourselves.

We have this unique ability to communicate and share ideas about the human experience, and these issues are so, so, so full of incredible, fascinating characters and stories. You don't need to be a scientist, you just need to look at what's happening out there in real time. I was involved in the movement to stop mountaintop removal for a full year before actually visiting an active site because I heard the people's story. I saw pictures, but it was the human element that got me. The stories are so outrageous, so rich, and you realize that they are just trying to have a decent life like everyone else in this country. We need bold artists who are willing to go out there, get the stories, and take them around the world. I think there's also a stigma in America about theatre for social change, but hopefully that's shifting as Americans are re-engaging in politics and their communities. As long as we aren't selling propaganda, I think we can be very successful.

Theatre can educate and move people to create change for the common good, not just be another outlet for entertainment.  

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It’s a cliché of life in New York: on even the chilliest winter days, windows are flung open to let free the over-cranked, inefficient steam heat. “We literally blow money out the window,” says Nancy Biberman, founder of the Bronx-based WHEDCo, a family and affordable housing non-profit. About a third of New York's building supply was built before 1939 -- long before sustainability and greenhouse gases were on anyone's radar screen -- and very little of it can be classified as green. That's true of the newer housing stock too, for that matter; a recent study showed that New York trails many other major cities in its number of LEED buildings and green housing options.

Find out what Bloomberg and other big-city bigwigs are up to in our list of green-leaning mayors.PlanNYC 2030Which means that nearly 80 percent of New York City’s carbon footprint comes from its energy-guzzling buildings. Thus the mayor announced last month that buildings bigger than 50,000 square feet would undergo a major overhaul, joining cities like Los Angeles and Seattle in a massive green building retrofit. Following the lead of the federal government (and inspired in part by stimulus funds), New York will now attempt to make existing buildings energy-efficient, lower their greenhouse gas emissions and remove their toxic innards. If all goes well, it will shrink that footprint 5 percent by 2022. Five percent may not sound like much, but it equates to cutting the carbon emissions of Oakland, Calif.

It would all begin, naturally, with a law, or several of them. The City Council is now weighing legislation that includes a new energy code—a kind of local LEED that existing buildings will have to adhere to after any renovation; a requirement that buildings larger than 50,000 square feet undertake energy audits every decade and make the necessary adjustments to meet that code; and a requirement that such buildings switch to energy-efficient lighting (an improvement, they say, that pays for itself almost immediately).

The new plan will be financed in part by $16 million in federal stimulus funds, starting sometime around 2013, with changes to be made within a decade or so to 22,000 buildings. The city estimates it would reduce energy costs by $750 million a year and create 20,000 or so of those green jobs we’ve been hearing so much about, from construction workers to energy auditors, who track down everything from air leaks to inefficient boilers to inadequate windows.

Of course, after such an audit, it's the owners who have to pay for the improvements. What’s to prevent the powerful real estate lobby from rabidly opposing the legislation? Biberman, whose WHEDCo non-profit owns and operates several properties in the Bronx, says the investment is worth it, and quickly: “If you replace an old boiler with an efficient one, the payback is immediate.”

WHEDCo began re-renovating a 10-story, 132-unit building in 2005, primarily to reduce operating costs. “Some of the things we found were relatively easy to remedy -- just plug up the holes,” Biberman says. The windows, that infamous leaky heat, the air whooshing out the doorjamb -- that’s the “low hanging fruit.” Boilers, though quickly offering a return on investment, require more cash up front. After spending $200,000 on that retrofit, WHEDCo has seen tens of thousands of dollars of savings, and expects to recoup the bulk of its investment within four years.

This is the kind of model the city wants to promote. Property owners, suddenly responsible for monitoring their buildings’ carbon footprint and then making changes to shrink it, can borrow a chunk of that federal stimulus money, translated into real estate loans. Spend the cash to replace those things, the philosophy goes, and landlords will make it back in utility bills within five years -- if it’ll take longer than that, the city won’t insist on the repairs.

The real mystery is how to police energy efficiency -- will those energy auditors become covert green building spies after their work is through, or will there be enough stimulus money to create a continual auditing office? Will we someday see closed windows in the winter in all New York buildings? “Financing the upgrades is not really problematic,” says Biberman. “How do you enforce it -- that’s the heart of the matter.”

The buildings department, says City Council spokesperson Andrew Doba, will have that task added to their building inspection duties -- but government staffers don’t think it’ll be too hard to push, what with the unreliable price of oil and stale real estate market. Says Doba, “We don’t think it’s onerous enough to get a lot of backlash.”

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It took a long time for the real estate bubble to burst in New York City -- longer, it seemed, than just about everywhere else; we were still selling $45 million penthouses at the Plaza when subdivisions were going bust out in Sprawlville. Which meant that the bubble had time to stretch farther and wider than any other; prices shot up as much as 57 percent in a single year in some neighborhoods, like trendy TriBeCa.

A condo grows in Brooklyn.Seth W via flickrBut burst it finally did, after more than 100,000 new units, most of them in the luxury condo vein, were added to the city's famously thin housing stock. Now thousands of those high-end units remain unoccupied, thanks to the financial meltdown and the credit crisis, the suddenly shrunken crop of Wall Street execs who were their target audience. City Council speaker Christine Quinn calls the units "tarnished trophies of the building boom."

The problem is especially visible here in my home borough of Brooklyn, where glittering towers threaten to transform the very nature of the place people were so keen to move to in the last five years. Amid the brownstones, these skyscrapers now stand half-empty, like vertical architectural graveyards.

So Quinn has a Robin Hood-esque plan, an ultimate salvage and recycling strategy: wrest those units from their developers and add them to the city’s shoddy supply of housing for lower-income residents. After all, affordable housing is a key, if often overlooked, aspect of urban sustainability. "These vacant apartments now represent our best asset in the fight for affordable housing," Quinn said at her State of the City address in February. She calls it the Affordable Housing Recovery Program. New York State Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries is pressing his own version of the plan, which he calls Project Reclaim.

New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn gladhands after the address in which she floated the housing buyout plan.William Alatriste/New York City CouncilUnder Quinn's vision, the city would use already budgeted capital funds to purchase vacant and unfinished units from developers and offer them to low- and middle-income families to rent or purchase. Per one report, a family of four could qualify if they earned somewhere between 80 percent and 150 percent of the annual area median income, taking in $61,440 to $115,000 a year. It's a cousin of another City Council plan to buy and rehab foreclosed homes for middle-income folk, to prevent these vacancies, whether they're in the ghetto or on 5th Avenue, from leading to blight, drops in property values, or even -- heaven forbid -- bad press. No matter how many vacancies we have, we don't want to be associated with that old, pre-Giuliani New York City, of course.

Developers seem to tentatively approve of this new scheme, which is still in the detail-deciding phase (lawmakers haven't yet announced a start date), but none interviewed in the local press vowed to take the city up on its eventual offer. Presumably, they're still dreaming of a market recovery that will allow them to recoup $700 per square foot.

One other slight problem with the plan: it willfully ignores the market argument that flooding the floor with units will naturally lower rents. This is already happening; the Real Estate Board of New York reported that the average condo sales price was $1.16 million in early 2009, a 10 percent drop from the year before. According to the real estate research firm REIS, vacancy rates in the New York metro area increased 1.1 percent in 2009's first quarter, the first rise in over a decade.

Still, the city has consistently had a vacancy rate of less than 3 percent, hence the continuing rent stabilization laws ... and those, developers and landlords emphatically object to. How well the city would manage thousands of units remains a mystery, too -- when it increased its holdings in the '80s and '90s, the city became known as the "landlord of last resort."

In the meantime, the buildings are still working at creative marketing techniques. They host Dean and Deluca-catered brunches and wine-and-cheese events to coax potential buyers, and they continue to slash prices, though they are still far from affordable. But if they currently have a dearth of customers, one can be sure the city-owned versions of them would have plenty; many of those Wall Streeters, now collecting unemployment or waiting tables, may qualify for the subsidized units, and get to live in their fancy highrises after all.

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