2012 January 25

Figs In Boston: New Plant Hardiness Zones Reflect Dramatic Global Warming

The Department of Agriculture’s plant hardiness maps are finally reflecting a fact that gardeners have already realized — the United States is changing dramatically with global warming pollution. The USDA released a new plant hardiness zone map to replace the 1990 map, reflecting twenty years of rapid global warming:

The 1990 map was based on temperatures from 1974 to 1986, the new map from 1976 to 2005. The nation’s average temperature from 1976 to 2005 was two-thirds of a degree higher than it was during the old time period, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

The new map is generally one half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States. Cities as varied as Boston, Honolulu, St. Louis, Des Moines, Iowa, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Fairbanks, Alaska, are in newer, warmer zones. Almost all of Ohio, Nebraska and Texas are in warmer zones.

The Washington Post quoted several experts who noted the new map, whose changes in hardiness zones are based on rising minimum temperatures across the nation, isn’t news to gardeners.

Boston University biology professor Richard Primack:

People who grow plants are well aware of the fact that temperatures have gotten more mild throughout the year, particularly in the wintertime.

George Ball, chairman and CEO of the seed company W. Atlee Burpee:

Climate change, which has been in the air for a long time, is not big news to gardeners.

Stanford University biology professor Terry Root:

It is great that the federal government is catching up with what the plants themselves have known for years now: The globe is warming and it is greatly influencing plants (and animals).

Vaughn Speer, an 87-year-old master gardener in Ames, Iowa, said he has seen redbud trees, appear ten miles north of their traditional limit in recent years. Our nation’s forests are dying with the changes. Lodgepole pines, aspens, walnut trees, and other dominant species adapted to a climate without greenhouse pollution are already suffering in our hotter planet.

In coming decades, the rate of global warming will increase significantly, a result of the rapid rise in fossil fuel pollution, making it ever more difficult for plants to adapt, and destabilizing all of our nation’s ecosystems.

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The Triumphs And Tragedies Of Spike Lee’s ‘Red Hook Summer’ — And The Fear Of Truly Challenging Movies

It’s difficult to encapsulate Red Hook Summer, Spike Lee’s new movie about an Atlanta teenager and potential future documentarian named Flik spending the summer in Brooklyn’s housing projects with his preacher grandfather. To some, the return of Mookie, dispensing advice about proper pizza conveyance and wondering about a sold-out condo across the street from the projects, makes it a sequel to Do The Right Thing. To many critics, it appears to be an uneven and overlong combination of coming-of-age story, love letter to Brooklyn, exploration of the black church, and strikingly dark twist. To me, Red Hook Summer is likely to be one of the most misunderstood movies in years. And I’d be willing to lay money that it will be one of the most intriguing, moving things I see this year, a profound challenge to the apolitical whiteness and cliche storytelling that define so many mainstream movies.

For a movie significantly set in and around a church, there’s something fitting about the structure of Red Hook Summer, which follows two narratives that rise together like the arcs of a masonry vault, each held in place by the keystone that is Clarke Peters’ performance as Enoch Rouse, bishop of struggling Red Hook church Little Piece of Heaven.

The first arch involves the search for a villain, or at least a source of menace in the neighborhood where Flik finds himself spending the summer. The first candidate is a white gentrifier in the neighborhood who is outraged when Flik and Chazz, the neighbor girl who attends Little Piece of Heaven faithfully with her mother Colleen, write their names in the fresh cement outside her house. “Are you two out of your minds?” she screams at them, all out of proportion to the slight, which a less proprietary homeowner might view as a sweet touch of the neighborhood. “Come on, show me what you got! Go back to your home and stay there!” as if by confining Flik and Chazz to the housing projects, she can have the Red Hook that she wants.

Later, the sense of menace shifts from gentrifiers to a new generation of neighborhood residents, specifically Box, a Blood gang leader who used to attend Little Piece of Heaven with his mother, Sister Augustine. On his arrival, Enoch warned Flik to stay away from Box, but Flik can’t resist trying to interview Box as part of his neighborhood tapestry. “What kind of questions?” Box wants to know when Flik makes his request. “Like what you do to make my granddaddy so mad?” the boy explains. Enoch told Flik from the beginning that he should “be careful with that thing out here,” when his grandson seemed determined to see the world through the lens of his iPad 2, and it’s Box who proves that the power to witness, and to record, can be threatening, and make the observer a target.

The second arch revolves around a series of three services at Little Piece of Heaven, which seem likely to be the most misunderstood parts of the movie (and already one place many critics are suggesting cuts), but are a powerful and subtle exploration of the growth of faith, the role politics play in people’s lives, and the power and fragility of community. There are three important elements in each of these sermons, each of which contributes in a significant way to the movie’s powerful denouement, which happens at the end of the third church service.

First, there’s the element of chastisement and conversion. In the first service, Enoch singles out Flik as the person in the sanctuary who needs Jesus, humiliating him. In the second, he singles out Deacon Z, the drunken, but still effective, chief elder of the church. “Why you so hard on me, Brother Enoch,” Z asks Enoch after the Bishop singles out his drinking as proof he needs the intervention of the Lord. “There ain’t but 3 men in the church. All in the late Octobers of life, looking for a few Aprils.” His call for Enoch to be more tolerant in services is coupled with a suggestion that Bishop Enoch be more tolerant towards Mr. Kevin, a young white man who runs a summer camp for Red Hook children. “He’s even helped a couple of them get into college,” Z tells Enoch. “What’s he doing that we’re not?…He’s saving those kids.”

Second, and speaking of kids getting saved, the services trace Flik’s growing openness to the gospel that Enoch’s pushing on him so aggressively. He’s slumped crankily with Chazz in a front-row pew during the first service. But in the second, he’s beginning to respond to the choir’s worship music in the second. And by the third, he’s singing and clapping along with Chazz and the rest of the congregation, an expression of joy and new faith that only makes what happens later in that third service, after the call to accept Jesus, even more shattering.

Third, the services are one of the many places where Red Hook Summer’s characters get into politics. One of Spike Lee’s many virtues is that he may be the director in America who most understands — and more importantly, values — the role that politics play in ordinary peoples’ lives and thinking about the world around them, and Red Hook Summer is no different. I would say there’s something bizarre about the fact that Hollywood focuses on characters who seem to have next to no interest or investment in politics, but in its obsessive focus on young, white, affluent people, Hollywood’s chosen a subset of characters who have the least to gain from engagement with or attention to the political process. When critics like GeekyTyrant complain about the fact that with Lee’s movies, “you know you’re going to get a lot of political talk and rants about how bad America is right now with everything going on,” they’re betraying a lack of awareness that it’s the lack of opinions or views that ought to be considered strained in movies, not the presence of them.

When Enoch preaches about pollution in Red Hook, telling his congregation, “Those cruise ships are docked, blowing out black smoke and giving our children asthma,” or Mr. Kevin says he wanted to work in Red Hook in part because of the residents’ higher rates of asthma and heart disease, their questions are not academic. “Why you suckin’ wind like that?” Chazz’s mother asks her, after catching Chazz and Flik post-flight from the gentrifier. “Those inhalers cost a ton of money.” And without spoiling things, that ongoing conversation also plays a critical role in setting the stage for the movie’s most critical scene (which I’ll discuss after the movie’s been released and people have had a chance to see it). Politics are not academic when pollution and drug costs are literally a matter of your survival.

There’s no question that there are flaws in the movie, among them a disruptive and deeply unnecessary reference to The Wire, and a less-disruptive though very funny swipe at Tyler Perry in a background movie poster. But I’m surprised to see critics complaining about things like switches in the cinematography, a clear sign of when we’re seeing things through Flik’s eyes, or through his camera. And absolutely, the language of the script is frequently intentionally artificial, but in particular, I found Chazz’s mannered nature charming rather than distancing, evidence of a child constructing an identity. If these occasional lapses in discipline are the price we pay for Spike Lee doing everything else he does so powerfully, it’s almost impossible for me to comprehend how they wouldn’t be worth it.

“We live right, but sometimes stray,” a chorus sings after the movie’s climax. “We’ll have to answer for our lives.” Red Hook Summer is a gorgeous testament to that ability to, as Ray Bradbury put it, behold beauty yet perceive its flaw, whether the object of our gaze is humanity or a housing project. If the movie is dismissed because Spike Lee has the courage to tell the truth about Hollywood and black Americans, or because it aims less to be entertaining than profoundly moving, that would be a real loss.

Did The White House Mean To Call Uranium, Natural Gas, And Coal ‘Renewable Energy?’

Our guest blogger is A. Siegel, of Get Energy Smart.

In association with the State of the Union address, the White House released “A Blueprint for An America Built to Last.” Within it, “A Blueprint to Make the Most of America’s Energy Resources,” from which we learn that “nuclear power, efficient natural gas, and clean coal” are “renewable energy” sources:

The President called on Congress to build on our success in positioning America to be the world’s leading manufacturer in high-tech batteries and reiterated his call for action on clean energy tax credits and a national goal of moving toward clean sources of electricity by setting a standard for utility companies, so that by 2035, 80% of the nation’s electricity will come from clean sources, including renewable energy sources like wind, solar, biomass, hydropower, nuclear power, efficient natural gas, and clean coal.

This is, almost certainly an issue of poor writing. It could have read “nuclear power, efficient natural gas, clean coal, and renewable energy sources like wind, solar, biomass, and hydropower.” That rewrite, however, would have put renewables at the back of the line and hurt the President among those strongly supportive of greater investment in renewable energy deployment and research — that is to say, the majority of Americans. Yet, in last year’s State of the Union address the President said that “clean energy jobs” meant nuclear power, offshore oil and gas drilling, and “clean coal.”

All the uranium on planet Earth was formed 6.6 billion years ago and is not “renewable.” Now, if we wish to speak in terms of tens of millions of years, one could argue that coal, natural gas, and oil are renewable. Today’s biomass will, over that sort of geologic time, create (renew, one might say) new fossil fuel supplies. However, in any rational discussion, these are not “renewable” fuels within any context of human civilization.

This section, however, has far more serious problems — most importantly, the President’s whole-sale throwing in the hat with the “natural gas is good for the environment and economy” propaganda that is a Potemkin village when it comes to addressing the nation’s real challenges.

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Democrats Fire Back At Christie For Opposing Marriage Equality

Yesterday, after the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced marriage equality legislation, New Jersey Democrats tore into Gov. Chris Christie (R) for calling on gay and lesbian marriage rights to be put on the ballot. “We vote on issues here, we don’t put civil rights on the ballot,” Senate President Steve Sweeney (D) said, before criticizing a reporter who suggested that lawmakers were wasting time by holding hearings on a bill that Christie has pledged to veto. “The point of going through a fight for civil rights, are you kidding me? For standing up for people to give them the same rights? I’m offended by that,” he exclaimed. “[I]f the Governor wants to stifle and silence his colleagues that’s one thing, but he’s not going to stifle or silence us. Someone has to stand up for equality and fairness.” Watch it:

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The place in your house you don’t like to go

I spent the day today at the GreenBiz Forum 12 in New York. I’m a senior writer at GreenBiz, which does a great job producing events. I interviewed Dan Hendrix, the CEO of Interface, who’s picking up where the company’s legendary and visionary founder, Ray Anderson, left off; more here. And I wrote about Israel Ganot, the co-founder and CEO of Gazelle, a fast-growing startup that recycles electronics. Please read this story if, like many of us, you don’t know what to do with your old gadgets. I first covered Gazelle back in 2009. [See Cash for (electronic) clunkers.]

Here’s how the story begins:

Think, for a moment, about that one place in your house where you don’t like to go.

That closet. The garage. In my house, it’s the attic. Ugh.

The place where you put stuff you no longer want or need.

“How much is enough?” asks Israel Ganot.

Ganot, who is the president, co-founder and CEO of Gazelle, spoke today at the GreenBiz Forum 12 in New York. He has a way to help you de-clutter your home, at least when it comes to electronics. Gazelle buys back cell phones, laptops and other electronics, offers free shipping and then pays you for them. Gazelle makes money by reselling the used goods in the U.S. or abroad. What it can’t resell, it recycles.

“We give new life to old gadgets that still have value,” he says.

You can read the rest here.