By now, you’ve probably heard a thing or two about the Circ, a proposed frivolous $60 million dollar highway project that threatens to rip through some of our state’s most pristine farmlands and wetlands. It’s unnecessary and destructive—and there are cheaper and cleaner alternatives.

What you may not have heard is that fewer than 20 people (according to the Burlington Free Press) have submitted comments voicing their opinion. No, that’s not a typo. Fewer than 20 people have spoken up about the Circ. We need to change that, and we need to change it now.

Here’s what we need you to do:

1. Submit a comment online against the proposed highway before the Friday, August 27 deadline.
2. Share this blog post via Twitter and Facebook with your family, friends and neighbors, asking them to submit a comment.

Not sure what to say in your comment to decisionmakers? Feel free to copy and paste the sample comment below:

The proposed Circ project is a bad idea for Vermont. The Circ will contribute harmful greenhouse gases, destroy farmlands and fragile wetlands, limit transportation choices, increase congestion—all while providing little benefit in travel time saved. Fixing existing roads and providing alternatives to driving—like freight rail, buses, carpooling and bike lanes—is cleaner, cheaper and more effective than the proposed Circ Highway project.

Comments are due by August 27—that’s this Friday! So please don’t wait. Our decisionmakers are listening, and we need as many people to speak up as possible. After you take action, please share this blog post far and wide to help get the word out.

Thank you for helping us put the breaks on the Circ project: Vermont deserves better!

Click the “like” button below to share this post on Facebook.

As I sit on the crowded 32 bus for my usual 50-minute-plus journey to get to work, I find myself wondering why no one seems to care that people who ride these buses regularly have to squeeze together as if trying to fit into a human sardine can.

MBTA buses.

The 32, which is almost always packed, worsens traffic on the already congested Hyde Park Avenue. It runs from Wolcott Square in Hyde Park, through Roslindale, to Forest Hills in Jamaica Plain. I’ve been taking the 32 bus my entire life; I lived in Roslindale until I was thirteen, then moved to Hyde Park. However, it hasn’t been until recently that I’ve started questioning the priorities of the MBTA.

Taking the 32 bus to Forest Hills then switching to the orange line to Downtown Crossing is the most convenient way for me to get downtown, where I’ve worked for the past two summers. I could also take the 50 bus to Forest Hills, which is sometimes a longer ride than the 32. The commuter rail, which costs more than twice the amount of the subway, takes only 20 minutes to get to South Station. My other option–taking the 33 or 24 bus to Mattapan Station, then taking the trolley to Ashmont Station, then switching to the red line–requires a little more effort and virtually the same amount of time. No relief.

Many times I have watched the commuter rail speed through Hyde Park Station, breathing in the fumes it leaves behind, trying to catch my breath as I race to catch the 32, and wonder why the people of this area are still cramming into one bus when there is a train that already runs through the neighborhood.

It has become quite apparent to me that the prices for the commuter rail need to be reduced so that common folk like me can afford to take it, otherwise there needs to be an extended train system to accommodate this area. Getting anywhere in Boston through public transit usually requires taking one of the four major lines–red, blue, green, and orange–all of which can only be accessed through a long bus ride from my area.

In an economy that’s stretched thin, like ours is, people have to go to greater lengths just to provide for their basic needs. Now, more than ever, there are so many other factors affecting daily life that to add something as miniscule as transportation to the laundry list is asking way too much for the average person. So instead, many are forced to brave long uncomfortable bus rides with the hope that there is at least one person associated with the MBTA who cares about providing adequate transit for those who need it.

I also cannot help but notice that some slightly more affluent areas of Boston seem to have a far more efficient transportation system than say, Hyde Park. This can only mean that public transportation is not prioritized by areas on a need basis. Don’t let the failing economy fool you; money is still being spent on public transit, just not in logical order. Despite what the MBTA cites as their reasons, the evidence is in the actions.

Maybe when I’m in my thirties they’ll finally get around to it.

Editor’s note: Tiffany Egbuonu is a Posse Scholar and a summer intern at CLF. She is entering her sophomore year at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, PA.

Do you find yourself relating to Tiffany? CLF is working to bring accessible and affordable transportation to ALL people in the Boston metro area and beyond. Read more about CLF’s public transit work  here.

What would make your neighborhood great? Is it more jobs, better transportation choices, diverse housing opportunities, improved access to open spaces like parks and playgrounds? The Massachusetts Smart Growth Alliance (MSGA) Great Neighborhoods program wants to help turn your community’s dreams into reality. The MSGA is looking to partner with community groups to develop initiatives that will build better neighborhoods in the Greater Boston area.

The MSGA wants to hear from you. To put your ideas into action, submit a letter of interest explaining your proposed project and how it will benefit your community by July 15, 2010. The letter should be no more than 2-3 pages in length.

Click here to read more about the Great Neighborhoods program and view the MSGA’s official guidelines for writing and submitting your letter of interest.

How can law and policy influence design to make the metropolitan Boston area more livable and eco-friendly?

• How many cars can the Green Line Extension to Medford take off the roads?  Would pay per-mile auto insurance help?  Would better bike maps and paths?  How about green zoning ordinances?

• Can greenspace and access to riverfronts make our communities healthier?

• What if Wal-Mart and Lowe’s new stores don’t just use renewable energy, but also design their parking lots to stop runoff from polluting our rivers and streams?

• Can Mayor Menino make the city’s public housing as environmentally sustainable as the Apple store on Boylston St the Macallen Building Condos in South Boston?

Meet, greet and exchange ideas…or just kick back…with environmentalists and urbanists working on these issues and more!  Co-hosted by Boston Urban Exchange and CLF.

Boston-area Urban Development Meet & Greet
Location: Mantra (downstairs), 52 Temple Place, Boston, MA.
Date: Wednesday, March 24, 6-8 pm
Free admission, cash bar.
More info at http://buxmarch2010.eventbrite.com/

Our co-sponsors:  Boston Urban Exchange (BUX) is a gathering of planners, architects, urban designers, developers, ethnologists, technologists, entrepreneurs, policy-makers, artists and others who care about urban development in the Boston/Cambridge region.

America is waking up to the fact that the unfathomable amounts of animal dung generated by our industrial agricultural system is poisoning our water and our air.  Those who live by waters polluted by the excesses of industrial agriculturae have long understood the grim connection between our cheap-food system and the slow death of rivers, lakes, streams, estuaries, and other coastal waters.  Now the mainstream media is bringing wider attention to this looming environmental disaster.

Exhibit A:  The Washington Post recently ran a prominent environmental expose under the headline “Manure becomes pollutant as volume grows” This excerpt explains the problem well:

Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem,….The country simply has more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields.   That excess manure gives off air pollutants, and it is the country’s fastest-growing large source of methane, a greenhouse gas. And it washes down with the rain, helping to cause the 230 oxygen-deprived “dead zones”

"Dead zones" are areas within waterbodies where oxygen becomes severely depleted when massive algae colonies--fed by nutrient-rich manure and other agricultural waste--die off. The oxygen-depleting algae decomposition process has disastrous results for fish and other aquatic life. This fishkill occured on the Neuse River in North Carolina an area of intensive factory farming.

Exhibit B: Popular talk radio host and TV personality Don Imus featured an unusually-sobering interview with investigative author David Kirby about his new book “Animal Factory.”  In vivid detail, the author explained the inhumane conditions in which thousands of hogs, cows, and chickens are often confined at these industrial meat and dairy operations that are much more akin to factories than “farms.”  Citing many gasp-inducing horror stories from the book, Kirby underscored the public health and environmental risks created by the oceans of excrement these operations release into the environment when they saturate spray fields with levels of liquid manure that runs off into nearby rivers, streams, and lakes.

Exhibit C: Through the international success of documentary film “Food, Inc.,” which is nominated for a “Best Documentary Feature” Academy Award millions of moviegoers were exposed to moving pictures of the environmental and social repercussions of industrial agriculture.

Defenders of industrial agriculture will tell you that spraying liquid manure on to pastures and cropland helps to fertilize that land to grow crops to feed the animals.  In reality, spraying massive amounts of liquid manure on the land is a cheap way for these industrial farms to dump their wastes.  The rest of us bear the true costs in the form of water that is unsafe for drinking, swimming, and fishing among other public health risks and other pollution problems.

Liquid manure is spread to saturation levels on a farm on the shores of Lake Champlain's St. Albans Bay, a part of the lake that has long suffered from algae blooms. Though blooms have yet to cause fishkills on the scale pictured above, scientists have documented a growing "dead zone" in the Lake's Northeast Arm--an area where manure from thousands of dairy cows is spread on riverside and lakeside cropland during much of the year.

This problem is coming to a head in Vermont, where lax regulation and poor management of industrial-scale dairy operations contributes pollution that feeds annual outbreaks of blue-green algae and nuisance weeds in Lake Champlain and is also responsible for bacteria contamination in the Lake and many other rivers and streams.  We would never allow unchecked pollution like this from any other industry, but the powerful agribusiness lobby has largely prevented the type of legislative and law-enforcement responses that this problem demands.  To learn more about CLF’s actions to document and force clean up and prevent a worsening of this dung disaster, read our report ”Failing Our Waters, Failing our Farms,” and the legal petition sent to EPA seeking stronger action under the Clean Water Act.   And check back here for a future post on other ways to get our society out of this dung dilemma.

So, what do we do? There’s no simple solution, but in Massachusetts the DEP is close to finalizing the revision for the Solid Waste Master Plan, with the intention of increasing the amount of waste diverted from landfills through more recycling and composting, and better all around materials management. The discussion also included the possibility of lifting a 20-year old moratorium on waste-to-energy facilities.

Today the Patrick Administration signaled a strong commitment to responsible resource management by announcing that the incinerator moratorium will stand and resources will begin to be managed more thoughtfully.

This is exciting news, because there are a lot of good options for responsible resource management that don’t involve traditional waste incineration. These include:

• Developing markets for recycled and reused materials, including building materials and asphalt as well as more traditional materials such as plastics, metals, and paper – a lot of our recyclables are currently bundled and sent to Canada and China rather than being processed and reused locally.
• Establishing state incentive programs to encourage the separation of organic material from the waste stream – organics decay in landfills and generate methane; food discards in particular are a valuable for compost and anaerobic digestion, and should not be equated with waste.
• Expanding organic material processing capacity in the form of properly managed composting operations and/or appropriately-sized anaerobic digestion facilities – Anaerobic digestion can be used for energy generation.
• Developing markets for organic material products, such as compost and other soil amendments – did you know the MWRA uses anaerobic digestion at Deer Island to process Boston area sewage, and subsequently processes the sludge into a fertilizer product?

Resource management solutions will need to protect environmental and human health, as well as be economically viable and socially acceptable.  Thankfully the Commonwealth appears to be on the right track.

Do our readers agree?

October 24, 2009 is the International Day of Climate Action, and author Bill McKibben’s advocacy movement known as 350.org has been getting a lot of attention. 350.org is coordinating a widespread day of environmental action with one goal: solutions to the climate crisis.

Why 350? McKibben argues that it is the safe upper limit in atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured in parts per million. In order to avoid an environmental catastrophe, it’s the number targeted by this movement. In this week’s Yale Environment 360, economist Frank Ackerman argues that what is good for the Earth is good for the wallet. Of course, it is an alarming idea that this is the “safe” level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as we are at 390 already – and rising.

Though 350.org’s wide umbrella includes some efforts that are problematic, the message is a powerful one: the time for solutions is now. The medium of that message, hundreds of thousands of people at 4,000 events in 170 countries, is even more striking.

To locate an event in your local community, use the map below:

To hop on this trajectory of a reduction in global carbon dioxide levels, learn the 5 things that New Englanders must do in 5 years, and 5 things that you can do in 5 minutes.

The other day I got an email from the folks at Zipcar asking for support from Zipcar members who live in Brookline MA to speak up regarding proposed revised zoning ordinances to encourage car sharing, and this note is to ask for your support of these updates. The proposed changes are “Warrant Articles” 12 and 13 on the November 2009 Town Meeting Warrant.  Here’s a quick overview prepared by Zipcar:

• A limited number of shared car parking locations will be permitted in all areas except those zoned for single family dwellings.
• A special permitting process would be available for those locations where member demand requires us to provide more than the number of spaces allowed under Article 13.

In response I sent the following email to members of Brookline Town Meeting:

Dear Town Meeting Members,

I am writing to you today in both my personal capacity as a Brookline resident and in my professional capacity, as a climate and environmental advocate, in order to urge you to vote in favor of Warrant Articles 12 and 13.

Almost ten years ago I had an opportunity to discuss the idea of car sharing with the founders of Zipcar just prior to the creation and launch of that enterprise. I urged them to press ahead with the concept and company and I joined shortly after the launch and have made heavy use of their services ever since. I can directly testify that the presence of Zipcar (particularly in Brookline Village) has allowed my family to manage with only one car. Car sharing reduces demand for parking, consumption of land by cars and traffic on the streets as cars are juggled among parking spaces. It supports and enhances public transportation use and activity in our commercial and residential centers (like Brookline Village, Coolidge Corner and Washington Square) and town policy should encourage and foster its expansion.

Zipcar started with a single green Volkswagen New Beetle in the Springfield Street municipal parking lot in Cambridge and its early expansion brought it naturally to Brookline. Through organic growth and merger it has now expanded across the continent (from California to Canada) and even across the Atlantic to London. We should be proud of the role that Brookline played in providing this good enterprise with a base for growth and should recognize that it continues to provide value to our residents and a benefit to the Town. The proposed Warrant Articles are reasonable measures that will facilitate this important community benefit – whether it is provided by Zipcar or another car sharing service.

Please let me know if I can provide you with any additional information or answer any questions on this, or any other, subject.

Seth Kaplan

I firmly believe in the value of car sharing (really, the wikipedia entry is quite good) as a tool for reducing car ownership and usage and for boosting transit use and helping build vital urban communities.

Some members of Brookline Town Meeting have suggested that they are concerned about noisy and disruptive college students traveling to and returning from cars stored in residential areas. This is a legitimate concern – but I would point out that Zipcar (and pretty much every operation of this sort) requires that members be at least 21 years of age and having shared cars in the neighborhood has the positive effect of providing local students (and recent grads) with an alternative that allows them to avoid owning a car that will clog up local streets.

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time thinking about where your garbage goes once it gets picked up from your curb. What’s that? You don’t wonder about the final resting place or you trash and recyclables? Well you should, and now, thanks to the MIT SENSEable City lab, you don’t have to wonder at all; you can know.

Trash Track  is a process in which a tiny tracking chip is placed on a specific piece of regular waste. The MIT system can then track the location of the chip as it navigates the waste management system. You can see if that scrap of pressure-treated wood ends up in the landfill on the other side of the state or a barge to South Carolina; you can see if your old battery actually makes it to the proper disposal location; you can see if that yogurt container actually gets sent to the recycling facility. How awesome is that?! Surely I’m not the only person excited by this…

Waste management in the US is “out of sight, out of mind” for most people. But if we continue to generate as much waste as we do now, it is going to become less and less out of sight for more and more people, with myriad social justice implications as well as environmental and human health impacts.

Hopefully Trash Track is just the start of better public information about our waste system; information that will allow all of us to better understand the impact of our “consume and dispose” lifestyle. And like anyone with a background in philosophy and faith in humanity I know that this new knowledge will result in meaningful change…right?

Suppose knowledge is not sufficient to elicit change; what can we do? I’ll share some thoughts in my next post. Feel free to share thoughts of your own in the comments below.