Protecting and improving the community for the people who live and work here

Newsday: The Editorial Board  

“With 10 days left before the April 1 deadline for an on-time budget, several worthy proposals are being debated that would have great impact on our environment.“

Food waste: For two years, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo pushed in vain a plan to reduce the huge amount of food wasted in New York and to help feed the hungry. He left it out of this year’s budget proposal, but spurred by environmental conservation committee chairman Sen. Todd Kaminsky, the Senate, formerly the obstacle, included it in its one-house budget. In the plan, supermarkets, colleges, hospitals and other big generators of excess food would have to donate edible items to hunger-relief organizations and recycle the rest. The timing is fortuitous; the metropolitan area’s first large-scale anaerobic digester just received a contract from the Long Island Power Authority for the power it will produce and is slated to open in Yaphank in 2020. With Cuomo ready to jump back on board, Kaminsky’s Assembly counterpart, Steve Englebright, another Long Islander, is well-positioned to bring it home.

Plastic bag ban: Another way to reduce obscene waste. Cuomo wants a ban on plastic bags and would give municipalities the option to charge a fee for paper bags. The Senate’s plan would make the paper fee mandatory, which has been shown to be the best way to promote reusable totes and reduce litter. But if the up-to-now resistant Assembly is willing to budge only on the plastic bag ban, negotiators should take it to keep moving the ball forward.

Bottle bill: Cuomo’s plan to add nickel deposits on glass, plastic and aluminum containers for beverages like sports and energy drinks and ready-to-drink iced teas and coffees was met with silence by both chambers. Now the issue is suddenly hot, but it’s complicated. Recycling is in crisis, sparked by China ratcheting up standards for recyclables. Cuomo’s plan would further hurt municipal recycling programs by removing plastics that still have value. Other proposals would add wines and spirits to the bottle bill, to get more glass out of curbside recycling to reduce the contamination issues they present. Another option is to hike the nickel fee to a dime or more to increase participation. Moving valuable aluminum cans back to curbside recycling would give municipalities and recyclers another source of revenue. Albany should be able to accomplish both goals — increasing recycling and keeping recyclers in business. If that can be done properly within the budget process, great. If not, punt it to the rest of the session. It’s that important.

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Wednesday, April 10th, at Downtown Art at 70 East 4th Street beginning at 6:30pm.

Help us celebrate the movement to reactivate the Stanton Building!

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The recent announcement by NYC Parks that they will move their storage out of the Stanton Building and commencement of construction on the public toilet rooms in the building are indeed cause for celebration! Join us for this special community event commemorating SDR Park’s past and future at this important juncture. 

The evening will feature

? guest speakers and updates on the Stanton Building  

? exhibition of historic images from the NYC Parks archives

? proposals for the re-imagined interiors of the Stanton Building by students in Pratt Institute’s Interior Design department 

NPR

“Pollution, much like wealth, is not distributed equally in the United States.

Scientists and policymakers have long known that black and Hispanic Americans tend to live in neighborhoods with more pollution of all kinds, than white Americans. And because pollution exposure can cause a range of health problems, this inequity could be a driver of unequal health outcomes across the U.S.

A study published Monday in the journal PNAS adds a new twist to the pollution problem by looking at consumption. While we tend to think of factories or power plants as the source of pollution, those polluters wouldn’t exist without consumer demand for their products.

The researchers found that air pollution is disproportionately caused by white Americans’ consumption of goods and services, but disproportionately inhaled by black and Hispanic Americans.”

Read more here.

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Undocumented

By Esther Kamkar

Come over here,

I have something to show you.

The indigenous border-crossers

oblivious to guards and checkpoints

blanket the fields.

Heliotropo smells like vanilla.

Sagebrush, is silvery-green artemisa.

The red of ocotillos, not the same

as the red of fairy dusters, zapotillos,

in harmony with yellow creosote flowers

and orange desert mallow.

What difference does a wall make?

Sun cup’s only story is the story of yellow.

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A former “illegal alien,” Esther Kamkar is currently living & writing in California. Her new book titled of such things (2018) is available on Barnes and Noble & Amazon.

Source URL Portside

“The Stanton Building Neighborhood Action Exhibition and Gathering”

Opening April 10^th 2019 at 6:30pm

Downtown Art: 70 East 4^th Street NYC

Organized by Keena Suh (with assistance from NYC Park’s Department Archivist)

From New Yorkers for Parks: Play Fair

“Wow! Nearly 200 New Yorkers braved the winter weather to join the Play Fair Coalition on the steps of City Hall on February 28 to tell the City Council and Mayor to stop overlooking and underfunding our parks and green spaces! But this is just the beginning, and now WE NEED YOU to sign this petition and tell your elected officials to get on board. “

Tell your elected officials to Play Fair!

Sara Roosevelt Park Community Coalition:

“As wealth and income inequality grow in a greater and greater divide between the haves and the have-nots, NYC Parks are the last democratic meeting spaces in the city. They are the air conditioning, vacation home, vacation, back-yard and get-away from increasingly harsh life here for the many.

We believe public open spaces should stay public, not reliant on the whims of the very wealthy where some parks get lavish funding and others go wanting – especially in neighborhoods that arguably need it the most. Parks are essential to a livable, green, and equitable New York City, and should be funded as such. Park workers should have job security that only comes when a steady source of income exists. Ecosystems world-wide are in trouble, globally insects are in a state of collapse, and climate change is real and steadily marching towards an unlivable planet. Parks are not a luxury – they are essential for the health, livability and sustainability of life here. We are part of a complex network that needs care and nurturing.”

“Protecting and improving the community for the people who live and work here”

‘Play Fair’ campaign launches fight for increased funds for NYC Parks Department

From AMNY: “A coalition of lawmakers, city workers and park advocates have banded together to demand the Parks Department receive a larger share of the city budget.”

“The current funding for the agency is about $534 million, less than 0.6% of the city’s budget, City Councilman Barry Grodenchik said.”

Do your research, then vote!

NYC Council: Powerful testimony by Girl Scouts of NYC, NYers for Parks, and others and Council Members: Grodenchik, Rosenthal, and others..

The Atlantic What is the backstory?

Why a Statue of the ‘Father of Gynecology’ Had to Come Down J. Marion Sims’s advances in medical science were made through experimentation on enslaved women.

The debate over the Sims statue echoes the debate over Confederate monuments, with supporters of keeping the statue accusing those of wanting to remove it of attempting to erase history. Sims developed a groundbreaking series of treatments for a condition known as vesicovaginal fistula, “an abnormal opening between the bladder and the vagina” that causes incontinence, through a series of agonizing experiments on slave women, performed without anesthesia. Those experiments formed the basis of medical breakthroughs that would later be deployed for the benefit of wealthier, whiter clients in more voluntary settings. Sims’s medical advances reflect how white Americans benefited from the slave system as a whole: Just as profits from slavery fueled American industrialization, so modern gynecology was birthed by the anguish of black women treated as chattel. And just as the critical role of slavery as a cornerstone of American capitalism has been neglected until recently, Sims’s reliance on human experimentation has only become controversial in the past few decades.

Play Fair

We’re introducing Play Fair, a new multi-year advocacy campaign for parks leading up to the Mayoral election in 2021. In 2019, we are kicking off the Play Faircampaign by focusing on a significant increase to the expense budget for the Parks Department, which would “baseline,” or secure, funding for much-needed maintenance, gardener and park worker positions in the City budget. Investing in greenspaces also improves air quality, makes our neighborhoods more resilient, and brings New Yorkers closer to nature.

New Yorkers for Parks is partnering with Council Member Barry Grodenchik, Chair of the Parks Committee, the New York League of Conservation Voters, and DC37, the Parks workers’ union, to form the PLAY FAIR COALITION. 

We’re having a rally to formally launch Play Fair, and we want you to be there with us. On Thursday, February 28th from 12:00pm-1:00pm, we’ll be on the Steps of City Hall to demand a bigger piece of the pie for Parks. We need YOU to help us show decision-makers that parks deserve significant public investment in maintenance and operations for cleanliness and safety.

RSVP

The Play Fair Coalition will ask the Mayor and the City Council to direct much-needed maintenance and operations funding to the NYC Parks Department. Although City parks make up 14% of NYC’s land, last year the agency only received a meager 0.59% of the total City budget. For too long, parks and gardens have been overlooked as essential infrastructure for healthy neighborhoods: now is the time to demand change and PLAY FAIR for PARKS!

NOTE: Please arrive to the rally by 11:30 AM to clear security. Signing up isn’t required, but will help us know how many people will be joining us.

RSVP