Working For Jobs

Alan Baum has to shout into the phone for me to hear him over the cacophony of the Detroit Auto Show, which opened Monday. Around him, thousands of journalists swarm from one new car to the next, lights flash, DJs spin, and the cream of the world’s automotive crop glistens. “A lot of show and not a lot of substance,” Baum, an industry analyst, jokes.

Just to look around at the “performance” cars on display here, from hulking pickups to lightning-fast sports cars, you might not be able to tell that this is the first major car show in Detroit since the introduction last fall of President Obama’s new fuel-efficiency standards, which will require all cars and light-duty trucks to operate at 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, nearly doubling current requirements, a move the administration predicts will save Americans nearly $2 trillion at the pump. The cars below are a few being featured this week in Detroit that are already taking steps in that direction.

Let’s be honest: No one is buying one of these for the great gas mileage. It’s more like the car you fantasize about from the age of 14 and take a soul-sucking job on Wall Street just to afford. But the simple fact that the Stingray, one of the gas-guzzling belles of the Detroit ball, takes even one step in a green direction is a sign of how deep the efficiency paradigm has penetrated the auto industry, says Don Anair, an analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Ironically, high-tech fuel-management equipment in the engine actually adds weight to a car that has traditionally tried to shave pounds wherever possible for the sake of speed.

While it’s true that the Detroit show has its of share super-green cars (like the futuristic Tesla Model X and a marked-down version of the classic Nissan Leaf), Baum says the real progress is on prioritizing fuel efficiency on updates to familiar models that used to be all about style or power. Fuel-efficiency standards and record-high gas prices be damned; in Detroit the floor is still packed with muscle-bound models, but a recent analysis by Baum’s firm found that from 2009 to 2013, the number of popular vehicles with improved fuel efficiency more than doubled, from 28 to 61, of which only a third are tiny subcompacts.

Volkswagen has taken an all-of-the-above approach to greening its fleet, Baum says, rolling out everything from plug-in electrics to hybrids to diesel (which is more efficient than normal gasoline). The CrossBlue might look designed expressly to ferry hordes of middle-schoolers to soccer practice, but it’s more a concept car than one you’ll soon find at the local dealership. It combines hybrid technology with diesel power, and reflects a growing U.S. market for diesel engines: Jeep also introduced a new diesel Grand Cherokee.

“Automakers are supportive of fuel-efficiency requirements because that’s what consumers want anyway,” Baum says, adding that as major manufacturers like Ford invest more heavily in highly efficient vehicles, they acquire a perverse fear of falling gas prices, which would diminish the economic incentive for consumers to spend more on an efficient car.

Still, history shows that car manufacturers need a regulatory boost to keep pushing on the fuel efficiency front, Anair says. After Congress passed the first federal fuel economy standards in 1975, efficiency innovation stagnated until 2007, when new legislation upped the ante. In 2010, the Obama administration set higher standards for the immediate future, and finally last fall set the historic long-term goals that automakers are now striving to reach; already, over the last few years, emissions from cars have dropped. “The effect of the standards is to raise the overall effort,” Anair says.

If you’re buying one of these, saving a few bucks at the gas station probably isn’t a major concern for you. Still, some of the same green technology that gained fame in the by-contrast-proletarian Prius has made its way into luxury vehicles like this one as well: a hybrid engine that turns off while idling, a feature I always found a bit spooky but which Anair says is increasingly common.

The American auto industry is playing catch-up to Europe on diesel engines, featured on several new models in Detroit. Diesel engines are up to 35 percent more efficient than their gasoline counterparts, although some studies raise a red flag with the global warming potential of the black carbon diesel engines emit. But Anair thinks fuel efficiency is likely to become the automotive trump card: “That’s front and center in consumers’ minds.”

The green-car trend found its limit when last year’s hybrid version of this classic American mega-truck flopped, Baum says; the modest fuel economy improvement wasn’t enough to make die-hard truck drivers overlook a loss of power. So for 2014, General Motors axed the hybrid model and put its chips back on muscle, giving drivers a choice between a beefy eight-cylinder engine and a slightly less beefy six. Still, both versions now automatically cut back to four cylinders when the extra power isn’t needed to save fuel … that’s worth something, right?

This story was produced as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Filed under: Article, Business & Technology, Climate & Energy

View full post on Grist

Venice, Italy. Not Detroit — yet. (Photo by Arian Zwegers.)

On Thursday, Detroit tried a little Venetian experiment, turning one of its freeways into a river.

This would have been great if it had been intentional, like an artistic statement about transportation and modern society or something. But instead, it was another statement: We should probably spend some money on infrastructure every so often.

Early in the afternoon, a four-foot water main ruptured on the city’s west side, sending what one resident described as “a little tidal wave” rushing through the street and swamping the nearby Lodge Freeway. Water reached the windows of cars trapped in the lower part of the roadway.

Freak occurrence, right? Not really. A few days ago, there was a break in nearby Shelby Township. In February, a water main break in a residential neighborhood flooded for a month, the freezing water leaving icy obstructions across the paths of neighbors.

Literally while the water main was still gushing yesterday, the Michigan legislature was working (unsuccessfully) to finalize the state’s 2013 budget. A 2009 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers suggested that the state needed an $11.3 billion investment in its water infrastructure by 2029. Gov. Rick Snyder’s (R) proposed budget for 2013 offers $56 million in funding for the Water Resources arm of the Department of Environmental Quality and a $2.5 million allocation for a federal matching grant for the drinking water revolving fund program — well off the ASCE’s mark. And legislators are likely to make the municipalities’ woes worse, reducing the amount of revenue collected from property taxes. As Detroit Mayor Dave Bing (D) told CBS, “We can’t take that kind of a hit.”

There is an obvious correlation between how much we spend on upkeep for our infrastructure and how often that infrastructure fails. And these ruptures aren’t just an inconvenience. In each case, this was fresh, treated water that went to waste, meaning that in addition to the cost of repairing damage to the mains and the surroundings, the cost of treatment was lost, too. Maybe spending a little money up front would save money over the long run? Just spitballing here. Oh, and give some folks jobs, since construction employment is at an all-time low, per today’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report.

Or we could turn Detroit into a new American Venice and revert to drinking directly from public waterways. Since entropy always wins anyway, why fight it?

Filed under: Cities, Infrastructure, News

View full post on Grist

by Patrick Crouch.

Edith
  Floyd is the real deal. With little in the way of funding or
  organizational infrastructure, she runs Growing Joy Community Garden on the
  northeast side of Detroit. Not many folks bother to venture out to her
  neighborhood, but Edith has been inspiring me for years. I caught up with her
  on a cold rainy November afternoon. While we talked in the dining room, her
  husband Henry watched their grandkids. 
   

Q. You haven’t always been an urban farmer. What did you do before this?

A. I worked at Detroit Public Schools. I started out with the Head Start Center
  and then I went to the middle school, to the Ed Tech, [which is] now the
  Computer Lab. I started farming because they laid me off and didn’t
  call me back. Farming is not making a living, it’s just keeping food in my
  freezer. I try to sell some so I can get some more equipment, so it will
  be easier for me to farm. 

Q. What neighborhood are we in? What is it like?

A. This is the northeast side—near the city airport. It’s surrounded by
  graveyards on three sides and then the other barrier is the railroad track;
  we are surrounded by railroad tracks, and sometimes those trains stay for like
  30 minutes, so you are trapped, ain’t no way out. 

Q. How long have you lived in this neighborhood?

A. Let’s see. I came here when my son was 4, so about 36, 37 years.

Q. So you’ve seen a lot of changes.

A. Yeah, when I came it was beautiful—there were grocery stores in the center,
  like in the middle of the neighborhood, but when the city came though here
  and bought everything up, they said [they were going to] enlarge the city airport. They bought up three and four blocks of houses and then left the rest of them
  there. They came in and ruined our neighborhood, and said they ran out
  of money and left us over here like that. I’m still here and I’m gonna stay here, ‘cause I don’t want to go
  somewhere and start all over again. I don’t think I’d be able to pay
  for another house, and this one is already paid for. There was like 66
  houses on this block, and now [there are] about six that people live in, and
  three need to be torn down, and the rest of it is empty. That’s where
  I’m putting my farm on, all the lots. [Editor’s note: some are calling this practice “blotting.” Here’s a recent NPR story on blotting in Detroit.] 

Q. How many lots are you farming now?

A. It’s like 28 lots.  

Q. What are you growing on those lots?

A:
  Across the street I have my strawberry lot. I try to plant by lot. I have a
  collard green lot, a kale lot, an okra lot, an eggplant lot, green bean lot.
  I had a corn lot, but it didn’t work so well. Right now I have a
  garlic lot, I had a tomato lot, cucumber lot, squash, cabbage, broccoli, watermelon, cantaloupe. I like flowers so I planted
  some of them, I had potatoes, mustard greens, turnip greens.

Q. That’s a lot of food!

A. Well, if it comes up it’s a lot, but I give some to the Capuchin Soup Kitchen. I
  sell some at Eastern Market, and Wayne State Market, but the cabbage does not
  sell so I don’t take cabbage there. (I still have about two of 300
  pounds of cabbage I need to harvest.)

Q. So how much money are you making in a season?  

A. I was trying to reach for 3,000, but I only made it to two something. I have
  to add up the last bit; I haven’t got my last check. Every year I try
  to up it; the first year I made 1,000. The second year I went 2,000; this
  year I was trying to go for $3,000.

Q. So 28 lots, $3,000—that’s a lot of work. Aren’t there easier
  ways to make money?

A. Well, I’m not doing this just to make money! I’m doing this because I
  love it. I love to see things grow from seeds.

Q. Do you come from a farming family?

A. Yeah, i grew up in a family that sharecropped, you know, the old-fashioned way.
  Near Orangeburg, S.C., but we lived out in the country, out
  close to the swamp. When our house burned down, a guy offered that if my dad
  worked for him, then we could stay in his house for free, because he had
  another house …The first year we worked our behinds off, we farmed 300 to 400
  acres of cotton, plus the wheat, rye, oats, and corn. When you sharecrop you do
  the work, you get half the crop, and you split the cost of the fertilizer.
  After the first year we didn’t make nothing! After that first year, he
  would just take a bunch of cotton and hide it in the woods, or we wouldn’t
  make a dime. My mother always canned
  and had a lot of food so she always had like 500 jars of tomatoes, corn,
  squash, everything. She kept enough food to eat, and even had enough to
  feed the neighbor[s’ family], and he had 12 kids.  

I
  think that’s the best time of my life, because we learned how to get food out
  of the woods, like all kinds of berries; gooseberries, blackberries,
  raspberry, strawberry, plums, and these little black berries we called
  sparkleberries.

We
  would collect hickory, walnuts, and pecans. My mama would make us get big five gallon buckets and crack them and
  she would make fruit cakes. She would
  add a little dried fruit, but mostly it was nuts. They were good. 

Q. So why did your family move up to Detroit?

A. They didn’t, just me! I came for one
  summer to stay with my aunt, and somehow my daddy talked them into having me
  stay, saying it’s better for me, and I don’t have to work. But I thought work was fun then. 

[My
  aunt] had a store and I would work there before school and after school. Then I met my husband and he would walk me
  to school every day; he was there when I got out of school to walk me back
  home. That was nice because at the
  time it was the riot.   

When
  we got married and moved to this neighborhood, we were the second black
  family on the street. It was so
  beautiful, there were houses everywhere, an apartment building down there, a
  restaurant, barber shop, hardware store, a bar, a steakhouse. There was a greenhouse with lots of flowers
  and plants, and a welding shop. We got along real well on this street until Devil’s Night started. Then they started lighting fires. We would stay up
  just about all night watching for fires, cause the houses were so close
  together, and the next day we would sleep. Mostly the teenagers would start
  fires. We had a nice big garage that
  you could drive your car into, with an apartment upstairs. They burned that down, and the one next
  door. Then people started moving out,
  and I didn’t blame them.

Then
  the [General Motors] Hamtramck plant closed and the rest of the people moved out because they
  lost their houses. They would pay
  somebody to burn it down to get insurance money, and they’d take the money and
  go. My husband got laid off for about
  a year, but they called him back. After that people just started moving out
  one by one until just about everyone was gone. All the younger people are gone, one or two
  older people are still here. Me and
  the girl next door and the people down the street are about my age, some are
  a little older. The rest are gone. I’m not gonna try and run with the rest of them, I just want to plant
  some food. Every time a house comes
  down I try to dig it out and plant some food, so that’s how I started. 

When
  I first came over here I had a garden in the backyard, and when people
  started moving out, I started one lot, then moved on to the next lot, and I
  kept at it. Three years ago I started the lot where the greenhouse
  is. It still
  has a lot of rocks, and I’m still trying to get the dirt better. I’m trying to get more leaves and grass so
  I can make a big compost pile. 

I
  found out that tomatoes will grow anywhere. I don’t care what kind of dirt you put tomatoes in, they will
  grow. String beans and okra will grow
  anywhere, and lima beans and peas, but they are slow-growing. 

I’m
  really hoping the city will give me some answers. I want to buy the land, but I don’t know.

Q. What’s next for the farm?

A. The big plan is to have them let me close everything down and plow it all up.
  I want to go clear down to the five-acre park at the end of the street. You can’t really make too much with beans
  or peas unless you have an acre or more. I had one lot with lima beans and I [harvested] about 100 quarts off the
  one lot, and I would have had more if I had planted earlier.

Related Links:

Baltimore’s can-do approach to food justice

Public school’s rooftop greenhouse teaches kids about food

Peebottle Farms: Talking to plants

View full post on Grist.org – the latest from Grist

by Stephen Lacey.

Cross-posted from Climate Progress.

The Obama administration is set to announce aggressive new fuel efficiency standards tomorrow, scoring a rare
victory on the environmental front. But the details of the agreement may
weaken the standards and allow automakers to delay action on improving
the efficiency of America’s fleet of vehicles.

At issue is a “technology reopener” that allows auto manufacturers
to fight the standards after 2021, in the hopes that they can
renegotiate rules with a future administration that may be more lenient
on the industry. The reopener potentially gives auto companies an
incentive not to develop technologies immediately so they can argue down
the road that the standard can’t be met.

Under the current timeline, the administration’s proposal would
increase fuel efficiency for cars by 5 percent per year and increase efficiency
of light trucks by 3.5 percent per year through 2021. After 2021, standards
for light trucks would climb to 5 percent through 2025—bringing the
efficiency of the entire U.S. vehicle fleet to 54.5 mpg from today’s
27.3 mpg. Those are the highest standards proposed since 1987. The most
recent standards, passed in 2009, require the nation’s fleet to average
35.2 mpg by 2016.

Despite the rise in value for used fuel-efficient cars and surveys [PDF] showing two-thirds of Americans want more efficient automobiles—and the inevitability of rising gasoline prices because of peak oil—American manufacturers say they are skeptical that consumers will buy
them. Hence, the inclusion of a reopener that gives auto companies a
“self destruct” mechanism if they don’t think the standard is working—
or if they decide to make it unworkable themselves.

Foreign manufacturers are also
criticizing the deal, saying that tax credits and more lenient standards
favor American companies that produce larger trucks and SUVs. But as of
today, at least 10 top auto companies say they support the deal. The
ability to renegotiate standards in the future likely played a major
role in picking up so much industry support.

While the reopener presents some potential challenges, the
agreement does demonstrate that aggressive, workable environmental
regulations can be agreed upon by industry. In fact, the United
Autoworkers Union came out in support of new regulations because they would “create new opportunity for American workers.”

In June, a group of 15 prominent Republicans sent a letter to the White House urging it to increase fuel efficiency standards
beyond 50 mpg, mostly for national security reasons. Some groups,
including Center for American Progress, have called for a standard as high as 60 mpg—a move that would reduce American oil consumption
by 44 billion gallons by 2030. While lower than what some groups wanted,
the current standard would still save tens of billions of gallons in
the coming decades.

With anti-environmental rhetoric among Republicans at an all-time high, the White House has had few wins
on the energy front. But even with major trade-offs, passage of a new
fuel efficiency standard is a big move for the Obama administration,
which reportedly convinced auto manufacturers to drop demands for a
40-mpg standard and agree to a 54-mpg standard.

Along with fuel economy standards, the administration is currently working on a first-ever mercury and air toxics standard for power plants. Although Obama has been criticized as not doing
enough on the energy front, these proposals would be two of the most
significant pieces of environmental policy in years.

Is that something to celebrate or lament?

Related Links:

Transportation and social justice: The sentence is in on the Raquel Nelson case

Which cities pay the most for gas?

Pedestrians and transit riders come last [VIDEO]

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

by Sarah Goodyear.

Wow. This video by Alex Gallegos about people riding bikes
in Detroit is just beautiful. Folks of all ages coming together, building community, staying
healthy, connecting with each other, making their city better and
enjoying their lives—all through the power of the bicycle.

As one bike-shop
owner points out, there aren’t a lot of bike lanes in Detroit, but because the city is
so underpopulated, there are a lot of car lanes that can be put to better use.

My favorite part of the film may be the guy who lost 70 pounds and beat high
blood pressure and diabetes by starting to ride: “I don’t have to shoot insulin no more because I
ride my bike like I ride my bike.”

(h/t @urbanophile)

Related Links:

The world’s first ass-powered outdoor concert

Bicycling our way into work and out of the Great Recession

Your bike seat could ruin your sex life

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

by Kaid Benfield.

Cross-posted from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

At the bottom of this post are two short videos about Detroit, both
featuring architect and planner Mark Nickita, principal of the city’s Archive Design Studio and a lifelong Detroit resident. In a very refreshing change from the
mind-numbing negativity one usually hears about the city, Nickita is
upbeat and hopeful. His point of view, emphasizing revitalization, is
much closer to my own than much of what I read, which effectively takes
the approach that the city has somehow been abandoned beyond redemption,
leaving the only question how to manage its more-or-less permanent
shrinkage.

But it’s not that simple.

There has indeed been a decline in part of the region. In 1970,
1,670,144 people lived within the city limits of Detroit. By 2010, that
number had declined to 713,777, an astounding apparent loss of some 57
percent of the 1970 population. Recently, much has been made the 25
percent population decline over the last decade, from 2000 (951,270) to
2010.

But the extent to which Detroit is such a tragically “shrinking city” depends on your definition of “city.” The population of metropolitan Detroit—the jurisdictional inner city and its immediate suburbs—did
decline from 1970 to 2010, but only from 4,490,902 to 4,296,250, a loss
of only 4 percent. Big difference.

Do the math: What that means is that, while the inner city’s population was declining so drastically, its suburbs added some 761,000 people, growing at the handsome rate of 27 percent. (In
the most recent decade of 2000-2010, the suburbs added some 91,000
people, or between 2 and 3 percent.) Patrick Cooper-McCann writes on his blog Rethink Detroit that, far from shrinking, the physical size of metro Detroit grew by 50 percent in those 40 years. As I’ve written before, neither the economy nor the environment pay attention to jurisdictional lines; neither should analysts.

Look at the maps below. On the left, the physical size of metro
Detroit around 1900; in the middle, by 1950, the developed area had grown; and on the right, by 2000, it had become immense:

Under current trends, it’s only going to get more expansive: As of
2004, the region’s planning agency was predicting that, over 30 years,
the amount of developed land in metro Detroit is going to expand yet
another 36 percent or more. “390,000 more acres bulldozed for progress.
The development will continue to be mostly single-family housing, and
will require more sewers, more stores and more schools,” wrote Sheryl
James of the Detroit Free Press (published on the website Urban Planet).  

Shrinking city? Really? What this tells me is that an even bigger
problem for Detroit than the decline of the Rust Belt economy has been
that the fringe of the region has been allowed, more than in most
places, to expand, not shrink, and to suck the life and hope out of the
inner city. So why aren’t the self-styled progressive responses to “the
Detroit problem” addressing this critical aspect of the situation? 

Maybe they are, but the only ones I hear and read are about
“right-sizing” the inner city—demolishing vacant (and even some
occupied) housing, letting vast areas revert to nature or farming, and
so forth. Let sprawl, the cause of the problem, be someone else’s issue
to address. But, in fact, the areas that are sprawling are where the
“right-sizing” most needs to occur.

Whether or not there is any good in the current approach for Detroit
as a community, it is impossible to see how it will be good for the
region’s carbon emissions. Just as is the case in every other U.S. metro
area, households on the fringe emit far more CO2 than households in the
center of the region, because their inhabitants walk less, drive longer
distances, and drive more often. On the map above from the Center for
Neighborhood Technology, households in the areas in red emit, on
average, 8.6 metric tons or more of carbon dioxide per year from
transportation; households in the pale yellow areas in the center emit
3.3 metric tons or less. Again, big difference.

The way to stem pollution is to address the unchecked expansion on
the fringe and keep the center as urban as possible. In this troubled
place even more than in others, Detroit needs a regional approach, not just demolitions in the center.

In the first video below, Mark Nickita discusses the importance of, and
prospects for, revitalizing the Woodward Avenue corridor (above) that
forms the Detroit region’s historic and economic backbone:

In the next (which actually was recorded first), Nickita discusses
what’s really been happening with regard to population in the Motor
City:

(Note:  Nickita’s numbers on the region’s population are bigger than
mine because I conservatively used the six-county, census-defined
Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) to define the region; Nickita used
the nine-county Combined Metroplitan Statistical Area.)

Related Links:

Colorado town considers “How much renewable energy is feasible”—80 percent by 2025?

A new generation says Dallas doesn’t have to suck

Amazing urban farm school for teen moms will be shut down

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

Ecos/Detroit, MI

Residential Energy Efficiency Solutions

The Multifamily unit boasts a rock-solid track record of delivering reduced energy consumption on behalf of our utility clients in multifamily programs. This business has grown rapidly the last few years and has an extensive network of trusted trade allies, retail partners, manufacturers, and measurement and verification partners. This team leverages those relationships to deliver the energy savings or peak power solutions our clients most desire.

As our utility clients gear up their energy efficiency and distributed generation programs, the opportunities are plentiful for making a big impact while we continue to grow SEEL. Our Multifamily Team has an immediate need for a Project Specialist based out of our office in Detroit, MI. In this role, you will report to our Program Manager and have the opportunity to have a significant impact on our continued success in multifamily programs.

Role Description

As the Project Specialist, you will be responsible for program management support for the Detroit Multifamily program, and you will lead the task execution of project work plans and work breakdown structures, and development of processes to manage time and budget for internal projects. You will be responsible for documentation of detailed processes and procedures specific to the Detroit Multi-Family program and for management of all program documentation from DTE Energy, clients, and all other stakeholders. You will develop and maintain relationships and favorable contacts with current and potential customers.

In this role, you will develop and give presentations to assist in program delivery and execution, and develop marketing strategies and marketing materials in conjunction with other internal teams to support programs. You will advise internal teams on any relevant product concerns and may recommend changes to current product development procedures based on market research and new trends.

You will also provide administrative duties such as project scheduling, meeting logistics and facilitation; scheduling of meetings, coordination of sub-contractors and client scheduling, conference rooms, and conference calls. You will help strengthen the retail, client, and manufacturer commitment to energy efficiency products to increase consumer awareness, and communicate the benefits of energy efficient lighting and increase sales of qualified products. You will successfully manage resources from cross-functional operations to delivering the required energy savings to our clients, and assist management by supporting the day-to-day program operations and communicating to external and internal partners.

Role Competencies

Our ideal candidate will possess a Bachelor's degree and minimum 5 years experience managing the delivery of project work plans, task completion, and/or project tasks. You will have 3 years of experience in managing the delivery of project work plans, task completion, and/or project tasks. You will have experience in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and/or electric technologies concepts, practices, and procedures or related field or is preferred.

You will have the ability to manage time effectively, and to problem-solve and work independently. You will be able to rely on pre-established guidelines, processes and/or procedures to perform job functions. You will have solid project management skills, and have the ability to anticipate challenges, plan for solutions, and work within existing structures to overcome barriers. You will have strong analytical skills, and an intermediate level of proficiency in Excel and other Microsoft Office Suite applications. You will have strong planning, implementation and organizational skills, and the ability to prioritize activities, meet deadlines and manage multiple tasks, from program planning to client meetings.

Ecos Information

Our salaries are competitive and commensurate with experience. We are a performance-based culture and have a goal-based incentive program and generous employee benefits. Our comprehensive benefit package includes medical, dental, vision insurance, life, AD&D, short and long-term disability insurance. We also offer flexible spending accounts and 401(k) with a generous employer match.

Ecos is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will be considered without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation or preference, religion, marital status, citizenship, veteran status, or physical or mental disability.

To learn more about Ecos and to apply online, please go to http://ecosconsulting.com/about/careers/.

Apply To Job

View full post on GreenBiz Jobs

Incoming search terms for the article:

• ecos detroit
• Ecos Detroit MI
• ecos and seel DTE multi family program
• ecos project specialist
• ecos seel

by Tom Philpott.

When
I visited Detroit last summer, I found it to be a place of extremes. On
the one hand, a city buckling under the weight of decades of
deindustrialization, white flight, and abandonment—a city so gripped
by economic malaise that it contained not even a single full-service
supermarket. On the other, it also seemed a a veritable beehive of
community organizing, based mainly around urban agriculture.

It’s
not hard to see why the city’s community leaders have settled on urban
ag. It takes two devastating problems—a surfeit of abandoned land, a
lack of grocery stores—and turns them into, respectively, a resource
and an opportunity. Abundant land can be used to grow high-quality fresh
food, which which will then find a ready market among a citizenry that
relies heavily on liquor stores for food shopping. I wrote up my
impressions of Detroit in a broad overview and in a brief look at three especially interesting projects.

One
project I visited briefly but didn’t get a chance to write about was
Catharine Ferguson Academy, a special public high school for pregnant
girls. The school, featured in the documentary Grown in Detroit, is most famous for its large vegetable garden tended and harvested by
the students. But its importance goes beyond gardening. Teenage
pregnancy can be a tragic event—it can severely limit educational and
job opportunities for young women and lead to cycles of poverty and despair. The threat is particularly serious in a place like Detroit,
where job opportunities are limited.

Here’s how the school describes itself:

At
Ferguson, the main goals are to educate the young mothers and prepare
them for a good future. “We want our girls to know that becoming a
mother in your teens does not mean you are doomed to a dead end life,”
said Ms. Andrews.  All students are schooled in the core curriculum of
English, math, science, and social studies in a family-like, accepting
environment. Along with the academics, there is ‘real life’ learning
about raising a child and how to function as a knowledgeable,
independent, and productive adult. “The responsibility of providing food,
shelter, and other basic needs in life should not be stressful. They
have the right to look forward to a rewarding life and we help them
achieve it,” said Ms. Durant.

By
all accounts, it has been successful at achieving those goals. Its
graduation rate is 90 percent—well above the citywide average—and
more than half of graduates go on to two- or four-year colleges. And
yes, gardening is a major part of the curriculum. The school’s grounds
include “goats, chickens, vegetable gardens, a horse, beehives, and more,
where the ‘city girls’ have taken to the farm like they’ve always lived
there.”

Now,
in a rational society with an interest in solving its festering
problems, the Catharine Ferguson approach would be supported. There
might even be attempts to replicate it for other at-risk youth. In Great
Recession America, where government budget deficits have been ludicrously
fingered as Public Enemy Number One, the response is to threaten to
defund it and shut it down.

This
Rachel Maddow show segment has the goods on the vicious, antidemocratic politics
that led to the insane decision to put the Catharine Ferguson on the
chopping block:

As for the young women who attend the academy, they are not responding passively to the attack. They organized a sit-in last week to protest the shut-down threat. In response, a city that can’t keep its schools running nevertheless managed to send a team of cops out to menace and
arrest the girls. From Voice of Detroit, here is the account of Catharine Ferguson student Ashley Matthews, who participated in the protest:

When we heard the police were coming, we ran to the library as fast as we could and barricaded ourselves in there. The police knocked on the window, and before we knew it, they busted open the library door. We all got in a line and held hands. We took a vote because we wanted to be
democratic and we decided not to leave. We chose to stick together, we came together and we were staying together. We were chanting, ‘Whose schools? Our schools!’ The whole time I was recording everything on my phone.

The cops apparently didn’t appreciate the spectacle of nonviolent civic activism from a population segment—teenagers—often associated with apathy. Reports Voice of Detroit:

She [Matthews] said the cop who arrested her, a Detroit police officer named R. Brown, saw that she was recording the events and snatched the phone away. She said Detroit Public Schools officers also took part in the attacks.

“I had sat down, and he yanked me up and slammed me down on my stomach on the floor,” Matthews said. “All the girls went berserk, telling him to get off me, but he was just wiping up the floor with me. He pressed his thumbs in my neck, and he tightened the handcuffs so hard that I have
bruises there. I cried at first but then I made myself stop.”

Images of pregnant girls being roughed up by cops and hauled away in chains for defending their public school all too neatly sum up the dysfunctions of our age. Ashley Matthews and her classmates remind us that something real and important is at stake in the Kabuki theater over deficits playing out in Washington and at state capitals across the nation. We can have robust, democratically oriented public institutions that give everyone a fair shake; or we can eviscerate such institutions, leaving behind only thuggish police forces charged with quelling civic uprisings.

Meanwhile, while public schools get the budget ax, cheered on by “deficit hawks,” details are still dripping out about the full extent of public support for the very big banks that caused the financial crisis in the first place, as the latest revelations from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) show. Severe austerity backed by state violence for the schools; and what Sanders called “free money” for the banks. As the young women of Catharine Ferguson demonstrate, there’s no need to accept this situation docilely.

Defend Public Education and Change.org both have petitions in defense of the academy.

Related Links:

City funding will help school gardens take over NYC

Meet the woman leading the charge to green America’s schools

Solar could save Minnesota schools millions

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

Incoming search terms for the article:

• garden-based public school in Detroit

by Christopher Mims.

The latest U.S. census reveals that not even Detroit natives are that into the Motor City anymore. The once-flourishing metropolis saw the biggest population drop in ten years—25 percent—of any city ever, except for the special case of post-Katrina New Orleans. Civic-minded organizations have a plan for saving Detroit, however, and it’s got nothing to do with delusional hail-Mary attempts to restart old-style growth.

It’s called managed decline, and basically it involves giving up on the city and finding something more useful to do with that space. This has a rich precedent in the American Great Plains, where Frank and Deborah Popper’s Buffalo Commons program has somehow convinced a bunch of rural counties to give up on their declining populations and—get this—re-wild their vast unbroken acres of plains grasses with bison. Montana, Nebraska, Texas, Kansas, they’re all getting in on the action.

The Poppers think analogous efforts to reclaim unused land and shrink cities could work for Detroit, as well. There are already nascent programs in cities like Buffalo, which has instituted a plan to raze 5,000 buildings in the next five years. It doesn’t have to be bison—Detroit could become a city that grows its food close to home, for example.

In all of these scenarios, Detroit, like radically-shrunk cities Braddock, Pennsylvania and Youngstown, Ohio, will transform itself by turning neighborhoods into parks and retreating to its urban core. In general, Detroit has to prepare itself for a smaller, more localized, post-carbon future. And who knows, maybe one day the bison could return—Detroit, like all of Middle America west of the Appalachians, is well within their historical range.

Read more:

“Detroit Census Confirms a Desertion Like No Other” The New York Times
“The Road to Right-Size Cities” Yes!

Related Links:

Obama administration can’t wait to sell China all the coal it can burn

Oil company ‘fesses up, feigns surprise about spill

How the U.S. narrowly avoided its own Fukushima-style disaster in 1992

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist

by Breaking Through Concrete team.

Avram Rodgers, 6, says he and I are secret agents. He takes my hand
and pulls me to the rabbit pens in the back of a fenced-in, grassy area
at the Catherine Ferguson Academy farm in Detroit. A handful of ducks waddle in a
little pool in the center of the enclosure. Goats chew grass in their
separate pen 30 feet away, and a group of young women students build
a small greenhouse 50 feet away.

Avram points out an eviscerated rabbit in the thick grass and
informs me that we must find its killer. The young bunny likely escaped
its cage, and my hunch is hawk or raccoon. Avram is less certain. But we
investigate the crime scene for only another 30 seconds until Avram’s
imagination takes a turn, and we veer out of the duck and rabbit area
and toward the greenhouse.

We don’t find the culprit, but Avram has just revealed something far
more interesting. His backyard mystery personifies the collision of raw
life/death and wide-open imagination that has come to define Detroit in
a much deeper way than the job-loss headlines and banal images of
windowless buildings that have become far too popular in European art
magazines.

Avram is a city kid, but he
walks around here like a country kid. He basically grew up on this
urban produce and livestock farm that takes up roughly half of the
school lot for the Catherine Ferguson Academy. CFA is a Detroit public
school for teenage mothers; Avram’s mom, Ashley Rodgers, entered in
ninth grade after becoming pregnant with Avram.

Ashley, now 21, leads the crew of students as they wrap the small
greenhouse in plastic. The group of girls will travel to South Africa
at the end of July for an international youth conference on food
security and farming. They’ll teach a workshop in greenhouse
construction, among other things. Crazy thing is, it’s not so crazy
that inner-city Detroit youth will be teaching farming to the world.

Wild Wild Wayne

Everyone knows about the economic woes of Detroit. The city’s
unemployment and foreclosure rates lead the nation. It has become the
national emblem of industrial failure, just as Wall Street has become
the symbol for soft, pasty, and greedy semi-men. But Wayne County and
Detroit have been somewhat of a void—a gritty blank slate for
decades, traced back to the race riots of the ‘40s and ‘60s. The
population peaked around 2 million in 1950 and now hovers at
850,000. The exodus has left an estimated 17,000 acres of vacant lots.

There’s an odd
undercurrent of tension amongst some of these groups. It’s a little bit Lord of the Flies out here in this wilderness of vacancy.

While the rest of the cities we’ve seen throughout this trip have
their share of unused land, Detroit’s sea of potential has created a
sense of Manifest Destiny among the urban farm pioneers. Just like
artists who can experiment at the fringe of their crafts when they move
into huge, unwanted warehouse spaces in empty downtowns, Detroit
farmers are at the cutting edge of urban agriculture.

In the course of our three days in Detroit, we weave through a
fraction of the network of projects and organizations. We see D Town, a
two-acre model farm begun at west Detroit’s Rouge Park. They grow
vegetables and mushrooms, raise bees, and sell honey at
a few of the city’s markets, specifically Eastern Market, the
120-year-old outdoor farmers market in downtown.

We see some projects associated with The Greening of Detroit, an
expansive organization begun in 1989 with, initially, a mission to
re-tree Detroit in response to a half-decade of massive tree loss
(500,000 lost between 1950 and 1980). The Greening now has its hands in
hundreds of community gardens and small plots throughout the city, in
addition to the large tree-planting projects like the 105 acres they
just bought at Rouge Park adjacent to D Town. 
Marilyn Nefer Ra Barber (right) runs D Town farm. A native of South
Carolina, of Gullah-Geechee descent, she talks of how the
agriculturalists who moved to Detroit from the South—partly to replace
the unjust farm life with promising factory jobs—are now returning to
the land in their backyards and neighborhoods. “Before, we had all the
jobs and the money and we could buy what we needed. Now we can plant a
seed and have control through our food,” she says.

We visit the Capuchin Soup Kitchen’s Earthworks Farm where a group
of neighborhood youth tend to a garden and sell the produce at the
markets. Earthworks also aids neighborhood residents with their own
backyard food gardens, working on a hyper-local scale.

Urban Farm, Incorporated?

Finally, we speak with Mike Scroll, president of Hantz Farms, the
massive, multi-million-dollar urban farm project that could become the
largest urban growing initiative in the country. Mike says that Hantz
now has three projects in the works, comprising three acres, five acres, and a hundred-plus. He said they plan to grow hardwoods,
Christmas trees, fruit and nut trees, and hydroponic and aeroponic
vegetables. He said they’ll stay away from the existing markets so as
not to impede on the current growers’ market share. But that means
they’ll be shipping all over the country rather than feeding Detroit.

Mike was a nice man, and his ambitious project sounds potentially
great as far as developing a profitable model for urban farming on a
large scale and for job creation in Detroit. But they’re getting
somewhat beat up in the press by the smaller grassroots projects who’ve
been doing this for decades. Mike says that while the public voice
sounds critical, in private, these same urban farm organizations are
asking to partner with Hantz via employment opportunities for the
organizations’ trainees and interns.

I must say, there’s an odd
undercurrent of tension amongst some of these groups. It’s a little bit Lord of the Flies out here in this wilderness of vacancy.

Back to the barn

After so much running around, we find our safe place back at Catherine
Ferguson Academy’s farm. This one’s been operating under the radar and
out of the fray for 20 years. It did not begin with a mission to
save the city or to be a model for the world. It began because Paul
Weertz, the science teacher, did not want his students—teenage
mothers and mothers-to-be—to inhale formaldehyde during dissections.
So Paul, now 56, began keeping a couple live rabbits and chickens in
pens out back so he could practice “fresh dissections” without the need
for toxic preservatives. Soon he had more chickens and rabbits and a
few goats. Within years, they plowed over the playground soil, planted
food, and the students helped him build a barn.

Weertz spends about half his classtime in the classroom and half at
the farm, overseeing the students as they milk the goats, feed the
chickens or the horse, or water and weed and seed the vegetable plots.
They seed, collect, and bale hay from 10 acres of vacant city lots and store it in the barn.

And they love it, says Weertz:

“The farm is a great way to teach parenting skills,” he says. “If
you don’t water and feed the plants, they wither up and die. Milking the
goats is the same as breast-feeding. And training the goats, too. We
teach kids how training works—you gotta be smarter than the animal. I
let the goats run wild for the first milking and then I teach the girls
that you have to outthink them and train them to do what you want them
to do.”

Watch the students milk a goat and ask questions:

A while ago I read an article in Atlantic Monthly titled “Cultivating Failure.” Writer Caitlin Flanagan argued that the en vogue school
farms act as a distraction from the book-learning that must occur to
get our underserved students into college (and a higher economic
strata). While I could dismiss the author’s palpable, almost personal
distaste for all things Alice Waters, the critique of school farms as a
wasteful, feel-good hobby fad of yuppie educators has been bothering me
for months.

“If I said to a farm kid, ‘You don’t need computers, you just need
to know farm equipment,’ that’d be discriminating. You can’t do the
inverse with the city kids and tell them all they need to know is on a
computer.”

Paul gets that occasionally as well, even in Detroit where growing
your own food is becoming a powerful symbol of autonomy. “Some people
say I just have them out there working on the farm, but I think they’re
getting smarter. Many kids are just not moving (these days) and
scientists are learning that we’re pretty smart when we use our hands.
I think when we’re out there working with our hands we’re recharging
our brains.

“If I said to a farm kid, ‘You don’t need computers, you just need
to know farm equipment,’ that’d be discriminating. You can’t do the
inverse with the city kids and tell them all they need to know is on a
computer.”

Sure, the way testing is currently set up relies heavily on
classroom skills, but the farm, via feeding schedules, planting plans,
chicken coop measurements, puts those skills to real tests. Paul knows
he and CFA have a unique situation working with a population of
students largely rejected from the mainstream. They’re in the
system, but at the fringe, sort of how Detroit is in the national sense. Only now people are starting to watch Detroit. The mayor’s talking
about consolidating neighborhoods and big capital is moving in via
Hantz. CFA is old-school in that they still operate and create in their
own gap, that edge space of reality and imagination.

Detroit has a glut of space. That can be a blessing and a curse,
even among the most well-meaning organizations. Seeing the city as a
study in the growth and interaction of grassroots organizations could
be as informative as viewing it as a test in the growth of food and
jobs.

It’s an experiment and a bust and a success and an opportunity
and the reason people are watching is that it’s as real and visceral as
a dissection.

All content
©Breaking Through Concrete, adapted with permission. For information regarding use of
images, video, or text, please contact btctour@mail.com.

Related Links:

It’s raining apples

Greening—and feeding—the city with a ‘garden block’

Cool digs for urban chickens [SLIDESHOW]

View full post on Grist – the latest from Grist