Life Is Rough in the Median

  • Brian Dold works for the Olmsted Conservancy, he says Olmsted designed wide boulevards to be tree and plant friendly. (Photo courtesy of Joyce Kryszak)

Most modern city streets were designed only with traffic in mind. There was little or no attention given to green space. Over time, some cities revamped their streets adding landscaped medians to make them more attractive. But not all cities thought ahead to what it would take to keep those green areas growing. Joyce Kryszak reports, in one city the volunteers who maintain the plants in the medians – are pretty stressed out.

Transcript

Most modern city streets were designed only with traffic in mind. There was little or no attention given to green space. Over time, some cities revamped their streets adding landscaped medians to make them more attractive. But not all cities thought ahead to what it would take to keep those green areas growing. Joyce Kryszak reports, in one city the volunteers who maintain the plants in the medians – are pretty stressed out.

It’s about eight o’clock on a chilly morning. Linda Garwol is dodging two lanes of traffic to take care of the shrubs and trees planted in the City of Buffalo’s Main street medians. At least, what’s left of the greenery.

“Uh, two trees are left. Things have been replanted in some of them,” said Garwol. “It’s a nice project, but it wasn’t well-thought out, obviously.”

Gawrol says just a couple of years after the medians were planted more than 70 of the trees and shrubs have died.

The federal plan that called for the green medians in the street didn’t include money for maintenance or irrigation. The City of Buffalo says it doesn’t have the money to maintain the green strips. Garwol says that’s when she and other volunteers stepped in. But she says there simply aren’t enough of them to get the job done.

“It is tough work. It’s bending, it’s picking up garbage, it’s weeding. So, it’s not easy to get volunteers, especially at this time of the morning. This is the big problem. To avoid the traffic you have to be up early,” said Garwol.

But it turned out that weeding was the least of their problems. Late last summer, it stopped raining. And, the strips are too narrow, the dirt too poor to retain enough water. And… there’s no irrigation system. Unless you count Sister Jeremy Midura. The Catholic nun started braving the traffic to save the wilting landscape in front of her church. Every week day morning at dawn, she tugs five gallon buckets of water between the racing cars.

“They recognize me as the crazy median woman,” said Midura.

“How many of buckets of water do you have to take out there?” reporter. “Well, we use about 12-14 buckets on the larger median across from Catalician Center and our church. Then about ten buckets over by our school area,” said Midura.

But the traffic-dodging nun couldn’t carry enough water for all the two-mile stretch of thirsty plants. By fall, the city finally sent some tanker trucks to water the medians twice a week.

And still trees and shrubs died.

This appears to be a case of bad planning. Experts say anything planted in small medians need to be drought and salt resistant. They have to be planted in the right kind of soil. And irrigation systems should be part of the plan. Otherwise, experts say cities are just throwing away their investment. We wanted to ask the City of Buffalo about that, but the city did not return our calls.

“Right now, we’re walking along what was a Olmstedian bridle-path…”

Frederick Law Olmsted was a 19th century landscape architect. Brian Dold works for the Olmsted Conservancy. Dold says Olmsted designed the boulevard to be tree and plant friendly. It’s thirty feet wide. Two rows of elms arch over the broad, grassy lawn.

Dold says there’s more than enough soil for roots to spread wide and deep and survive droughts. He says, unfortunately, that’s not the case in many urban landscapes today.

“And that really creates an environment where you’re asking too much of a common plant to survive and do well in,” said Dold.

But cities such as Buffalo are learning from their mistakes. The medians now being added down the rest of Main Street will have irrigation systems. A special adaptive soil is being used. And… there’s a good chance the new plantings will survive in the green strip between the lanes of traffic.

For The Environment Report, I’m Joyce Kryszak.

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Interview: Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar

  • Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar (Photo by Andy Pernick, courtesy of the Bureau of Reclamation)

The Department of Interior includes
agencies such as the US Fish and
Wildlife Service, the National Park
Service, the Bureau of Land Management
and many other bureaus, services and
offices. Former Senator Ken Salazar
directs it all. Lester Graham recently
talked with the Secretary of Interior
about the Department and the problems
and challenges he faces:

Transcript

The Department of Interior includes
agencies such as the US Fish and
Wildlife Service, the National Park
Service, the Bureau of Land Management
and many other bureaus, services and
offices. Former Senator Ken Salazar
directs it all. Lester Graham recently
talked with the Secretary of Interior
about the Department and the problems
and challenges he faces:

Lester Graham: Interior is a huge department, with many services and bureaus. Some of those departments deal with oil and gas exploration on public lands and places such as Alaska, Utah, and offshore. During the Bush Administration, the Department of the Interior was criticized for being too cozy with the oil and gas industry. And it culminated with a scandal involving oil company execs, government workers, and wild parties – complete with cocaine and sex. Secretary Salazar stressed to me, those days of partying and sweetheart deals with oil and gas companies are over.

Ken Salazar: It is unfortunate that the department was blemished in the Bush era because of the transgressions which occurred here and the paradigm which unfolded – which we are seeing the results of today – is that there was a bending of the rules and a flaunting of the law. There is a lot of cleaning up that has to be done.

Graham: Recently you came to a memorandum, I’m understanding, with FERC about offshore wind turbines. How soon might we see wind turbines off the coasts of the US?

Salazar: I expect that it will happen during the first term of the Obama Administration. I think that there is a huge potential for wind energy, especially off the shores of the Atlantic, because of the shallowness of those waters.

Graham: Will we ever see a point where we have windmills near coast, and drilling rigs out farther, along the Atlantic Coast?

Salazar: I do believe that we will see the wind potential develop. I think it will be similar to what we already see in the United Kingdom and Denmark and Norway. In respect to oil and gas off the Atlantic, I think that is still a question that needs to be looked at. And it’s part of what we’re doing in looking at a new 5-year plan for the Outer Continental Shelf. And we are not making a decision at this point, or pre-judging where we will end up after we complete the comment process which ends in September.

Graham: Secretary Salazar says domestic oil and gas will play a role in American energy. He talked about the Department of Interior’s role in the nation’s energy independence, and noted the departments 15,000 scientists will be helping deal with the big issues such as global warming and climate change. Ken Salazar says that since the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and other nature-related agencies make up Interior, one of its top priorities is a program called ‘Treasured Landscapes.’

Salazar: I am hopeful that we will be able to, in this Administration, create the kind of legacy that was created by Teddy Roosevelt. President Obama has a vision for the landscapes of America, which is one that I believe we can deliver on. Restoration of major landscapes, such as the Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes and the Everglades and so many others, will be a part of that agenda.

Graham: Secretary Salazar, thank you so much for your time.

Salazar: Thank you very much, Lester.

Graham: Ken Salazar, President Obama’s Secretary of the Interior. For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Costs of Building in Danger Zones

  • In San Diego’s suburbs, the homes on the outer edges of developments and in close proximity to the surrounding countryside are the first to burn. (Photo by Lisa Ann Pinkerton)

During the past 20 years, we’ve been building
homes closer to nature. Whether it’s near coastal areas
or in the wilderness, homebuyers want to live in more
natural settings. But… Lisa Ann Pinkerton reports
often that means putting people and property in the path
of floods or fire:

Transcript

During the past 20 years, we’ve been building
homes closer to nature. Whether it’s near coastal areas
or in the wilderness, homebuyers want to live in more
natural settings. But… Lisa Ann Pinkerton reports
often that means putting people and property in the path
of floods or fire:

2007 was the second worst in history for wildfires in the U.S. Nine-million acres were
scorched and Southern California bore the brunt of it. Most of the property damage was
in San Diego where wildfires in wilderness areas spread to suburban neighborhoods. Half a
million people were evacuated and Shannon Denton was among them. She says her
neighborhood was cleared out at 4 in the morning.

“We were scared. ‘Cause we didn’t – luckily we had all our pictures organized, so we just took most of our pictures and our video stuff, grabbed our kids at the last minute and left within a half-hour. It was scary, very
scary.”

(construction sound)

These days, Denton’s subdivision is busy. There are bulldozers demolishing the burned
out remains of old houses. And construction crews are building new ones on every single
street.

Denton’s thankful her house was spared. But she says even if it had burned down, she’d
take the risk of it happening again, because she likes living here.

“It’s pretty close to nature. There’s a lot of walking and hiking, a lot of mountains that you can take trails and different things.”

Despite the risk of fire, people like Denton don’t want to leave. Some of the 18-
thousand homes lost in San Diego last fall were built in places where wildfires had
burned only four years earlier.

That’s not unusual. The US Fire Administration says nearly 40% of new home
development across the country is in places where residential homes and wilderness meet,
and thus, are more prone to fire.

“They have a right to build that single family home.”

That’s Jeff Murphy of San Diego County’s Department of Planning.

“As a jurisdiction its our responsibility to have codes and ordinances that are
in place to make sure that there’s minimal structural damage as the result of wildfire and minimize
the risk of loss of life.”

Murphy says people are going to live where they want to, all government can do is
require smart development. And San Diego’s building codes are the most restrictive in
the California. They were reevaluated after the 2003 wildfires, when seven percent of the
homes were destroyed.

In the 2007 wildfires, Murphy says the new codes reduced that loss to one-percent.

“Even though we had a lot of structure loss during these fires, what these
numbers are showing us is that our codes are working.”

And Americans aren’t just building in areas at risk of fire. We build in flood zones, too.
FEMA estimates around 10 million people in the US are at risk of flooding. And
according to the United Nations, we saw the most floods of any country last year.

Roger Kennedy is a former director of the National Park Service. He says this kind of
“risky living” costs US taxpayers about two-billion dollars a year in firefighting and
rebuilding costs. The total in property damage hovers around 20 Billion.

Kennedy says people are choosing to build and live on land that’s in danger-prone areas
because they’re not responsible for the true costs. Insurance, guaranteed mortgages, and
federal disaster relief have reduced the personal financial risk.

“People wouldn’t settle in places from which they knew they would not be
rescued and where the taxpayers wouldn’t pick up- or the insurance company which is
essentially the same thing- wouldn’t pick up the tab.”

Kennedy says knowing about a home’s potential risk might reduce the material cost of
fires and floods. And, it might save lives.

But he says, people have to want to know their risks. And even then… they might choose
to ignore it. Because for many, the enjoyment their property brings far outweighs the
occasional “Act of Nature.”

For the Environment Report, I’m Lisa Ann Pinkerton.

Related Links

Part 1: Selling the Family Farm to Developers

  • A former farm field in Central Ohio ready for development. It's an increasingly common sight in this area. This land is right next door to a dairy. Worried about his new neighbors, the farmer is planning to sell. (Photo by Tamara Keith)

In the Great Lakes region, farmland is rapidly being developed into homes, office parks and shopping centers. Nationally, farmland is lost at a rate of more than 9-thousand acres a day. But in order for this development to happen, someone has to sell their land. In the first of a two-part series on farmers and the decisions they make about their land, the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamara Keith introduces us to some farmers who have made the difficult choice to sell:

Transcript

In the Great Lakes region, farmland is rapidly being developed into homes, office parks
and shopping centers. Nationally, farmland is lost at a rate of more than nine-thousand
acres a day. But in order for this development to happen, someone has to sell their
land. Tamara Keith introduces us to some farmers who have made that difficult choice:


At a busy intersection in a newly suburban area, a red barn and white house sit back
off the road. Lush green pasture land hugs the old farm buildings. But the days are
numbered for this bucolic scene.


(sound of construction)


Across the street dozens of condos are under construction… and farmer Roy Jackson has
put this 216-acre farm in Central Ohio under option for development. As soon as the
developer gets approval to build, Jackson’s farm will be no more.


“I’m a third generation farmer and you put your roots down and to see your land be
developed is something I have seen coming, but to actually see it happen across the
road; it’s a sad thing, but it’s progress.”


Sitting on his front porch, Jackson looks our on a neighborhood where once there were farms.


Jackson: “At one point we farmed over 1500 acres and now we’re down to about 300.”


Keith: “What happened?”


Jackson: “We’ve lost a lot of it to development. In the estate of my mom and dad
we had to sell that to settle the estate and that was part of it as well.”


Like many in agriculture, Jackson didn’t own all the land he farmed. He was leasing
it and when the owner decided to sell for development, Jackson was out of luck. Now
he says there’s not enough land left to farm profitably.


“I have a son that wants to farm with me and to do it here, there just isn’t enough
land to sustain two families and make a living for both.”


So, he’s found a big piece of land down in Kentucky, in an area where land is still
plentiful and development pressures are distant. He’s leasing it with an option to buy.
Soon Jackson and his son will have the cattle ranch they’ve been planning for years.
It just won’t be in the state where his family has farmed for three generations.


(sound of heavy machinery)


Workers operate backhoes to grade the ground in an open field that will eventually
be home to some seven-thousand people in a new development. Retired farmer and
agriculture educator Dick Hummel recently sold a portion of this land, allowing
the project to move forward.


“I had some people critical of me because I was going to sell farmland, but on
the other hand, I really didn’t. I traded. You just have to accept that in this
community because that’s what’s going to happen. That’s what has happened. Plus
the fact, it’s been pretty tough farming and this has given a lot of farmers a
chance to sell some land for some excellent prices.”


Hummel sold about 100 acres of farmland and bought some new land – 77 acres –
farther out in the country. His father had bought what Hummel calls the “home farm”
in 1935, and that family history weighed heavily on Hummel when he was deciding what
to do.


“It was harder to decide to sell that land because it had been in my family for many
generations than it was the agricultural part.”


His father bought the land for 100 dollars an acre and Hummel was able to sell it
for a whole lot more. Asked why he sold, Hummel’s answer is simple.


“The offer. I hadn’t thought about selling at all. I didn’t even know that they
would want any of this particular land ’till all at once there were others that
were selling for a price. I heard about that, and first thing I knew, a heck of
a lot of land in this area was selling. So you compare notes as to prices, et
cetera and so forth, and that’s how it happens.”


Hummel says he wasn’t pressured to sell. He’s well past retirement age, and
he says it was the right decision personally. And such is the case for most
farmers who sell their land for development, says Sara Nikolich, Ohio director
with American Farmland Trust.


“You’ve got acres of farmland that can be sold for 20, 30,000 dollars an acre at times.
For a lot of farmers that’s their retirement they’re sitting on, and when you have
development surrounding you and you don’t have any public policy to promote agriculture
and perhaps you don’t have any heirs, you don’t have any options available to you other
than development.”


And so, the personal decisions of individual farmers are transforming some of the
nation’s rural landscape into suburban landscapes.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamara Keith.

Related Links

Gardens Become Sculpture Showcase

  • The Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park is an outdoor art museum that aims to blend art and nature. This piece is a work by Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro. Photo courtesy of the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park.

Recently, a new sculpture park opened in the Great Lakes region. This new outdoor art museum exhibits 24 pieces by acclaimed modern sculptors. Eventually, 80 pieces will be on view and the park is expected to become a regional arts destination. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney has a look at how the sculpture park at the Frederik Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids mixes art and nature:

Transcript

Recently, a new sculpture park opened in the Great Lakes region.
This new outdoor art museum exhibits 24 pieces by acclaimed modern
sculptors. Eventually 80 pieces will be on view and the park is expected
to become a regional arts destination. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Tamar Charney has a look at how the sculpture park at the Frederik Meijer
Gardens in Grand Rapids mixes art and nature:


The pieces in the 30 acres sculpture park are spread out amid hills,
paths, and nooks. There’s an area with stone and bronze works from the
early modern masters like Rodin, Lipchitz, and Henry Moore. In a hollow
there’s an enormous red gardening trowel by Claus Oldenburg and Coosje van
Bruggen. And suspended just inches over a pond is a kinetic or moving
piece by George Rickey. Just downstream from the pond are 15 gigantic
ceramic eggs. A blue robin’s egg, a speckled killdeer’s egg… they are all
enlarged versions of eggs laid by birds you can find at the park. It’s a
work by Carolyn Ottmers, a sculptor from Chicago. She says the sculpture
park meshes the visual arts with the wonders of nature.


“I think in the way they have chosen to arrange the sculptures, and
integrate within the park… created this arena for encounters which for
me is a similar experience echoed when you walk through nature.”


As you move through the park you catch a glimpse of a piece here, a
suggestion of a work there through the trees, around the bend, or across the
pond. Officials with the gardens say the collection is the most
significant one in the Midwest. But it’s not your typical sculpture park,
with formal manicured gardens adorned with sculpture.


“The sculpture is not a decoration of a garden.”


Magdalena Abakanowicz is a sculptor from Poland. Her bronze piece called
“Figure on a Trunk” is a headless, shoeless person. It’s hidden in an alcove
made of young trees. Abakanowicz rails against the idea of art decorating
a garden, but she says nature can create the right space in which to see
sculpture.


“Spaces to contemplate, spaces to meditate, spaces in which we are
confronted to our own scale and the scale of the world.”


These are spaces that change with the weather, the time of day and the
season. Joseph Becherer is the sculpture curator for the Frederik Meijer
Gardens and Sculpture Park. He says it’s the natural setting that may just get more
people interested in looking at art.


“I think there are many, many people… the majority of Americans that are
very intimidated by a traditional museum or gallery but there is something
welcoming, inviting and warm about coming to a garden.”


And some of the things on exhibit in the botanical section of the gardens
can help people understand some of the things on exhibit in the sculpture
section. It’s something Italian sculptor Arnoldo Pomodoro is well aware
of. At the gardens, his piece called “Disk in the Form of a Desert Rose”
sits on a small grassy field next to a waterfall. After the dedication
ceremony, he was strutting around, greeting the people admiring his piece
when he was approached by a young boy with his buddies from school in tow.


Child: “Um, they want to know what the sculpture is supposed to be… like… about.”


Pomodoro: “In the gallery down is a real rose of the desert so the inspiration
comes from this rose which is a stone very beautiful.”


Pomodoro encourages the children to go into the conservatory to see a real desert rose
to start understanding and discovering the connections between art and nature,
and sculpture and the environment.


“You go and see it’s an homage to the nature. Ciao.”


Kids: “Ciao.”


In the coming years, more than 50 new sculptures will be added to the Frederik
Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamar Charney.

Saving Niagara’s Natural Beauty

A historian believes one of the world’s most visited natural sites is
being ruined by tourist development. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Lester Graham reports that instead of new hotels and casinos…one man is
pushing for an appreciation of the natural beauty of Niagara Falls: