Vegetable City

In the oasis of greenery and continuously flowing water of Boswyck Farms, Lee Mandell grows fresh basil that is, in all likelihood, more delicious than any basil you have or will ever taste. “You’re not gonna get it any fresher,” he says. “You simply can’t get closer to production than this.” His basil is a “Thai lemon basil” that, when placed on the tongue, conveys hints of citrus mingling with the taste of a subtle, savory curry.

For Mandell, the way his plants taste is one of the most important considerations on this indoor farm he started seven months ago in his Bushwick loft. “It was one of the things I was most worried about when I started growing,” he says. “To me, taste is the most important test you can have. You can test for sugar content and all kinds of other things, but if your produce doesn’t pass the taste test, what’s the use?”

A section of the basil-growing area at Bosyck Farms.

But Mandell’s vision for Boswyck Farms extends well beyond his attention to the palate. For one, his growing space is not a typical garden. Instead of growing his plants in soil, Mandell grows them in water. Appropriately, this method is called hydroponic farming. Hydroponics can produce higher crop yields using less space than soil-based growing methods. Advocates such as Mandell say that hydroponics is an especially important tool for urban environments, where space is an issue. In his loft (in addition to the other-wordly Thai lemon basil) Mandell grows tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant and sweet peppers. In the fall he will start growing kale and lettuce.

Hydroponically-grown plants are kept alive with systems of circulating water that disperse nutrients to their roots. The simplest of the growing arrangements in Mandell’s apartment is made up of plastic soda bottles dangling from one another in a series of vertical columns suspended from the ceiling. The more complex ones require aquarium pumps, troughs, and small, fired clay pellets to hold the plants in place.

Mandell has been growing things for years, but he first got his start in hydroponics when he moved from Boston to Bushwick a year and a half ago. His Boston home was a sunny apartment with south-facing windows conducive to growing all kinds of plants, but his apartment in Bushwick was darker and the windows smaller than they had been in his previous home. To continue gardening, Mandell had to purchase lights. A magazine called Growers Edge was included in the box of lights that arrived on his doorstep, and in it was an article about an environmental science and microbiology professor named Dickson Despommier (http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/dept/sph/ehs/4.html) who was doing research at Columbia University on high-rise vertical farming. “Forty-story buildings that are just farms throughout the entire building,” explains Mandell. “That hasn’t happened yet, but I read the article and got really intrigued. I thought ‘I can do this.’”

Mandell explaining the pepper-growing process.

Although Mandell has yet to construct a forty-story urban farm, he has become a passionate advocate for and an important player in the urban hydroponics movement. “Hydroponics is an important component of producing large quantities of food within an urban environment,” he asserts. “It uses less water and obviously less soil, and especially in places that have slightly toxic soil that’s a very positive thing.” Another benefit of city hydroponics is that the method involves much less weight than soil farming, so it is particularly advantageous for rooftop farming where weight, in addition to space, is a constraining factor.

Boswyck Farms (Mandell’s sights are set on expansion but so far there is just one farm, despite the plural) is still a small-scale and non-commercial project, but Mandell is moving towards increasing the production of his operation. He will soon begin to provide fresh produce to local establishments like Roberta’s Pizza, an independent restaurant off the L train in Bushwick. He is also working towards selling his crops at local farmers’ markets and eventually, when production picks up, donating five percent of his produce to local food pantries. Mandell hopes that the farm will eventually move into a larger commercial space, but the idea of living locally is one of the major forces that drives his work. The name “Boswyck” comes from what the neighborhood that is now known as Bushwick went by when it was a farming community in the 17th century.

Mandell is fiercely committed to the idea of a de-centralized food production system. His mission is to teach as many people as possible how to farm in order to accomplish this, so he has begun leading workshops out of a lab in Manhattan, teaching participants how to install their own home hydroponic systems. He hopes to soon begin installing greenhouses on rooftops in Bushwick, and to one day expand the project into the other boroughs and neighborhoods of New York.

“I have this high-in-the-sky goal of getting every rooftop in New York to be useful,” he says, and suggests that all New York roofs could (and should) one day function as gardening spaces or hubs for wind or solar energy.

Mandell collaborates with several other hydroponic farming groups in New York including the Science Barge (http://nysunworks.org/?page_id=18) and the Window Farms project (http://www.windowfarms.org/). The Science Barge is a fully sustainable traveling urban farm that doubles as an environmental education center. Its goal, according to its website, is to make New York a more sustainable city by moving it in the direction of recycling its own wastewater, generating its own power, and producing its own food. For its vegetable production (tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, herbs) the Science Barge uses hydroponics.

The Window Farms project, according to founders Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray, “is about DIY food farming in NYC windows.” The goal of the project is to provide the masses with easy-to-use and inexpensive hydroponic farm systems to be used in offices and apartments throughout the city.

Like Boswyck Farms, both the Science Barge and the Window Farms project are focused not only on using hydroponics to grow food sustainably and efficiently, but also on sharing knowledge about this growing method through art, workshops, and public education programs.

“Teaching kids, especially, is incredibly important,” says Mandell. “It’s a cliché, but they’re our future. There are a lot of kids who are growing up in the city and have never seen food production. For them, produce comes wrapped in cellophane. The idea of it being actually attached to a plant is almost unreal.”

Eggplant, peppers, tomatoes.

In Tokyo, hydroponics has nearly replaced soil-based methods. In Australia experts estimate that 20% of the value of vegetable and floral production in the country comes from hydroponics. In Holland hydroponics accounts for about half of the value of the country’s fruits and vegetables. The hydroponics movement has also taken hold in Canada, and is becoming especially popular in greenhouse growing there. In addition, although water is the primary agent in hydroponic growing, the method uses less water than traditional farming practices. Because of this, hydroponic farming is becoming more prevalent and more significant in regions, like the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, that suffer from water scarcity.

But Mandell insists that in the United States, hydroponics is vastly under-utilized. The biggest advancements in hydroponics in the U.S. have come from marijuana growers, he says, but not enough has been done in urban environments. Because space is becoming more and more scarce in cities, Mandell holds that the urban environment is where hydroponics has the most potential. He believes that hydroponic farming is a tool that cities should turn to in order to address urban problems such as the limited accessibility of fresh produce, the lack of space, and the environmentally detrimental effects of transporting massive amounts of food from rural area into urban ones. The bottom line, according to Mandell, is that hydroponics is crucial for urban sustainability. “It’s not the silver bullet that will solve everything,” he says, “but it’s an option, and it’s a good option.”

He admits that the method is not perfect for every crop or for every setting. “You wouldn’t do hydroponics for wheat,” he says, “because you need acres and acres for that. But fruits, vegetables, things like that are really ideal for hydroponics, especially in urban settings. It’s all about growing the right things in the right places.”

Mandell is especially eager to insist that anyone can do hydroponic growing. “I jokingly tell people that everybody’s familiar with hydroponics because in the ’80s the Joseph company introduced Chia Pets,” he points out. “Those are hydroponics. So it’s not like it’s unfamiliar, and it’s not as if Chia Pets are complicated. You sprinkle the seeds on the pet and you water it.”

Asked about his role within the broader urban agriculture movement, Mandell is quick to respond. “I want to help people grow in any way they can,” he says, “whether it’s just a little flower box or a rooftop farm.”

The farm is operated straight out of Mandell's home.

Dirty waters

(by Lauren Raheja and Nicole Brydson)

On a recent sunny afternoon, a young woman stood on a bridge that passes over the Gowanus Canal near the Smith and 9th St. subway stop, sketchpad and pencil in hand, studying the body of water before her.

“I like trying to find beauty in industrial places,” she said. “You just sort of have to appreciate what’s around you, you know?”

At first sight it’s obvious that the Gowanus Canal, a waterway that extends to Boerum Hill through the neighborhoods of Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, and Red Hook, is filthy. Yet, residents continue to congregate around it, canoe across it, build vessels to tour it, and wonder if it its beauty will ever again surpass its usefulness as an industrial center. The dirtiness of the canal is due to an accumulation of approximately 150 years of heavy industrial activity since it was constructed in 1849, as well as sewage and storm water run-off, and its proximity to factories and gas refineries.

The grime, plastic waste, construction debris, used condoms, fecal matter, and toxic films of tar, mercury, and pathogens that linger in its depths have made the canal a site of controversy since the EPA announced in April that the waterway is a candidate for a spot on the Superfund National Priorities List.

The Superfund program, a national initiative put in place to identify the country’s most hazardous waste sites and to clean them up, was developed in response to the discovery of toxic chemicals at the bottom of New York’s Love Canal in 1978. Created under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), the Environmental Protection Agency oversees the Superfund initiative. Since 1980, over 700 hazardously polluted sites have been placed on the National Priorities List and remediated.

A Superfund designation would mark the Gowanus Canal as one of the most dangerous hazardous waste sites in the country, and a site direly in need of immediate cleanup. The nomination has entangled the city, the EPA, prospective canal developer Toll Brothers, and a handful of community organizations in an intensely heated struggle over the imminent future of the canal.

Toll Brothers, self-proclaimed as “the nation’s leading builder of luxury homes,” purchased land around the canal several years ago, and the developer plans to build 447 residential units, 2,000 square feet of commercial space, and two parking garages between 2nd Street and Carroll Street along the waterfront. Arguing that EPA cleanup would postpone their development plans, Toll Brothers have come out in opposition to the Superfund designation. In a testimony issued to the EPA on June 24th by the Vice President of Toll Brothers, David Von Spreckelsen writes

I have spoken with banks and insurance companies regarding the prospects of getting loans and insurance policies that would enable development along the canal were it to be placed on the National Priorities List. Their answers have varied from it being very difficult to impossible to obtain what would be necessary to move a development project forward.

Organizations such as Friends and Residents Of Greater Gowanus (FROGG) and Carroll Gardens Coalition for Respectful Development (CG CORD), who have been lobbying in favor of the canal’s designation as a Superfund site, maintain that the waterway is dangerously unhealthy and insist that immediate cleanup action must be taken before development projects begin. Both groups hold that making it a Superfund site, because of the reliability, funding, and resources of the EPA, is the best option for a comprehensive cleaning of the canal.

The Gowanus Canal hosts an unseemly combination of industrial and residential waste, storm water run-off, and sewage. It has been given the nickname “Lavender Lake” because of the oil streaks that leave a purplish tint on its surface. FROGG and CG CORD say that proximity to, let alone contact with the canal could pose serious health concerns. The Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation report that cancer-causing PCBs, as well as sulfur, cyanide, and asbestos can be found in the waterway.

Preliminary studies conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers show that lead, cadmium, arsenic, zinc, and other poisonous substances are also present in the canal. Potential risks, the EPA says, are human contact with the water through kayaking and canoeing, flooding, and the consumption of fish that live in the water.

If it becomes a site on the Superfund National Priorities List, the EPA would initiate and manage a cleanup operation in consultation with stakeholders—including local residents and property owners, community groups, prospective developers, and state and local government. Their procedure would address both the contaminants within the canal and onshore sources of pollution. They would obtain funding from “Potentially Responsible Parties” (PRPs) including National Grid (formerly Brooklyn Union Gas), with Superfund money covering what the PRPs are not able to pay.

Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Superfund Program was allocated an extra $600 million (on top of its $320 million annual operating budget) to facilitate waste site cleanup. The EPA estimates that Gowanus Canal sediment removal alone could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Concerned that a Superfund designation would have a stigmatizing effect on the area of Brooklyn surrounding the canal, and thus attract fewer developers to the area, Mayor Bloomberg’s administration, like Toll Brothers, opposes the Superfund plan.

In a proposal for a “Superfund Alternative” endorsed by Toll Brothers and the Department of City Planning, the office of the mayor suggests that the cleanup should be funded in part by the federal Water Resources and Development Act and in part by the city, instead of Superfund, in order to avoid the National Priorities List and the stigma that might come with it. Bill de Blasio, city councilman for the canal area, has adamantly opposed Superfund designation on the same grounds. CG CORD reports that he has stated, “You don’t want to drink out of it, you don’t want to eat fish out of it, but it is not a danger to live near it.” Di Blasio supports the city’s alternative proposal.

But according to EPA officials, WRDA grant money is insufficient for the Gowanus project. The WRDA is allocated a total of $50 million for all of its national projects, a number far below what the EPA estimates the Gowanus Canal cleanup will cost, and what the Superfund program is able to pay. WRDA funding would mean that the Army Corps of Engineers would oversee the operation, but the EPA fears that it does not have the resources to address the onshore pollution sources. Because PRPs can be legally held responsible only if a Superfund designation is in place, the agency is also concerned that these parties would resist contributing to the cleanup, and that such resistance would stall the project.

According to a July 2nd article in the Times, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has expressed support for a placement of the Gowanus Canal on the National Priorities List, but is also reviewing the city’s clean-up proposal.

State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, who represents the 18th New York State Senate District, where the majority of the canal is located, was the first public official to speak out in favor of placing it on the National Priorities List. In May, she wrote a letter to Dennis Munhall of the EPA urging him to support the Superfund designation. “While the economic development of this artery is crucial to the future of New York City,” she writes, “sustainable, healthy development is only possible in a sustainable, healthy environment.”

The Gowanus Canal issue is currently in a public comment period that lasts until July 8th. If you would like to voice your opinion about the Superfund designation, Dennis Munhall of the Environmental Protection Agency can be contacted at munhall.dennis@epa.gov or (212) 637-4343.

what? a poem?

Black checkerboard squares with white ones interlaced to form something wholly not checkerboard, something bloody and belligerently stupid.

The Mercedes Benz owns the right turn only sign and the coffee shop, blackened with soot-stained purebred puppies who become stray dogs in the rain.

One of them pulls up his red collared shirt, pulls it up, up, and up once again until its crocodile crawls out of its sleeve and begs to be remembered.

The fish-hook rug makes tambourines play—so when the mustard-seed buzzes, the doorbell does not work intentionally. Seeing farther onwards still, we notice that the butterfly does not gloat in the rain but laughs and laughs because he sees himself as he is—rightly dressed for disaster and persnickety samosas—a samosa that enjoys the rain but doubts the existence of its own potatoes.

His aunt wants to heat them but not eat them so he lies down across the railroad tracks without a helmet, plucks his bicycle spokes for dramatic effect, and glides seamlessly above the haunted trees inhabited by marsupials who, having forgotten to shave, regain their shadows striking 6, 7, now 8 o’clock.

Martinis, then, flavored pink, make tomatoes seem more exciting than sanding banisters.

grasshopper on goggles

Knowing which way the wind blows.

“It’s time to repower America,” an organization called Environment America tells me, in my inbox. It is messages like this one that, ever since that first cathartic week in November when we learned that the notion of Change with a capital ‘c’ had won out over a platform that stood for supposedly “traditional” values, make me think of running through the streets.

That night of November 4th was so chaotic, so frenzied, so beautiful that it’s difficult to recollect everything that happened after Obama gave his acceptance speech to an audience of tens of thousands ecstatic supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park.

Ever since then, it seems like we, in the United States, have sort of been coasting. Yes, Bush has done a few more silly things since November 4th (most recently, he and his advisers proposed passing a regulation that would make it more difficult, once again, for women to access reproductive health care, including even the most basic contraceptives) and the economy is still a rather unhappy mess, but: we are promised that CHANGE IS COMING so this all seems a little less foreboding, a little less ominous, than it did pre-November 4th.

I remember feeling that night that, for the first time in recent memory, something was happening to our nation that warranted serious celebration. A collective running-through-the-streets was in order, so that’s what we did in Portland, and surely in countless other cities throughout the country. We ran through the goddamn streets because we were just that happy. And there were fog machines and there were lights and it was heartachingly, nearly unbearably, lovely. There is one particularly vivid moment from that night that stands out more than the others: my friend Chandler and I had escaped a smoke-filled pub on Belmont to follow the din that seemed to be coming from just a few blocks south of us. Hundreds of people packed Hawthorne Blvd., and not a single one of them was stationary. Nobody could sit still, so everyone ran.

Chandler and I reached Hawthorne somewhere around 34th Avenue, and as we approached we decided we had no other option but to join the throngs of moving people.

We ran from the north side to the south side of Hawthorne and then back again, and as this was happening we realized there was really no method to the madness (I must have been envisioning some sort of parade). I glanced over at Chandler and he laughed, then turned to run back across the street for the fifth or sixth time. So we kept running, because we were ecstatic.

Watching our soon-to-be president speak earlier that evening was a release and a collective sigh of relief; it was a signal that the tremendous collective burden that is the Bush administration would be lifted, and it would be lifted soon. And that, needless to say, felt good. It was catharsis.

Hearing Bill Ayers, the man responsible for Sarah Palin’s accusatory remarks about Mr. Obama having “palled around with terrorists” speak on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross on November 18th was almost as inspiring as that night… but in a different way.
Ayers, having been in the Weather Underground, the radical student-based group at the forefront of the opposition to the Vietnam War, was not there on the radio to soothe or comfort his listeners, and his message certainly was not that everything was going to be OK. There was one thing in particular during that broadcast that jolted me out of the mild passivity I had been experiencing ever since election night: Ayers described the excitement he shared with his peers in the Weather Underground (and with his friends in Students for a Democratic Society, the organization from which the Weather sprung—and that still exists today) upon word of the announcement that Lyndon B. Johnson would no longer be running for re-election. Granted, Obama’s victory in the campaign that his consumed many of our lives for the better part of the past six months is certainly a different type of occasion—yet the two are comparable. Both signaled what was (and in our case, now, is) thought to be the end of a destructive regime. In 1968, the man thought to be most responsible for the escalation of war was falling from power. Now, the commander-in-chief responsible for at least two devastatingly bloody wars is departing, and is being replaced by a man who is a self-proclaimed icon for change in the wake of utter hopelessness.

But Johnson’s 1968 decision to step down from office, despite the sentiments that it conveyed at the time, was not a magic-potion cure-all for the nation’s ills, or even for the war. Yes, considerable change would come about, eventually—the Vietnam War would draw to a close, massive steps would be taken and accomplishments would be made by civil rights leaders and leaders in the feminist movement—but what sent a series of rather unpleasant tingles down my spine during the Ayers and Terry Gross interview was the reminder that just a matter of days after Johnson’s announcement, Martin Luther King, Jr. would be assassinated (Johnson’s announcement came on the 31st of March, 1968, and the assassination happened in Memphis on April 4th). That was the cause of the first set of spinal stings.

The second was the reminder that the Vietnam War did not come to an end immediately, that the senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated, thousands upon thousands of tons of bombs would be dropped on Laos and Cambodia, and in October of that same gruesome year (which was also home to the Tet Offensive) the Defense Department would send 24,000 troops to Iraq, I mean… Vietnam—where the war would continue for another seven years.

When asked (by Gross, and by other interrogators who, several months ago sought to incriminate Obama by linking him to Ayers) whether he was regretful about his involvement with the “radical” Weather Underground, Bill Ayers said ‘no.’ The organization had been involved in countless riots and bombings throughout the late 60s and the early 1970s—including a bombing in the Pentagon (which did not kill or severely injure anyone). But it was certainly not the violence that he is proud of.

Like any human being who has lived a remotely fulfilling life, Bill Ayers has regrets, he tells us during the interview. But doing something during the Vietnam War isn’t one of those regrets—nor should it be. Yes, tactics, for any organization, are highly important. But what is also important is action.

Ayers and the rest of the Weatherman learned this lesson more fully in the aftermath of their excitement about Johnson’s announcement, especially as the devastating year that was 1968 came to an end. I absolutely detest the phrase “resting on laurels,” but I’m going to use it here anyways, because now is not the time for that. Yes, Obama has been elected—and I am of the opinion that he is a leader who will indeed bring about Change—and he’ll be in office soon. But that’s not enough, so we’ll keep running, like we did that night on Hawthorne Blvd.

Not running away, but running towards: something, somewhere that is better than the place we stand right now. We’ll keep running—for social justice, for environmental justice, for women’s rights, and for peace. We’ll keep running.

The full interview can be found here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97112600&ft=1&f=13