Concrete ideas

Assorted thoughts collected while pondering the number of weeds growing in the cracks on the street in front of my house:

Big environmental problems often have Silly, arcane, boring or ambiguous names. Noxious weeds - sure, I guess. Impervious surfaces - what? Aquifer recharge - zzzzz. Light pollution - you mean light bulbs or not heavy?

But they're all connected. Check this out:

Take your run-of-the-mill parking lot. What have you got? Room for 200 cars, a lot of asphalt, five or six islands with shrimpy trees, a bunch of light poles and a couple of drains.

Take your typical street. What have you got? Miles of asphalt (or sometimes concrete), trees along the edges if you're lucky and occasional drains.

Take your typical sidewalk. What have you got? I think you can see where I'm going with this.

View Larger Map
Now, I'm not saying let's just tear everything down and live in yurts, but any one of these three surfaces - parking lots, streets and sidewalks - can be built to allow the water that falls on them to go somewhere that isn't a storm drain. Retrofitting is another matter, but I have seen parking lots that have filtration systems under the asphalt to get all the phosphates and oil to land somewhere besides the nearest stream.

I know it could mean fewer places to park, but my feelings wouldn't be hurt if parking lots had more trees in them, by which I mean more trees tall enough to provide shade. And lights that are shielded so they don't spread the wealth to the sky.

With enough places reinvented to cut down on the amount of asphalt exposed to the sun, maybe we could also stop using the ground as a big passive solar heating system. I know my Newfoundlands are a lot happier when the night cool sets in, but that's always slower when you live in a place with lots of pavement.

So that's the lite version of my manifesto on pavement. I could, of course, go on and on, in much greater detail. Just buy me a glass of bourbon sometime if you'd like to hear the whole spiel.

Poppycock from Big Media

So, there are about 101 stylish stories to write, and of course there being way more than 101 writers, they all get written a lot. One of my personal favorites is a riff on the False Piety Piece, which can be laid down anytime there's a new bishop in the archdiocese (The new guy is unimpeachable, but he represents the old hierarchy, which endorses frying and eating small children); a good-hearted sports star signs a fat contract (Joe Blow's only done good things for our city, but Frank Jones turned into a psychotic ax-killer when he got that five-year deal in 1931); etc.

Today's contestant is a USA Today spiel on how "Eco-friendly events can leave large, unfriendly footprints"

I'm sure it is true, of course, but, um: No shit, Sherlock. Have you ever been to a rock show? A balloon festival? A hunters' blind at the end of the season? My front yard? Yours?

Merely the existence of a major crowd-drawer necessarily means waste, harm and general badness. But maybe the eco-friendly events spur people to make wiser choices down the road, ultimately paying for the one-time cost, and maybe paying it many times over.

Would you say no to a washing machine that would pay for itself in two years via energy and water efficiency just because you had to drive to a nearby city to buy it for $200 more than a cheap, inefficient alternative?

I suspect not, but I'm sorry to see my colleagues in print are disinclined to go the extra mile in their own work.

Water wise?

I got my utility bill today. Most of the costs are set:

• $34.60 for sewer
• $3.18 for storm water
• $16.81 for trash
• $1.90 for recycling
• 67 cents in trash tax. Why they don't fold that into the $16.81 is a mystery.
• $18.07 for water

So that's $75.26 of my $78.29 bill. The other $3.06 is the charge for our use of 300 cubic feet of water (about 2,250 gallons). That's lower than usual, but we were on the road a lot. We average about 500 cubic feet, so our bill is usually a couple bucks higher. In those monhts, 92 percent of my bill is set costs, and my choices work out to about six bucks.

On Friday in the paper, we published a small column the city is submitting each week to try to get people on board with water conservation.

I think you know where I'm headed here, but I'll just say it anyway.

Maybe it is time to ditch the set fee and switch to a sliding scale for use. I usually pay $24 for 600 cubic feet, so how about:

• $4 per 100 cubic feet for the first 10 units.
• $8 per unit for units 11-20.
• $16 per unit for units 21-30.
• $32 per unit for units 31 and up.

I'm sure a system can be worked out for non-residential users, too.

It's about damn time

An AP story on the wire today suggests LEDs will soon be a viable alternative to incandescent bulbs and compact fluorescents, too.

Incandescents and CF bulbs are of course the most widely available choices for most people's lighting needs, unless, I suppose, you count candles. Both have major drawbacks - inefficiency (while I was writing this post, I had a funny parenthetical - (Who hasn't used an incandescent light to warm a chick?)), aesthetically displeasing light, contributions to mercury pollution and climate change, that sort of thing.

As the story points out, LEDs aren't ready to take over as your garden-variety solution to home-lighting problems, but maybe in a few years, they will be.