NEWSLETTER: October 2003
Dear ECC Member:
The aborigines believe, “We don’t own the land, the land owns us.”
They have been looking after their lands for the last 50,000 years. Part of this
land care is an annual controlled burn, which returns nutrients to its arid soils.
Everyone is invited to come to the Dedication Ceremony to honor those who have
participated in the Restoration Work that has taken place in Wilcox Park for the
last three years. Work and interest did not just start three years ago, it has
evolved sporadically over many years. However, more serious efforts began happening
when Sherri Belden designed many work projects, goals and explored many ideas
in the early 90s. After Sherri moved away, the ECC opted to take on the project
because it is seen as an important link in a trail system that hopefully will
be continued on the city’s agenda.
It all became viable when we received the Iroquois Grant for $10,000 and the Long
Island Sound Fund Grant for $19,400. With much help from Boy Scout Troop 196,
Steve Kraffmiller and his firm STV, Inc. and many on their staff, Public Works
and Irwin Langewisch, Friends of Wilcox Park, the efforts of Vincent Piselli who
has worked and planned projects with the Scouts and the Alternative Education
students, we have made some headway towards its restoration. The Ceremony will
be held on Tuesday, October 21 at 3:00 PM at the Milford Boat Launching Ramp Parking
Lot. Please join us to give thanks to all the folks who have made this restoration
possible.
Our speaker for the October ECC Meeting is one of our Freedom Lawn winners, Katherine
Neville. However, she is better known as a Master Gardener and as a lecturer at
the New York Botanical Gardens, Fairfield University and Federated Garden Clubs.
She will lecture on “How to Put Your Garden to Bed for the Winter.”
She also gives this lecture series at Milford’s Adult Education Program.
Katherine is the past President of the Westchester Fairfield Horticultural Society
and is now a board member and their Horticulture Director. Many of you may know
her as President of the Milford Garden Club, and she also serves on the Board
of Directors of the Yale New Haven Women’s Auxiliary as their Vice President.
We plan to present awards to the winners of the Freedom Lawn Contest at this meeting,
so bring your friends and relatives to share the occasion. We meet Thursday, October
16 at the Parsons Building in Conference Room C, which is on the second floor.
We have an important announcement! Laurel Lobovits has designed and built the
ECC’s very own website, MilfordECC.com which will also have a direct link
to the City of Milford’s website. It has just been set up so it will take
a bit to become more active. We will have a calendar of events and important announcements
and/or articles that are related to environmental issues important to our community
and beyond.
Just a couple of items on cars. This item came from Abigail Gerhard, it was published
in US TODAY, September 16, about what Ford and California are doing. It is important
to note, as I think it will play a part in a design for the Connecticut Legislature
to improve our air quality.
Seven companies will be selling such cars. However, Ford and Toyota will have
theirs, the Focus and Pirus respectively, available this year in showrooms across
the country. This new car is a super-clean normal looking car, priced about the
same, uses unleaded gasoline, but is nearly pollution-free. They are called PZEVs,
(pronounced PEE-zev) for partial zero-emission vehicles. According to this report,
a car with PZEV’s hardware is more pollution free than the standard hybrid
car but have no report on the mileage. Because of their severe smog problem, California
is requiring the biggest automakers to sell these PZEVs to meet federal clean-air
standards.
These newest cars present problems: 1) convincing people that they are as clean
as they claim 2) because 50% of air pollution comes from 10% of these old cars,
an attitude prevails of why bother, and 3) finally the problem of their disposal.
However, according to Tom Austin of Sierra Research in Sacramento, who studies
clean-air issues for government and industry, “It’s only a matter
of time before essentially all gasoline-fueled passenger cars and light trucks
are PZEVs.”
PZEVs’ hardware, as described by Ford Motor vice president, Dave Szczupak,
“It is no one thing. It is attention to a lot of details.” The engine
has been redesigned from scratch to burn cleanly. “The catalytic converters
are packed with about twice as much of the expensive metals that scrub out air
pollutants. And to eliminate evaporative emissions, they have changed the gas
tank to be an impermeable steel tank, instead of the cheaper plastic tank that
most cars use, and extra carbon filled filters keep gas fumes from escaping from
the engine.”
So if Connecticut passes a law like California, that only helps push the standards
more quickly to be of PZEVs, thus improving all of our air quality.
There are over 5,000 in Europe and Asia but only one of its kind in the United
States, the Hoboken municipal parking garage. That is, a space saving automated
or robot parking garage. It looks like a giant erecter set with no floors. The
pallet that holds the car moves along tracks. These garages can be designed to
look just like their adjacent buildings; they need only two people to manage it;
no paving; no anti-theft protection; and no ventilation. The cars are driven into
the garage onto a pallet… you get out, flash your card in front of an automatic
reader, then the car is turned 180 degrees so it will face outward when returned
to its owner… (a return takes only two and one half minutes) and then it
is taken up an elevator and stored in an available slot.
Vermont’s ridge lines, a perfect spot for catching the prevailing winds
and a place for those turbine windmill-producing electric power, are becoming
an environmental and moral issue. They are a sight to encounter and their lights
present another bothersome issue. To a Vermonter, “To look out and see lights
at night is, to them, true degradation.” It was pointed out that in one
area, as viewed from the top of the mountain, with the proposals out there, that
area would literally be surrounded with windmills. As one man said, “This
place has a soul. Its soul will be ruined.”
This dilemma, our two greatest environmental conservation issues are at logger
heads--how to save the planet with wind power versus how to save our souls and
psyches with vistas.
As the Northern Sky News, September 2003 issue, tells the story about Vermonters
and their dilemma—they sound just like the people whom we read about last
month, the people who think like a mountain. “Vermont has a 150-year legacy
of tradition and law in regard to forest and viewscape protection.” In 1873,
the Vermont Supreme Court decision: “to view and enjoy the beauty of the
earth is a privilege belonging to all God’s creatures alike, [any person}
is entitled to have that view protected as much as any other interest.”
These ideas in Vermont, the author said, “are as common as the sight of
a black-and-white Holstein grazing placidly on a green hillside.” He went
on to say, “these ideas would be regarded in the rest of America as inane
or insane.”
Vermonters also have a strong tradition of refusing modern technology; keeping
dirt roads to discourage city traffic (a law that I love), most signs are outlawed,
and chain stores are often refused per-mission to build, especially despised is
Wal-Mart.
So how are they going to deal with these dilemmas? “A collaborative, like
a modern version of the tribal tradition of sitting under the palaver tree and
talking until matters become resolved. The palaver tradition relies as much on
the healing power of conversation as it does on law. They used this method in
the 1980s, “to resolve disputes over how much utilities should invest in
energy efficiency and it was very successful in reaching fact-based decisions
about where investments in energy efficiency are cost-effective and where they
are not.” It was effective in getting tremendous environmental improvements
that protected flows for fish.
It is good to know we don’t have to go to Switzerland to find people who
practice THINKING LIKE A MOUNTAIN; we can claim a state that thinks that way.
A brief report from the CEQ: They survived, sort of, the budget crunch, being
reduced from $150,000 to $50,000. Their good news was the protection of 18,000
acres for open space—the Kelda Lands for the year 2002. But, the news for
the rest of Connecticut’s environment quality such as water: work on water
treatment plants has petered in the last few years and air: which is being polluted
by the midwest electric power plants. The troubling news, we are in first place
for breast cancer and third for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
There is increased auto travel, decreased public transit use, and disappointing
recycling practices among Connecticut citizens.
We are looking for donations of fall blooming perennials for Wilcox Park. We want
to spiff up for the Dedication Ceremony. Please drop off at Vincent’s home,
across from entrance to Silver Sands Park, at 361 Meadowside Rd.
Ann Berman, Chair of ECC
www.milfordecc.com
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