Ben Nadler of Kinetic Carnival talks to some of the folks at Surfside Gardens in Coney Island about the future of their community garden as development plans threaten to convert their beautiful garden to low-cost housing.

During Rudy Giuliani’s mayoralty in the 1990s, garden closures were at their highest rates, culminating in 1998 when the Giuliani administration tried to auction off all of the community gardens on city-owned property.

But a judge stopped Giuliani’s plan from moving forward. In 2002, a compromise was reached between the attorney general’s office and the city that handed jurisdiction over many gardens to the parks department, protecting them from development. Many others have been bought by private organizations like the Trust for Public Land, but a few dozen or so remain under the control of HPD.

Read the full article here.

Find the surfside garden on Google Maps

Louise Crawford of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn interviews Joe Holtz from the Park Slope Food Coop about their upcoming vote regarding the selling of bottled water.

The problem is this: 30 million or so bottles end up in landfills every day, environmental experts say. The vast majority of the bottles are made from petroleum — roughly 1.5 million barrels of oil a year, enough to fuel 100,000 cars, according to the Earth Policy Institute.

Read the whole article here:
Find the Park Slope Food Coop on Google Maps.

Anne Pope shows us around the sustainable side of Flatbush. Her tour in includes a stop at a meeting of the Sustainable Flatbush gardening committee, hosted by Flatbush Gardener, Chris Kreussling.

The Gardening Committee has already begun planning for a whole weekend of activities on Arbor Day Weekend (April 25-27); yes, it’s about trees, but trees and neighborhood “greening” are also Livable Streets issues, they affect energy use, are proven to be good for business, and are healthy for children and other living things.

It’s easier building green in the Netherlands, first, because it is a national consensus and people are aware of the long term maintenance effects when building a building which lasts for at least 50 years. Second, building standards and codes are kept up-to-date to the current (energy) developments. The minimum energy efficiency requirements are set to a relative high level in relation to the regularly available building technology and is updated every few years or so. In the US the minimum energy standards are relatively low and building a better performing building is basically voluntary. The gap between the minimum requirements and the regularly available building technology is large.

For the full article go here.
See where the LEED building is on Google Maps.

Brooklyn Optimist Morgan Pehme interviews Milton Puryear of the Brooklyn Greenway Intiative.

With the Greenway borough residents would finally be able to access a waterfront we lost long ago to commercial and industrial interests. In place of powerplants and other eyesores, pedestrians, bicyclists and families would have an ambitious multi-use green space to enjoy much like the series of wonderful parks which now span the West Side of Manhattan.

According to Curbed:

Anytime you get to write about Wallabout more than once in a couple of weeks, you know that something is going on. Or, might go on at some point. In any case, Wallabout is about a mile-long hunk north of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill between Flushing and Park avenues near the Navy Yard. It draws its name from Wallabout Bay, which has a pretty grim history.

For more on Wallabout go here and here.
See where Wallabout is on Google Maps.

In this segment we follow Bob Guskind of Gowanus Lounge as he takes us to Carroll Gardens, where overdevelopment is the word on the street.

The Carroll Gardens community activist message board we nicknamed the Democracy Wall acquired some new artwork on Saturday night about the 360 Smith Street development, work on which will likely be starting soon, given that building permits were issued on February 22. The artist named Art Dog, who has created the big murals, said the asbestos removal that was going on this weekend in the Carroll Street station could not stop the art: “A little asbestos never hurt anyone did it? I think the wind blew it down the street.”

For more on development in Carroll Gardens go here.