By Bill Slawski, on July 10th, 2008
Fighting the Sahara Desert with a wall of trees has been on the minds of people in North African nations since at least 2005. A Greenbelt would help stem the growth of the desert, and the first phase of the project would involved the creation of a strip of trees 7,000 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide.
Maitre Abdoulaye Wade, President of the Republic of Senegal, recently described how alongside the wall would be built water capture basiss, to collect rain water during the rainy season, and enable farmers in rural areas to grow food all year long.
The organizers of this project have a model to look to in China, where a Great Green Wall is beiing built to try and stop the Gobi Desert from expanding. The wall is a planned 2,800 mile long network of forest belts that are hoped to act as a wind break.
By Bill Slawski, on July 9th, 2008
The congested streets of New York City might see a little relief this summer as plans move forward to close miles of City streets to cars on three Saturdays during the month of August.
The car-free lanes will extend 6.9-miles through Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge towards Park Avenue and the Upper East Side. Will removing traffic from busy thoroughfares help people think about city life in a different way? Maybe.
Copenhagen started something similar around 40 years ago (1962) by turning its main street to pedestrian use only, and has continued to develop to a more pedestrian friendly urban area since, adding more pedestrian-only streets, reducing parking spaces, and turning parking lots into parks..
One of the people involved in the transformation of Copenhagen’s more pedestrian urban spaces is Jan Gehl, who consulted with New York Mayor Bloomberg on PlaNYC. PlaNYC is an initiative to make a Greener New York City.
It’s great to hear that New York is taking strides like this, to make urban life more livable, and finding ways to make it more friendly to the environment. An organization that pursues similar initiatives around the world is the Project for Public Places.
