Two sisters who recently returned from Portland, Oregon and Brooklyn, New York, have begun an asphalt garden in a lot on Stanard, one block south of St. Clair Avenue behind the Goodrich Gannet Center. Map Here’s their plan:

RiverSweep is Ohio Canal Corridor's 18th Annual, environmental awareness and clean-up initiative developed by Ohio Canal Corridor. The event partners multiple non-profit organizations with private companies to clean areas along the Cuyahoga River Valley and its tributaries. RiverSweep is a "done in a day" event where volunteers gather at one of seven designated areas.

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Greetings from Blue Pike Farm.

There is much to do in the St. Clair / Superior neighborhood on Saturday
May 5th.

First, there is the Blue Pike Farm Open House. We are holding our Spring

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I recently posted on realneo about a report I saw on CNN profiling Lucien Gambarota, an inventor in Hong Kong who has developed and begun manufacturing micro wind turbines - see http://realneo.org/Micro-Wind-Turbines. He is also working on technologies to capture energy from waves, and hybrids of wind and wave.

For Immediate Release
Contact: Ms. Daryl Davis, event coordinator
216-631-0557 (day) or daryl [dot] davis [at] sbcglobal [dot] net

Friday night I attended a reception and lecture at SPACES Gallery for select Cleveland organizations with interest in urban planning and sustainability. The current exhibition at Spaces, Shrinking Cities, explores strategies for post-industrial urban areas and should be of great interest to anyone interested in urban planning and sustainability. Terry Schwarz, Senior Planner at the Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio, was to give a tour of the exhibition. My affiliation? I am an energy ambassador at Case. I am also an art historian, and although there are some witty, beautiful and innovative works represented in the exhibition the theme and the messages of the show truly over power the aesthetics. One could easily forget they are in an art exhibition.

 It is very nice to see my favorite real urban planner Joe Stanley featured on Lee Batdorff's very informative University Circle Blog - and thanks to Joe for mentioning us here at realneo! We set up and host his http://neomainstreet.com site, which is one of the best uses of Drupal in this region, and presents excellent work by a talented planner and designer. Joe is working on all the community development projects I'm involved with, including overall East Cleveland planning and the Star Intergenerational Neighborhood planning and The Intergenerational School, along with other work Joe does independently.

We live in "Forest City" so Arbor Day should be an important holiday in Cleveland. Here is one idea how you might celebrate ...

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****(....this is part of a series of articles, and the author is just finishing up the building of his workshop)****

Buzzing Hong Kong is better known for keeping lights on all night and the air conditioner running full blast, not saving energy. But engineers in the city have introduced an innovative wind energy technology than can help both rural and city residents protect the environment and cut down on energy costs - without having to spend a fortune on an expensive device. Claudia Blume reports.

"I think Cleveland is a good place. Inner city is rough, but the outskirts is real beautiful, and great schools there. Plus my family, my mom and my sisters, they're all in Cleveland, so it's easier for me to be there than anywhere else." This quote, from an excellent Free Times interview with Charles "Wish Bone" Scruggs, of Cleveland-roots, Grammy award winning, multi-platinum rap trailblazers Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, sings the woes of a place branded as a "Shrinking City", where even the urban hard-core Thugs chose the 'burbs over the 'hood. The result of such out-migration, and downright defection, as is the case with all the other members of Bone, is the subject of a series of art exhibitions and related events taking place over the next month, all over town... which event sponsor Kent Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC) introduces by pointing out: "In 2005, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that Cleveland had lost nearly 20,000 residents in just five years. The city’s population of 458,684 was the lowest in nearly one hundred years." Starting Friday, April 20, 2007, at 4:30 PM, with a lecture at CUDC, explore what it means when a city loses its Bones...

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If you thought you needed to have solar panels in extremely sunny places to make it worth while, then think again!  Germany is leading the world in energy produced by the sun. This fact does not surprise me.  The Germans have been energy savvy for a long time.  I remember a trip to Münich in 1990, when I was amazed at the advanced system they had in place for commuters on bicycles.  Not only did they have separate bicycle lanes in the busy roads, but they even had traffic lights specifically for cyclists.

    If Germany can produce 1,000 Kilowatt hours per square meter per year, from solar power alone, imagine what places with extremely sunny climates can do.  However, the point is, it does not matter how little sun there is, anything is better than nothing.

   Got Solar Power?

This is the title of a children’s book that spent some time in our house.  I believe the afflicted robin of the title died of pesticide poisoning.  I thought of him the other night when my friend Susan mentioned she had seen three dead robins in the past week.  That comment made me recall that I had watched a robin feebly hopping in a busy intersection and not at all removing himself from danger.  As we stood on the corner, in the snow, another person waiting to cross Lee entered our conversation; she too had seen dead robins – two – recently.  Now perhaps we all saw the same three robins….but  it is still weird, something is up.  Sleuth Susan went home and discovered that many robins have been stretched to the breaking point by the recent high/low extreme weather we’ve been having. Read more

Two ways to put an end to junk mail >>>

http://www.newdream.org/junkmail/#more

Don't miss the new documentary about Ralph Nader's life, An
Unreasonable Man, premiering Friday, April 20, 2007 in
Cleveland and Columbus. Click here to watch a quick preview.
 On opening night and Saturday, April 21 in Cleveland,

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The Best Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs: PM Lab Test

I used to see this when I was a small child back in the 1950's, when we would drive up to the lake from Wellington to swim at Beaver Creek Park.

The question "Am I possible?" is the beating heart of Get Rid of Yourself, and it echoes throughout Bernadette Corporation's existence on the borders of fashion and art.  The group is influenced by Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren, and Jean-Luc Godard. They are also interested in new immigrant cultures surrounding their loft "headquarters" on the Bowery in New York City. Bernadette Corporation's interventionist projects function as a critique of our global culture, which constructs identity through consumption and branding.

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Cuyahoga County has issued  RFQ 8382 for a so called “Feasability Study concerning Lake Eire Wind Energy Center”. See County site here.  Responses are due April 23. 2007  The  "Center" is not a center as in a building, but  an offshore installation of  turbines.

I went to a very good talk about climate change and the "Inconvenient Truth" at the Natural History Museum last week.  The dialogue was led by local businessman/ environmentalist Jeff Friedman. It occurs to me that cycling can be a stronger part of climate change discussion.