• Sustainability

Imagining a Future Of Cities With Many Fewer Or Even Without Cars

• air pollution
• bikes
• cars
• New York City

The New York Times’ opinion writer Farhad Manjoo penned a fantastic story (the graphics are amazing) that visualizes a carless future for NYC and asks the fundamental question “why do cities waste so much space on cars.” 

Why This Matters:  Now is the time to reimagine urban spaces — particularly if, as Manjoo predicts, more people worry that the only way to safely get around in cities is in their own car.

• Sustainability

One NYC Trashy Thing: The Best Bin Won!

• New York City
• trash

There are more than 23,000 trash cans scattered around New York City and they have been virtually unchanged in design since the 1930s — way before we even thought about plastic, much less recycling it.  NYC decided to have a competition to select the best new bin design to replace the old bins — the […]

• Food

New York To Bid Foie Gras Adieu

• animal cruelty
• animal rights
• foie gras
• New York City

The New York City Council voted overwhelmingly to ban the French delicacy foie gras from being sold in restaurants, stores, and farmer’s markets because it is made by force-feeding ducks and geese to fatten up their livers in a way that some consider the “most inhumane process in the commercial food industry,” according to The […]

• Ocean

NY Weighs Options For Defending Against the Next Superstorm

• Hudson River
• New York City
• New York Harbor
• sea level rise
• storm surge

After the environmental group American Rivers named the Hudson River the second-most endangered in the U.S., Yale Environment 360 took a look at why and found that the plans to protect the New York metro area from storms like Superstorm Sandy may be expensive and counterproductive, providing little protection from storm surge and at the […]

• Animals

NYC Considers Banning the Sale of Fur

• animal cruelty
• animal rights
• fur
• fur ban
• New York
• New York City

After bans on the sale of animal fur were passed throughout California, some New York City councilmembers pushed their colleagues this week to back a ban on the sale of fur in the nation’s largest fur retail market. The bill’s opposition comes from religious groups including black pastors and Hasidic leaders. As the New York Times […]

• Politics

De Blasio Getting Tough on Pollution – Is He Running Too?

• fracking
• GND
• Mayor De Blasio
• New York City
• pipeline
• pollution
• Trump Tower

Mayor Bill De Blasio of New York City, who is allegedly mulling whether to throw his hat into the Presidential race, used Trump Tower as a backdrop for an event on Monday highlighting a tough new law that reduces emissions from buildings, which has been dubbed the NYC’s GND.