Trees Take a Hit for Pedestrians: the New Thoroughfare Along Walnut Lane

Back in early July, when local media were focused on four Norway maples threatened by construction on Hawthorn Avenue, there was considerable carnage going on just blocks away along Walnut Lane. About twelve mature London plane trees (or sycamores) met their demise.

The rings could be counted to tell the age.

Further down, across from JW Middle School, the roots of a row of hackberry trees next to the ballfield were dealt a considerable hacking when the old, uneven sidewalk was removed.

Soon, the only evidence that shade trees once stood near the highschool were neat mounds of woodchips left by the root grinder.

The reason for the logging and root disruption became clear in the weeks that followed, as workers removed the old curb and sidewalks and began installing new, along with upscale Belgian block curbs.

Judging from the double-wide sidewalks being installed on both sides of Walnut Lane, the trees were sacrificed as part of a vision for a broad pedestrian thoroughfare that, it can be hoped, will encourage walking and biking to school.

The new sidewalk construction includes the area where the highschool has been inundated by stormwater runoff twice in the past.

This is what the same spot looked like two years ago, after a flash flood sent runoff cascading into the school basement and onto the performing arts stage, requiring once again a replacement of the wooden stage. The recurrent damage is due to the school and its detention basin being lower than Walnut Lane. When the street's drain pipes become overwhelmed, there's no place for the water to go other than into the school.

A few of us had proposed a solution so that the high school would not be flooded the next time Princeton gets hit by another of those thick, heavy rains that all our earth-warming is making thicker and heavier. It's an approach influenced more by landscape thinking than engineering, and focuses on surface flow rather than putting faith in pipes that can clog and overflow. The solution would take advantage of a wonderful open field on Westminster property that Westminster's own consultant had declared unbuildable because of its wetland status. It might seem that Westminster would not be excited about having runoff directed onto its own property, but Westminster has a vested interest in preserving the high school performing arts center. I heard that they provided some of the funding for the construction of the facility, in exchange for access for periodic use. The idea, then, was to create a means--essentially a swale--for excess water from the street and the school to more easily flow into the adjacent Westminster property's field, thereby preventing the water from rising high enough to enter the school's basement and music facilities.

That idea seems not to have made much headway with the powers that be, and yet the sidewalk construction is still being used to make some positive changes.

Here you can see that the new curb is lower than the current street level. The street will actually be lowered,  knawed down by a giant asphalt-eating machine, so that the street can hold more floodwater. In addition, the town engineer informed me via email, "We are installing upsized pipes across Walnut Lane and adding an inlet to assist in getting overflow into the storm sewer system. All this increased capacity still runs into a smaller pipe that goes under the Westminster property.

The most positive change is that they lowered the sidewalk and driveway on the Westminster side of the street two inches. This is not as much as we suggested, but two inches could conceivably be the difference between inundation and preservation of the high school's basement and performing arts wing. As any beaver will tell you, when backing up water, an inch here and there can make a big difference.

A view down Walnut Lane, with hackberries on the left and Norway Maples on the right, in front of the middle school.

Though trees have been sacrificed or traumatized, the new double-wide sidewalks represent another of Princeton's improvements to the pedestrian experience near schools. It's a contrast with what many of us have to deal with in neighborhoods, ducking around shrubs left to grow by inattentive homeowners.

Some of the shade trees were saved along Walnut Lane, but it will take a lot of thoughtfully chosen and strategically placed new trees to eventually shade this new pedestrian-friendly corridor.

Update: With the passing of Aretha Franklin, the thought occurs: Why not name the walkway after her. "Aretha Way," perhaps. The sidewalk intersects with Franklin Avenue, and runs between two great centers of music.

Resourceful Californians Serve Themselves Gas

A trip to California for some gigs gave this New Jersian an opportunity to witness some remarkable behavior. People--young people, older people--were getting out of their cars, and doing crazy things. Like cleaning their own windows.

This driver managed to find a hole towards the rear of his car, and put something in it. I've never seen anything like this in New Jersey. The concentration, the resourcefulness, the skill to manipulate devices, indeed the courage to take on this sort of task was astonishing.

But I worried. What if a driver is unable to get out of the car, or it's too hot, or too cold?

My eyes grew wide as I looked around the corner of the station and saw the most amazing feature, a full service pump! With an attendant! Californians really do have it all.

(As of 2018, New Jersey is the only state that doesn't allow self-serve gas.)

Beta Bike Lane Presentation Tonight at Town Council

For one brief week or two in May, bikelanes bloomed in Princeton on Hamilton Avenue. They called it a beta bike lane, a trial run that left a trail of comments/impressions on the town website, by bike enthusiasts and, no doubt, disgruntled neighbors who saw parking spaces displaced to make room for the bike lanes on the narrow street. We get to hear all about it tonight (Monday, July 23), in a report on the results of the experiment in bicycle empowerment.

From emails urging attendance at the 7pm meeting at council chambers on Witherspoon Street, it sounds like the public will have an opportunity to speak of what it's like for a bicyclist to actually have designated space on the street.

For me, using the bike lanes was a revelation. I still remember, years ago, when I switched, mentally, from car to bike, when I overcame the ingrained impulse to grab the car keys any time I needed to go out. Over time, I became more of an optimist, slow to be deterred by a threat of rain, and I found myself feeling an inexplicable happiness while riding. What's that about? Fresh air? A new-found sense of empowerment, of freedom from the need to feed dystopia just to get where I need to go?

But the happiness is mixed with an awareness that there's no pavement upon which I can feel I belong. The sharrows were meant to show that we have a place on the street, but it's hard to feel comfortable when my uphill labors are testing the patience of the car driver close behind. My strategy is to stay out of the way of cars and pedestrians as much as possible, to be unobtrusive, unobstructive.

The bike lane removes that ambivalence. It gives a bicyclist a home, even if only for a few blocks.

Potentially relevant to tonight's discussion will be the town's policy on parking in driveways, which seems to forbid using driveways for parking except behind the house. If parking is to be sacrificed to create bikelanes, parking options for homeowners may need to be reviewed.

Sec. 17A-387. Required parking spaces - Size; design; signs.

...

(b) Areas counted as parking spaces include any private garage, carport or other paved off-street area

available for parking, other than a driveway; except, that in the cases of one-family and two-family dwelling, and

secondary residence buildings, driveway space not in the front yard may be counted as parking spaces.

(c) Parking spaces shall not be provided within a required front yard. If in a rear or side yard, parking

spaces shall not be located within four feet of any lot line.

Blue Curtain Concerts July 14 and 21

Every summer, Blue Curtain brings to Princeton a welcome infusion of music from around the world. The Princeton Recreation Dept. hosts the free concerts at Pettoranello Gardens, just off 206, with parking accessed from Mountain Avenue.

The concerts are tonight and next Saturday, at 7pm.

Princeton Rec. Dept staff were out this week, sprucing up the grounds in preparation.

Four years ago, the concert continued into the night, allowing for some photos of the actual blue curtain for which the nonprofit is named.

Serving as a Redistributor of Scrap Metal

I never go looking, but often encounter metal placed out for the trash along town streets--slightly rusted lawn furniture, file cabinets, folding bed frames. During World War II, citizens would gather scrap metal and contribute it to the war effort. People back then felt like their small efforts could add up to a big success, and they proved right. We're cheated of that sense of empowerment today, as the ideology-based attacks on collective effort have left people feeling isolated and powerless.

Growing up in the post-WWII years, I absorbed enough of that can-do collective ethic that I can't let good metal languishing on back streets end up buried in the landfill. So I pick it up, put it on the curb of my busy street after trash day, and it quickly disappears into the truck of this or that scrap guy passing by.

A very nice wooden table ended up on the restored patio of Veblen House.

A lot of this is driven by imagination. The way my mind works, I instantly imagine the lost potential of the metal, the needless space taken up in the garbage truck as it drives to the landfill an hour away, the potential utility an object still has. All of these are real things--the long drive to the landfill, the lost potential--but can only be accessed through our imaginations. All too often, as political sabotage increasingly allows us only to use collective power to unintentionally create problems (climate change, water pollution) rather than intentionally solve them, people spend their mental energy not on thoughts that spur action, but instead on rationalizations for inaction.

Meanwhile, the pleasures of serendipity and steering stuff towards a better end await.

Using Parks to Demonstrate Sustainability

People tend to emulate what they see, but many sustainable practices are invisible. Composting, raingardens, leaf corrals--these tend to be in the backyard. Buildings don't advertise their carbon footprints. Making sustainable practices visible is an important step towards more widespread adoption.

Parks can be a great place to teach both kids and adults about sustainable practices--simple things, like letting the nutrients in leaves cycle back into the soil from which they came, or separating out recyclables from trash, or utilizing water runoff to feed a raingarden. The small municipal park behind my house holds a few examples.

First is the humble bucket hooked to the trash bin that makes a handy place for park users to put their recyclables. Nothing could be simpler, or cheaper to install, yet the duct-tape on this bucket testifies to its many years of service, and the copious, clean contents testify to the visual clarity this setup provides. Many high-priced recycling/trash dual containers encountered elsewhere may look good, but provide no clear visual cues as to where to put recyclables.

Second is the mulch mowing done in the fall. As the oak trees whose shade provides a haven for birthday parties and other gatherings in the summer have grown, they've generated more leaves. Two autumns ago, I watched as a crew of five spent four hours blowing the leaves into piles and hauling them away. Why not mow the leaves back into the grass, and save lots of staff and trucking time?

The parks department agreed, and now mows the leaves back into the grass. Yes, the lawn may appear less verdant for a month or two in the fall/winter as the leaf fragments break down and return to the soil, but the extra nutrients and organic matter sustain a healthy lawn the next year.

Aesthetics is a recurring issue in sustainable practices. The consequences of nature-abusive behavior (fossil fuel use, landfills, water pollution) are not seen by most people. For anyone who can visualize those consequences, though, the park's highly functional recycling bucket, or a solar panel on a telephone pole, or a mulch-mowed lawn, or a leaf corral in the frontyard, are welcome sights.

The water faucet offers an opportunity to demonstrate how water runoff, whether from sump pumps, air conditioners, water fountains, roofs or asphalt, can be used to feed a raingarden. This park has yet to take advantage of that opportunity.

A leaf corral--this one's in my front yard--is another possibility, though it would likely need to be made out of sturdier materials to endure the (welcome) hands-on curiosity of kids.

Parks are a place where people have some time on their hands to take a look around, and where some learning can happen. Let's use them.

Shade and Sustainability

Our house stays cool deep into the morning thanks to two trees, both imperiled. The one on the left in the photo is an ash, which in its love of the sun has bent southward like a shielding hand over the roof. Though it has yet to show any symptoms, we almost certainly will lose it to the appetites of the Emerald Ash Borer. If its lopsided growth were to cause it to fall against the house in an ice storm, we've decided it would do little damage, like the giant elm on Murray Ave that simply tipped a few feet in Hurricane Sandy's fierce winds to rest softly against a house. And so we keep it, for now, feeling fortunate when we think of those who have to crank the A/C in houses or apartments unprotected from the sun.

The other tree, taller and to the right, is a red oak, planted by the builders and first residents of the house, the Dubas, who love oaks in part because their family name is derived from the Ukrainian word for oak. That tree, too, is threatened, by the introduced bacterial leaf scorch that causes increasing dieback in the upper limbs.

The ash's sheltering embrace is most evident when seen from the inside of the house.

These trees are on the east-north-east side of the house, where solar panels are not an option. Trees on the south and west sides of the house, however, stir ambivalence. The shade is appreciated, as is the additional cooling effect that comes from all the water being transpired through the leaves.

But the two trees shading the southwest side don't come close to the beneficial effect of solar panels, which not only would shade the roof like trees do, but also would generate energy that would otherwise come from fossil fuels. Trees pull carbon out of the air, until they give most of it back when they die and decompose. Even more important in the longterm is to not be adding more and more carbon to the above ground world as we combust coal, oil and natural gas. The more carbon being pumped or dug up from where it has been safely sequestered underground, the less likely it is that the plant world can ever pull enough out to sustain a livable planet.

If I had my druthers, I'd cut down the large trees on the south and west sides of the house, which also are suffering from dieback, and use their collected solar energy in our wood stove to heat the house in winter. I'd install solar panels from the opened sky, and replant our southwest exposure with smaller tree species that will still provide cooling but not shade the solar panels.

Some people view trees as an unalloyed good. Others view them as pests that keep making a mess. What I'd advocate for, and would wish to see better reflected in our shade tree ordinance and in the actions of homeowners, is a more complex view of trees that integrates the many ways a tree can contribute to or interfere with sustainability, depending on location, size, and species.

How Raingardens Reduce Plastics Pollution

Chances are, this trash would have ended up in Carnegie Lake; might even have continued downstream and out into the ocean to join those massive gyres of plastic we hear about. But something filtered it out before it could get into the local waterways.

That something is a raingarden, in this case the two raingardens I've "adopted" at Westminster Choir College. You can see how the curb dips down to allow water to enter from the pavement.

People think of raingardens as plantings that reduce flooding, feed pollinators, and filter pollutants out of stormwater, but they also serve to protect waterways from trash.

Here's the typical stormdrain along the edge of a town street. A plastic water bottle and other small bits of trash, along with the nutrients in the leaves, stand poised to enter the stormdrain that will carry them down to Harry's Brook, then on to Carnegie Lake. Most storm drains have openings large enough to allow plastic bottles and other trash through. An additional issue, as can be seen in the photo, is that the asphalt around stormdrains eventually breaks down, requiring repair. Many stormdrains around town show signs of being patched multiple times in the past--a time-consuming, labor intensive proposition.

Here's another broken stormdrain. Not the most flattering depiction. Most are in good condition, and they certainly are a compact way to get rid of stormwater, but they essentially convey the problems of trash and nutrient pollution "down the pipe", for downstream aquatic life to deal with.

The raingarden, by contrast, traps the problems at the source, protecting the local waterways. Somehow, this fact didn't sink in for me until I found myself picking up the trash while doing some weeding. I was essentially cleaning a runoff filter, like one might clean the lint filter in a clothesdryer. That concrete structure in the photo is the drain. Water rarely if ever rises high enough to flow into it, seeping instead into the soil.

The photo, taken in the spring, doesn't show the raingarden at its aesthetic best. The native plants planted here are warm-season species that don't grow up and fill in until the beginning of summer. Below is a more flattering example of a wetland planting with species that get going early in spring,

The soft rush (dark green), sedges (light green), and sensitive fern grow naturally along a seepage slope at Smoyer Park.

The lush growth owes to the more stable supply of water from the seepage slope, while a streetscape planting will have greater extremes of dry and wet.

Upcoming Free Events -- Theater, Jazz, Video

(Also posted at PrincetonNatureNotes.org)

CLIMATE CABARET -- A free performance of original climate change theater and locally sourced "Sustainable Jazz" at the Labyrinth Bookstore in Princeton, 6pm on Wednesday, June 13. This performance will feature climate-adapted versions of Shakespeare, The King's Speech, a song from the Wizard of Oz, along with theatrical sketches ranging from comic to poignant. A suburban lawn undergoes therapy for recurring feelings of emptiness and chemical addiction, and for the first time, an environmentalist house cat will share her thoughts and concerns about earth and the human race. Actors: Cheryl Jones, Basha Parmet, Kitty Getlik, Fred Dennehy, Steve Hiltner. With Phil Orr, piano, and Steve Hiltner, sax/clarinet.

SUSTAINABLE JAZZ -- Another free show, this one hosted by the Princeton Public Library, from 2-3pm on Sunday, June 17. Steve Hiltner and the extraordinary pianist Phil Orr will perform Steve's original jazz compositions from their upcoming album. Styles range from straight-ahead jazz to funk, rumba and tango. Check out Phil's many other creative collaborations, including the ongoing Jazz On Broad series in Hopewell, at http://philiporrmusician.com/.

VIDEO PREMIER – Farming in the Millstone Valley: Past and Present 
--to be held at the Princeton Garden Theatre at 7:30 PM Tuesday June 12th, 2018. The viewing will be followed by a panel discussion. A preview of the video was shown at Eno Terra, but the final version has many new images. The video was made by the Millstone Valley Preservation Coalition (MVPC), in association with the Van Harlingen Historical Society. Kingston and the Princeton Nurseries Kingston Site are included in the video.

BIRTHDAY PARTY FOR OSWALD VEBLEN -- An outdoor picnic event at Herrontown Woods in celebration of Oswald Veblen's 138th birthday (still going strong) is being planned for 2pm Sunday, June 24. Oswald and Elizabeth Veblen donated Princeton's first dedicated nature preserve, Herrontown Woods, in 1957. The Friends of Herrontown Woods have been caring for this wonderful legacy, and researching the fascinating history of the Veblen House and farm cottage. Veblen was featured recently in a Princeton Alumni Weekly article, entitled "The Power of Small Numbers." Time to throw him a party. More details will be posted when available, at FOHW.org.

Bike Lanes Bloom on Hamilton Ave (for a week)

Update: Town council will be discussing bike lanes Jan. 26, 2021 at its 7:30pm meeting. Community input encouraged. More info on the meeting and how to comment can be found on the Princeton Bicycle Advisory Committee website. The post below dates from 2018.

The sun finally came out Sunday, and with it sprouted some bike lanes on Hamilton Avenue. A bit like Brigadoon--that Scottish village that comes to life for one day every 100 years--these bike lanes will last only a week, enough time for the community to fall in love with them and call for a future and more lasting return.

As serendipity would have it, I happened to be biking by during the transformation, guitar strapped to my back on the way to perform in Onstage at McCarter Theater. Two council members and a Princeton Environmental Commission member were carefully shifting the centerline over to accommodate bikelanes on either side. The street was closed while the volunteers worked, bringing a sudden sense of relaxation and freedom from the din and danger of machines. For one afternoon, while being refitted, the road wasn't serving as a climate change factory. Councilman Tim Quinn, the leading force behind this initiative, hailed me in good humor as "the Dean of Sustainability" as I rode by,

and more volunteers who had added new green bike symbols further up encouraged me to give the bikelanes a try. My usual approach to riding up Hamilton Ave is to use sidewalks when they're empty, in order to stay out of the way of cars as much as possible. A bikelane greatly simplifies the journey, with actual designated space provided for bicycles, so that people like me who want to stay out of the way of cars and pedestrians aren't having to constantly improvise a route. Significant car parking is being sacrificed while this "beta" bike lane is in existence, but for a week, until May 26 or 27, we get to enjoy and demonstrate the utility of these lanes.

Any initiative to increase the number of bike lanes in town comes up against not only cars and parking, but also leaves and brush, which get piled in streets pretty much year round and, if not timed with scheduled pickups, can sit for weeks, forcing bicyclists out into traffic.

The laudable push for bike lanes could be coordinated with a gradual shift towards containerization of leaves/brush. Supplying homeowners on busy main streets with large-capacity rollcarts to containerize their leaves/brush would be a low-cost way of beginning the shift away from the traditional loose dumping of yardwaste in the path of bicyclists, while making our streets cleaner and more attractive.

In the meantime, give the beta bikelanes a spin this week. They worked great yesterday during my bike ride to the Dinky.

One Man's Walk Through Communiversity

After performing at the Arts Council's Communiversity, with traffic kept at bay by an impressive assemblage of municipal vehicles, there was a decision to be made, either to adopt a jaded townie's view of this mass infusion of humanity as an annual annoyance to be avoided, or to dive in and explore? To flee or not to flee, that is the question. Buoyed by the pleasure of playing music for passersby, I chose the latter, saxophone strapped on my back, though an end around was needed to avoid the impenetrable human congestion on Witherspoon Street.

Nassau Street was much more easily navigated, allowing access to booths like Goofy Foot's not so goofy efforts to make comfortable clothing out of recycled plastic bottles. They told me that the color of the clothes comes not from extra dye but from the color of the bottles themselves, making each shipment's color a little different.

Then it was time for the novel concept of Meet a Muslim. I went over, shook some hands, and was told that the original jihad was directed inward, at getting oneself and one's own life together. That seemed to run parallel to some of my own thoughts about the pathological lack of self-scrutiny driving political polarization. One problem with the world is that what typically passes for a tough-minded skeptic these days is someone who only directs their skepticism outward, leaving their own views and beliefs unexamined. Deniers of the threats posed by climate change and invasive species are in this category.

Then it was off to the Princeton Historical Society's table, which had a dog theme. Here's the Stony Brook Hunt Club, featuring hats, horses and hounds. I wondered if the family that brought what later became the Veblen House to town might have taken part in one of these outings, seeing as Jesse Paulmier Whiton-Stuart was a man of wealth who loved horses and dogs. He also took a strong interest in mathematics, which suggests it wasn't completely coincidental that he later sold the house to the great mathematician Oswald Veblen.

Kip Cherry was hosting the tent for the Princeton Battlefield Society.

What got me reaching for my wallet at these nonprofit tables tended to be food and drink, which the nonprofits were offering for less than the concession stands. Communiversity offers a chance to save money by donating to a good cause--a dollar for a can of soda to support a Christian ministry's work in Appalachia, a dollar for a cookie to support some school project.

The Princeton Junior School had some initiative called a Wishing Garden, represented by a miniature garden of plastic dandelion seedheads that put a positive spin on what a lot of lawns look like this time of year. As with the introspective jihad, there was no time for deeper understanding. We got into a conversation about climate cabaret, and how it might fit into programming at the Junior School.

Talk of the climate cabaret continued at Sustainable Princeton's tent, with the head of the local Citizens Climate Lobby chapter.  I'll never get how sustainability is a niche interest, as if the future were optional.

It can be refreshing to make like a bee in a wishing garden of booths stretched along Nassau Street, talking to people wishing and working for a better world, with a saxophone strapped on my back like wings, feeling lucky that I needed only a bike parked nearby to fly me home.

Snowden Bridge Is Falling Down

Snowden bridge is falling down,
Falling down, falling down,
Snowden Bridge is falling down,
Why not fix it?

People drive by this old bridge all the time and never see it. Just beyond Overbrook Drive, Snowden Lane crosses over a tributary of Harry's Brook. Beside the bridge is an older bridge no longer used. It has a lovely stone arch that is gradually falling apart. This older bridge could at some point serve as a crossing for a bike/pedestrian trail out Snowden, but even if it weren't used it is a lovely bit of history, and will only obstruct the stream if it falls in.

Two years ago I appealed to the town's engineering department to fix it. There may have been a question as to whether it's the town's bridge or is the homeowner's responsibility (update: town engineering says it's on private property), but since then, another stone of the arch has fallen into the stream. The longer it goes unrepaired, the more expensive the fix.

I Sing the Auto Electric

When my thoughts turn to transformative, hopeful things, I think of the empowerment of women, the increasing political participation of young people, the growth energy in native plants when given a chance to grow, and the promise of the electric car. It's more than promise these days, with the Chevy Bolt getting 230 miles to the charge, and charging stations sprouting up, often providing a recharge for free.

As long as vehicles have exhaust pipes--essentially weapons aimed at the future--there's little hope for the world. That's why our Prius here, wonderful as it is, will hopefully be our last internal combustion car. The electric BMW parked beyond it is beyond our price range, but is considerably cheaper than usual through the end of this month, for those who take advantage of PSEG's offer of $10,000 off. Add a $7500 federal rebate, and that gets the price down below $30,000.

Small, efficient cars are surprisingly spacious inside. An electric motor is much lower maintenance and more efficient than an internal combustion engine--even more so around town when a gas engine has no chance to warm up.

A friend with an electric car tells me that when he goes on trips with his Nissan Leaf, which gets half the distance as the Chevy Bolt on a charge, he approaches traveling with a different mindset. He takes a book along to read at recharging stops. Sometimes enforced idle time can create the space to attend to things that don't otherwise get done.

People can always find reasons not to change, but shifting to electric cars brings us closer to stripping travel of its collateral damage, allowing us to enjoy the exhilaration or necessity of travel by simply pushing electrons back and forth, leaving no lasting trace in the atmosphere to haunt the future.


Below is some PSEG info, gleaned somewhere on the web, about charging stations:

PSEG Brings EV Chargers to New Jersey Turnpike

PSEG and EVgo® have joined forces to bring electric vehicle (EV) charging stations to the Joyce Kilmer and Molly Pitcher service areas on the New Jersey Turnpike. There are two fast chargers at each service area that can provide electric vehicles with an 80 percent state of charge in 30 minutes, or about 150 miles of range per hour.

Participants in the Nissan No Charge to Charge and BMW ChargeNowprograms can utilize the chargers, as can EV drivers with an EVgo subscription plan. One-time customers can also use a credit card to pay for a charge.

In addition to the EVgo partnership, PSEG also offers an EV charging program designed to help spur the continued adoption of EVs in New Jersey by providing convenient charging options and gathering data on real-world use. That program currently has charging stations with a total of 135 plugs installed at 23 customer sites. PSEG also offers an Employee EV Charging Program with 45 plugs available at various company locations.

PSEG and EVgo plan to install chargers at additional service areas on the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway in the near future. EVgo is the largest public fast charging network in the nation with more than 1,000 charging locations.

Princeton's Carbon Footprint: An upcoming report, its history and meaning

Note: Sustainable Princeton will present the findings of an inventory of the town's greenhouse gas emissions on Tuesday, March 27, at the Andlinger Center. Details at this link. Below is a history of Princeton's long quest to comprehend its impact on the world's climate, and my thoughts on the powerful ethical and emotional implications of a town's "carbon footprint."

Through a generous grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Sustainable Princeton has been able to fund a study of Princeton's carbon footprint, that is, how much carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases we are collectively sending skyward. That number represents the extent to which we as a town are trapped in a carbon economy, and thereby contribute daily to a collective, chemical undermining of nature. The main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, plays important positive roles in the earth's atmosphere, oceans, and in delivering to plants the carbon they use to grow, but as in our bodies, a significant change in its concentration can have disastrous consequences.

Few of us pay any notice to the exhaust pipes and chimneys in our lives, even though their emissions are quietly day to day determining our planetary fate. We abuse nature because we see little choice, because everyone else does it, because each individual's contribution seems insignificant, and because we can. Abuse can be inadvertent or, as in the photo of an outsized exhaust pipe in the back of a Dodge Ram pickup truck, a brazen show of power.

I may have been the first to attempt a carbon assessment of Princeton's energy use, in 2011, when I sought data from our energy provider, PSEG, on Princeton's consumption of gas and electricity. At the time, Princeton University was beginning to assess its own energy use, as was Sustainable Lawrence just down the road.

The premise, at least for me, was that awareness of our collective energy use as a town could help spur a move to use less, knowing the catastrophic global consequences of using carbon-based energy. We could compare our energy use year to year, and with other towns in the area, and thereby gain a sense of progress towards a shared goal.

My own experience with a home energy monitor, which displays how much electricity my house is using at any moment, suggested that knowledge is power. If I turned on the electric clothes dryer, our home energy use jumped by 3500 watts. Who knew? That's when we got clothes racks to hang-dry the clothes. A noisy, inefficient fan in the attic was replaced by passive ventilation. Turning off a few unneeded lights made the number drop even further. It was empowering and satisfying. We saved 35% on energy costs in the years that followed, with no loss in comfort or livability.

Immediate feedback seemed key in changing behavior. I dreamed of being able to go to a website where Princeton's energy use would be displayed in real time. Even more fine-grained data would allow neighborhoods to compete to see "how low we could go." But I quickly came up against the technical hurdles. PSEG was only set up to provide data every three months. Determining energy use by town government, or by the school system, required sending PSEG the meter numbers on every building. And then there's all the consumption of gasoline by cars and trucks driving through town. How to assess that?

I was stunned to learn that our town's biggest energy hog may be the incinerator that burns sewage sludge down on River Road. When natural gas prices were high, the town was spending more than one million dollars each year to fuel an incinerator most people don't even know exists. (I bet "Princeton's Finest" could outcompete Milorganite any day, and dramatically reduce our carbon footprint at the same time.)

In 2014 Heidi Fichtenbaum of Sustainable Princeton contacted me, wanting to pick up on my initial work with PSEG to quantify Princeton's energy use. I passed the data to SP's Christine Symington, who attended Hack Nights hosted by Code for Princeton, and sent the following update to me in 2015:

"Your past efforts to get this data were instrumental in getting a conversation started with PSEG that has led to us getting a commitment to getting updated data each quarter. 

We now have the start of a webpage that gives anyone in Princeton the ability to visualize our collective energy consumption. The team working on this included a 7th grader that designed the logo & created the styling for the site. Keep in mind that this is a work in progress. Ideas out there to expand on this include:

• providing an import tool for residents and businesses who opt in to upload their personal utility bill information so it can be collected and used to create a "Princeton" energy consumption profile. This could be used to gather before and after energy costs from homeowners that participated in the EnergySmart Homes campaign 

• an import tool for Sustainable Princeton to upload the data from PSEG easily and dynamically update the site with current usage data

• a map of Princeton that would display energy efficiency or renewable energy implementations 

• scenario builders that would show what Princeton could do to get to a 20% reduction in fossil fuels by 2020, i.e. increase solar installations by x%"

Then, in the fall of 2015, Christine published a report on Princeton's energy use on the SP website, the aim being to identify a baseline of energy use from which to measure Princeton's progress towards reducing energy use 20% by 2020.

Now, a grant-funded professional study may yield some meaningful number for Princeton's carbon footprint.

The big question going forward will be what Princeton does with that number. If we've learned anything in this long struggle to get action on climate change, it's that numbers don't make people change their behavior. The number on my home energy monitor moved me to action only because of a feeling in my gut that it is ethically wrong to be using energy that risks the future of our children, our nation, and a livable planet. How, we must ask, if Princeton is to be an example to the rest of the world, do we plant that feeling of ethical revulsion deep within more than a conscientious few of its residents?

One heartening development over the past year or two has been the growing gut-level rejection of discrimination, sexual harassment, and most recently gun violence. These issues have gone from the level of intellectual and political objection to a cathartic, visceral imperative that such behavior must be purged from society.

The Academy Awards this week was emblematic in its conscious shift towards inclusion and respect. And yet, predictably interspersed throughout that program and many others are car commercials that not only tolerate but glorify our collective chemical abuse of nature.

Our senses, of course, will not help us to reject the daily practice of pouring more and more CO2 into the atmosphere from the underground fuels we burn. Invisible, odorless, it all seems harmless enough. But if we were doing to our closely regulated bodies what we are doing indiscriminately to the earth--raising its temperature, acidifying the waters that sustain its life--we would literally feel in our guts the revulsion necessary to drive change in behavior.

It will be interesting on Wednesday to see the numbers that Sustainable Princeton has come up with, how business, commercial, residential, school and municipal sectors compare, and to see if the numbers are fine-grained enough to help drive decisions that will lead to substantive, measurable change.

Climate change is deceptive on so many levels. It is human nature to cling to the status quo, and yet it is the status quo that now drives radical change that increasingly threatens the lifestyle we wish to preserve. The more we cling, the less control we will ultimately have, as rising oceans claim our cities and super storms devastate communities. Each of us is left to grapple with the personal predicament arising from a collective failure, as in some lines I read at a recent poetry event at the library:

I don't mean to
I don't mean to
I don't mean to be so mean
To the earth.

How I love so much about it
As I travel all about it,
Spewing all that carbon as I go.
Where will I go,
When all that I love so,
When all that I go to,
Is gone?

Pessimists will say that it's already too late, that too much change is already baked into the system. But that is just one more in a long line of convenient excuses for inaction. Ending abusive behavior helps everyone. It not only makes life better for the abused, but also makes the former abuser a better person. Reducing the incredible disrespect for nature embedded in our economy and our culture will free us from an existential predicament we face as individuals every day, and make us better people.

A version of this piece was first published by PlanetPrinceton.com.

Roadside Snow Reveals the Two Worlds We Navigate

There is an important distinction that is often not made, between the impact of people and the impact of the machines people use. Machines are useful, even lovable, and yet the ones with exhaust pipes are, for all their fine attributes, contributing to a chemical assault on nature. That assault may be unintentional, undramatic, and mostly invisible, yet it is relentless and permanent in effect. Some of us participate reluctantly, others obliviously.

This photo is one of the ways to visualize the difference between People World and the Machine World we participate in. Pedestrians and bicyclists (it's legal to bicycle, respectfully, on most sidewalks in Princeton) leave no trace, while the snow is symbolic of the mess cars and trucks make of the world. That dirt that can be seen will seep into the ground or be washed away as a plug of pollution in local streams during the next rain, but is also symbolic of the larger, permanent damage: the CO2 rising from the exhaust pipes up into the air.

Once that distinction is clearly drawn in the mind as well as the snow, then one can begin to gain freedom from the sorts of machines creating slow havoc, and use one's own resourcefulness and partner with nature rather than the flawed machines. The aim is not self-denial but the pleasure of freeing oneself in more and more ways from the ethically challenged machines we feel dependent upon.

Recycling Receptacle in a Princeton Park--Simple But Effective

One of life's persistent questions, in Princeton or anywhere else, has been how to improve recycling in public spaces. I used to write critiques of recycling arrangements wherever encountered, whether here, in airports, or in travels around the world. One of the posts, Ten Tips for Improving Recycling in Your Workplace, speaks to the importance of pairing trash and recycling containers, and making sure they contrast visually.

This very simple retrofit, initiated by the Princeton Borough parks department probably ten years ago, is a good example of how easy and inexpensive it can be to add a recycling container to an existing trash can. The bucket used to have a recycling sign on it, contrasts visually, and is simply hung on the trash receptacle to provide park users with a clear choice. Though it may not be the most attractive setup, this combo has survived years of use, and works much better than sleek, high-priced combo containers that often put appearance ahead of functionality, confusing users by giving very little visual contrast between the recycling and trash receptacles.

Of course, the high degree of separation of trash and recyclables that this simple retrofit achieves is only one step in getting the bottles, cans, etc. actually recycled. The next step is for the park custodial crew to actually keep the recyclables separate from the trash when they empty the containers. As the Ten Tips post explains, anyone wishing to determine whether recycling is actually happening at their workplace, school, parks or elsewhere, needs to track each step along the way to the recycling facility.

An empty bottle, then, is a bit like a salmon swimming upstream, having to negotiate many obstacles along the way, any one of which could prevent it from reaching that place where new bottles can be born. Thanks to this simple retrofit in one of Princeton's parks, a lot of bottles and other recyclables have made it past one of the major obstacles along that path to recycling.

SOLAR JAM 2018 - A Solar Car Race

This from Liz Cutler, Sustainability Coordinator for Princeton Day School. Please pass along to those who might be interested.

OASIS (Organizing Action on Sustainability In Schools) invites students grades 3-8 to participate in SOLARJAM 2018, a solar car race, May 19.

Students can come as a school group or register on their own.

The Top Three Finishing cars in Upper Division (grades 6-8)
are invited to race in the TransOptions Junior Solar
Sprints’ Inter-County Regional Race in Florham Park on Monday, May 21st.'

For information, registration contact: theandrewlloyd@gmail.com