While it’s totally possible to write about homegrown culture in the city even when you live over 32 miles from any nearest or dearest form of it, (Scranton and Wilkes-Barre!) I’m not sure how often or urban-centric it will remain.

All of that in mind, if you are organizing or participating a bike rally, a film festival, an urban gardening group, a reading series, or producing anything homegrown in your city, let me know. If you’d like to write about a group or community-driven event instead, get in contact and we’ll see what happens.

-Dakota

Two social networking sites—Hyperlocavore and Shared Earth—have launched in hopes of helping perfect strangers find each other. Whether you’ve got gardening experience, a useable backyard, or even just available elbow grease—both projects aim to assist individuals find other local lonely gardeners in a quest for the perfect summer heirloom tomato, and move towards greater self-reliant sustainability.

As WorldChanging notes of Shared Earth, the network seems like “a free service in the Craigslist mold with a dash of online dating.”

Yet both sites are as practical as they are social. In an interview posted to TreeHugger, Shared Earth creator Adam Dell stated, “I think it scales all the way up to ‘I’m gonna be a farmer,’ and all the way down to ‘I have a fire escape on my building in New York, I’m growing some food and I can use some help.’”

Differences between both networks exist—but not many. Shared Earth connects those who have space to share, and those who want to help develop it. Hyperlocavore attempts to expand this service into a larger hub—of informational videos, gardening stories and blogs, book recommendations and shared Twitter updates.

You might not find a date, but it seems you can still find love—in the organic produce of a portion of someone else’s yard.

Photo Credit: Josie B. / Creative Commons

Recent spurts of warm air and spring rain here in Chicago are blooming lilac bushes and bulbs and making the coming summer season of farmer’s markets and backyard vegetable gardens more attractive than ever.

But the soil beneath the grass of your walk-up might not only be less than ideal, it could be toxic. Metropolitan areas and residential neighborhoods not far from heavily-polluted superfund sites (such as the Gowanus Canal of Brooklyn) frequently hold onto large swaths of soil containing lead and other heavy metals, pesticides or even petroleum hydrocarbons and solvents.

A soil kit from your local garden center can help you determine whether the PPM (parts per million) of lead and other toxic chemicals is too high to safely grow edible produce out of, or in some cases—isn’t even safe enough to stick your hands into. Those interested in phytoremediation—or a process that aims to use plants to return polluted soil environments to their original, uncontaminated state—can plant and remove mustard greens, sunflowers, and collards to accumulate toxins in the soil.

According to The Food Project, this alone could take over 7-10 years to make a significant impact on soil. It’s still a step towards leaving the toxic past that remains in your backyard behind—and an alternative to the high expense of other professional remediation methods.

Photo Credit: Moriza / Creative Commons

We love ugly.

The New York Times recently highlighted artful incinerators turning garbage to green energy (such as the incinerator above), a varied and either newly constructed or retrofitted lot that stand in stark contrast to ugly non-renewal-based plants across America.

For Denmark and other eco-minded countries building or retrofitting these plants to burn trash as alternative to higher levels of fuel consumption, aesthetic building design has weighed heavily into the process, and designs range from one made almost entirely out of glass, to another in Vienna that is a kaleidoscope art piece of black and grey boxes, disco ball-shininess and curved ceilings.

Yet American cities won’t catch a glimpse of similar designs anytime soon. According to the article, Matt Hale—director of the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery of the EPA—has claimed opposition due to “relative abundance of cheap landfills in a large country, opposition from state officials who feared the plants could undercut recycling programs and a “negative public perception.”

Not only are we lazy, we also can’t construct anything that doesn’t resemble a nuclear monstrosity—such as Michigan City’s notorious generating station—because America really just loves ugly?

Criticism of many other forms of alternative energy production is justified —such as the noise pollution that wind turbines introduce to formerly quiet communities. But it seems most ridiculous to never admit that the effort of a country like Denmark—that recycles over 46% of trash production—is truly quite admirable.

Photo Credit: Dugspr / Creative Commons

Beyond your mother’s love for her garden or your best friend’s righteous indignation about the environment, Alex Steffen keeps cultivating a whole lot of love for the future of urban sustainability.

His drive to keep compassion in tandem with environmental conversation and innovation runs far as co-founder and executive editor of Seattle-based WorldChanging—a non-profit recently ranked as the second-largest sustainability website in the world.

In a new interview for The Sun he stated, “Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience.”

Stories covered by WorldChanging fall onto very different trajectories—such as one detailing the efforts of a panel of over 1,000 young people across the world to negotiate climate policy using Google Wave. Another only needs to be mentioned by name, “How Condoms Could Save The Forests,” to illustrate how the online magazine is turning a slant towards constructive hope into environmental journalism.

How ’bout that? Love and technology it seems, can actually save the world.

Photo Credit: Isolano / Creative Commons

Moving towards a period of the season during which snow melts to reveal groundcover looking a lot more moist and dead than full of life, it would appear that the pink, mustard and otherwise rainbow-colored knits that crawl up the length of multiple permanent fixtures in the city would become a welcome development—or at least much more so than the slush and brown grass that does, in fact, legally reside on the public streets of West Cape May.

Residents have dubbed the artist the ‘Midnight Knitter,’ and “The mayor and many residents admit they’re delighted by the woolly rainbow of colours that has popped up,” states Metro.co.uk.

So what’s the problem?

Not only are police carefully looking for clues to the identity, or identities of those that identify with the group’s official website (SaltyKnits.com), but many pieces of flare have also been removed from the group’s main tagging grounds in Wilbraham Park; an act apparently committed by citizens who do not believe in rogue acts of public property improvement, but do believe in confiscating art.

Some of the advice seems relatively sound, barring Hyde’s scientific, yet utterly unappetizing tip that “Lard is the highest calorie per cent food you can buy.”

Yet, as a gluten-free, vegetarian art student with an enormous appetite and a non-enormous amount of money to spend, the article seems to avoid one of the easiest, time-strapped and time-honored solutions accessible to pretty much everyone, regardless of your preference in food or particular allergies—the crock pot.

Mild Moroccan lentil stews to spicy dahls, chili and all the other soups and long-simmering messes that you can think of can be cooking on the cheap while you’re not even in the apartment.

Food can be cooked in small or exceptionally large quantities, stacked into neat tupperware rows in your refrigerator or freezer, and reheated when you please.

Purveyors of fine vegetable stock can also easily create their omega-rich own by boiling down generally discarded kitchen scraps—tops and bottoms of carrots and celery, sweet potatoes, and other soup-friendly stuff from the garden—and letting the vegetable-rich water that remains soak flax seeds until ready to use.

I don’t get by on 33 cents a meal. But if you place your efforts on cooking vegetarian meals in a crock pot and potentially split a membership to a local CSA or organic distribution group with a friend or a neighbor, it’s definitely cheap and entirely healthy.

In a city full of possibility, the options a girl—or boy—has to choose from when deciding to roll out of bed in the early hours of the morning and skip across town for a spot between strangers on a yoga mat are never slim.

But have you ever done it in the dark?

Beyond its recent one-offs, such as a donation-only class held in January at the Gold Coast’s Exhale Spa (to benefit American Red Cross relief work in Haiti), a style known as candlelight yoga is flickering throughout the city as yogis and yoginis find relaxation in dimly lit classes at both the Nature Yoga Sanctuary in Ukrainian Village and at all three Moksha Yoga locations; in River West, Lake View, and Logan Square.

Nature Yoga Sanctuary 2021 West Division St
Sunday, 7:00-9:00 PM
with Rich Logan

Every 3rd Thursday of the month, 8:00-9:15pm
with Erica Rumpel, live music by Mark

Moksha Yoga Riverwest 700 N Carpenter St
Thursday, 7:45 – 9:00 PM
with Nina Gaglio

Moksha Yoga Lakeview 3334 N Clark St
Thursday, 7:45 – 9:00 PM
with Becky Raines, live music by DhakFu

Moksha Yoga Logan Square 2522 W Armitage Ave
Sunday, 6:30 — 8:00 PM
with Kerri Noto

—Ian Jack (former editor of Granta), for The Guardian.

The Oatmeal, a veritable website for well-illustrated humor and occasional literary commentary (see The Oatmeal’s explanation of Twilight here), now coaxes us all to use the little mark a little more with an essential guide to semicolon punctuation.

If, after reading the strip, we really were to type the phrase “The ice cream truck man drove by my house today. He had big hairy knuckles,” we could pause for a moment before remembering The Oatmeal’s wisdom, shout “EUREKA!” then backspace and insert a semicolon.

Vonnegut stated that using a semicolon only proves you went to college. But at least we could have that. I have gone to college, Vonnegut, and I am graduating soon.

For more, see The Oatmeal’s illustrated guide to the apostrophe, as well as frequently misspelled words.

via Laughing Squid

Beyond numerous credits that include founding Rose Metal Press and publishing both prose and poetry (like a creative nonfiction novel on nude art modeling), she was also published recently in an issue of Another Chicago Magazine that I carried throughout Europe last summer.

In the eponymous essay of the collection that appears in ACM she writes, “They say that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. I placed an online order for kazoos while Iraq did. Nero was an emperor. I was a Senate Aide.” (ACM 48, “American Values”)

I laughed and felt glad that I was studying contemporary Russian literature abroad in Prague, the heart of all that is elegant, gothic and literary in Eastern Europe.

Somehow American satire seems so much more fulfilling after leaving the country. Yet, Kathleen Rooney’s voice remains exuberating and intelligent anywhere—whatever strip mall, coffee shop or country you read it in.

Women and Children First is located at 5233 North Clark Street, Chicago, IL 60640.