Category: Rochester

Regenerative Community Development Initiatives for the Greater Rochester Region

Image by Vikramjit Kakati from Pixabay

A New Way to Garden this Spring?

At the tail end of winter, it’s tempting to imagine the possibility of a new wave of gardening catching on this spring. Can we imagine streets and communities full of native plants and flowers, sunshine, busy with butterflies and bees? More than almost any other action that individuals can take, gardening has multiple benefits for…
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Restoring Backyard Ecosystems

Can Saving the Planet Start in Our Own Backyard? “We now know that restoring flourishing landscapes is critical not only to preventing further biodiversity loss, but is also critical to reversing global warming and addressing climate change. This project has the possibility of engaging millions of ordinary citizens in useful and meaningful action by providing…
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Using Art to Combat the Urban Heat Island Effect

As noted in SmartCitiesDive, “A Massachusetts group is teaching city leaders how to collaborate with artists on cooling methods and climate awareness.” Cities use art to combat extreme urban heat Read the full story here… For a description of urban heat islands in Rochester, see RochesterFirst.com, “Heat Island Defined: How cities act like giant ovens…
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A New Hope for Nature

In Nature’s Best Hope (2020), Douglas Tallamy takes a major step beyond E.O. Wilson’s call for half the Earth to be set aside for nature. Tallamy, a professor of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, argues that we need a substantial restoration of the natural environment in our own backyards. Only by…
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Restoring & Regenerating the City

Creating regenerative cities primarily means this: To develop comprehensive political, financial, and technical strategies to assure a restorative relationship between cities and the ecosystems from which they draw resources for their sustenance. Towns and cities cannot exist in isolation from nature. —Herbert Girardet, Creating Regenerative Cities (2014) We recently published a post at PossiblePlanet.org that discusses the…
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Bouncing Forward

  The opportunity, as we come out of the pandemic[1], is to reimagine our future and build forward to address the immediate challenges and create a better future. It’s not about “Building Back Better” but about “Building Forward Better.” To the extent that we fail to recognize this, the crises we face—of climate change, biodiversity…
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