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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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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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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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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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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Our Possible Rochester initiative has taken another major step forward, with the launch of our community-oriented site, PossibleRochester.org. Our business-oriented site, PossibleRochester.com, which focuses on C-PACE (Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy) as a financing mechanism for upgrading commercial properties to clean energy, has been operating since February when the city announced the launch of…
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(Image credit: Veer Mudambi, Rate It Green) We’re pleased to announce the launch of our new initiative to support the introduction of C-PACE (Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy) in the City of Rochester. As part of this, we are seeking to conduct a national demonstration project for what we call Community PACE and, at the…
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At Possible Planet, we’ve been working on Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) for nearly a decade, so we were delighted to find out that the City of Rochester had approved it last year. The program actually launched in February of 2021, with an announcement by Mayor Lovely Warren and the posting of a…
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A Race to Make a Difference It’s important that key local partners—municipal and county economic development officers, business associations, local nonprofits, and community leaders—be aligned and coordinated in communicating the message. One way to do this is the idea of a “Race for PACE.” This could be a virtual or physical event, as well as…
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