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Community Corner

At Solar Fest: Sustainability Projects On Wheels

The Urban Divers' Solar Fest featured a wide array of grassroots green enterprises.

On Saturday in Red Hook, the environmental education non-profit Urban Divers presented Solar Fest, an adventure into the world of sustainability and environmentalism.

The goal of Solar Fest, said Divers executive director Ludger Balan, is to promote a “movement towards sustainable communities and a sustainable environment.”

He meant the “movement” part literally. This year's fest focused on mobile sustainability projects.

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Anchoring Solar Fest was the Urban Divers’ EnviroMedia Mobile, a 48-foot trailer housing “the amazing traveling Nature and Maritime Museum.” The museum tells the story of New York harbor, Balan said, through exhibits on “living nature where we are” and “historic heroes of our estuary.”

Attractions inside the Mobile include: a full-sized bark canoe like those the Lenape once sailed in New York harbor, a taxidermied cormorant Balan rescued from a street tree on Bergen Street but wasn’t able to rehabilitate and samples of tile and clean top soil made of toxic sediment drawn from Newtown Creek.

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These products are “examples of solutions” that could be applied to the Gowanus Canal, Balan said – an alternative to dredging up contaminated material from the canal’s bottom and trucking it, NIMBY-style, to a landfill.

Parked near the EnviroMedia Mobile was Compass Green, an 18-foot box truck turned mobile greenhouse. Growing inside were dozens of varieties of food plants, including lemongrass, cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, basil and broccoli.

“We knew we needed to make inroads into getting sustainability to new audiences, into schools," said Compass Green co-founder Justin Cutter. We "teach practical steps for more sustainable living, especially growing our food.”

(Compass Green will be in Brooklyn through the second week in July. Get in touch if you’d like the farm-on-wheels to visit your school, farmers market, event, or festival before it takes off on tour again.)

Rounding out the “Going Mobile” theme of the Fest was a mockup of Marco Castro’s Bus Roots project, which aims to install green roofs on NYC’s 4,500 buses. He’s started with a small demonstration garden on the roof of the BioBus, a traveling science lab and classroom. Castro was inspired by a desire to make green roofs more visible and “to make rain a more likable thing,” by increasing the amount of flora available to slurp it up. 

Representing the “solar” in Solar Fest was Sea Bright Solar consultant Daniel Willis. For brownstones, Willis said, “the potential [solar panel] system size is pretty small,” thanks to new NYC fire regulations requiring 6-foot-wide access pathways atop short buildings with flat roofs.

Solar installations on big warehouses in Red Hook and Gowanus, on the other hand, are “a no-brainer.” Payback periods for residential projects range from 7 to 10 years, while commercial owners can recoup their investment in as little as 4 years.

Helen Ho of IOBY (In Our Back Yards) handed out wildflower seedballs while promoting local investment in neighborhood environmental projects. Most IOBY projects “are funded by donors who live within two miles,” Ho said. Two Gowanus-based projects currently seeking funding are “DontFlushMe” (aimed at mitigating Combined Sewer Overflows) and “2nd Avenue Community – A Small Green Patch” (aimed at establishing a garden in a vacant lot at 2nd Avenue and 9th Street). 

Horticulturist and plant therapist Sebert Harper guided festival-goers through the process of transplanting a marigold. According to Harper, hands-on activities like this one engage the senses, enhance dexterity, help people “learn about the planet” and produce “a calming effect.”

“It makes you feel good!” he said.

Vanissa Chan of the Alliance of Conscious Documentarians (ACD) – an organization working to bring “the people’s perspective” to news coverage – urged locals to attend the annual Day of Remembrance for Nicholas Naquan Heyward, Jr., a teenager shot by police in the Gowanus Houses in September 1994.

Red-Hook-based bluegrass-reggae band City Billies provided live entertainment.

“We love this event and we support everything it’s about,” said guitarist and songwriter Mark Anselm.

Sophia Suarez, an Urban Divers volunteer with a degree in wildlife conservation, said she was "in awe" of the EnviroMedia Mobile.

“It’s all about things that are actually here in New York City," she said. "Kids don’t realize the city has so much wildlife, and such a rich history of wildlife.”

Speaking of wildlife – stay tuned for Urban Divers’ Pirates Festival, on Saturday, July 30, also at Ikea Erie Basin Park. Yes, there will be pirates!

But perhaps Jay Graham, gazing out over the green meadow at the harbor, said it best.

“The setting’s terrific!”

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