​My sister is a teacher, so my messages are filled with the latest last newest update on her school’s ever-changing plan to reopen in a few weeks, or not, or sort of, or maybe not. It’s in flux, it’s maddening, and it’s very high stakes. I bet your school is the same. 

Flexibility helps, and outdoor spaces could give your school just that, since   coronavirus experts agree that outside is safer. If you’re against restarting in-person instruction, maybe the most vital in-person activities could be done outside. If you’re in favor of in-person instruction, but want lots of safeguards, moving some activities outside can help with that. If you’re one of the many people in the middle of this debate, meeting in person but outside is kind of an in-the-middle solution. 

I spent years designing outdoor spaces for schools and teaching others how to design them. It’s not just playgrounds and ball fields. 

Think about: 

Small meeting spaces
If everything else is virtual, but you just have to have a certain conversation or lesson or demonstration in person, this is place to do it. You don’t need much: a couple chairs, maybe a small table, but for maximum sanitation, people could provide their own folding chairs (and sanitize the table before and after). A chalkboard or whiteboard would be helpful, and fine outside as long as temperatures are above freezing. Position this space somewhere as free of distraction as possible, perhaps facing a wall of the building or an area of trees, not the parking lot or a road with traffic, with shade and protection from wind. A small elementary school might want three or four of these spaces, distant from each other as well, maybe marked with large colorful signs to make it easy to determine which one you’re headed for.

Teacher/staff lounge
Think of your deck or your favorite restaurant patio - that’s an outdoor lounge area. At a school it’s vital that this area be screened off so that kids and parents aren’t constantly wandering in, and you need some audio privacy - not next to the playground or the main entrance from the parking lot. All outdoor lounge spaces need shade and protection from harsh winds. Since hand sanitation is the name of the game right now, a sink would be ideal to include, but if water isn’t available nearby, at least a big jug of hand sanitizer needs to be included. 

Outdoor classroom 
A lot of schools have one of these already, but they were more popular years ago than now, so it’s probably older and maybe not used much. This could be the time to change that. Look for a semi-circle of simple benches somewhere, and be advised that if those benches are wooden and old, they may be tough to adequately sanitize between uses. Also be advised that putting a tent without walls over the outdoor classroom could make it a lot more useful. 

Small-scale gyms 
A spot to run around with a couple other kids or siblings could be really valuable, especially at schools where many families don’t have yards of their own. Playground equipment is problematic as shared surfaces that lots of little hands touch, so you need somewhere else. Maybe shared equipment is out, but you can do a lot with marking paint on the ground.  A bench here for adult supervision is a nice touch. 

Many paths to entry
Schools usually funnel all foot traffic to certain entrances, kids here, teachers there, visitors here. Social distancing demands that we do the opposite, and disperse that traffic as much as possible. Schools are required to have a lot of fire exits, so there’s plenty of doors, but think about how people get to those doors, especially from parking lots, local streets, and bus stops. You need lots of signs, maybe color-coded ones, maybe even temporarily repainting the doors to match that color-coding or painting lines on the ground like hospitals do. The trick is to make these many new paths to doors work with these other new outdoor spaces, so that visitors aren’t walking through the small meeting spaces and so on. You’ll likely need a master plan, a map of the school grounds with everything drawn on it. 

But it snows here!
Yes, many places in this country have at least a few months of the year where it’s too cold or too wet or both to be outside. But it’s less than you think. All the techniques used to make your favorite restaurant patio comfortable on chilly nights work for outdoor school spaces, too, like portable heaters and wind barriers. Most schools have at least some masonry on their facades, which holds heat from the sun, so any spaces next to a west- or south-facing wall will stay somewhat warmer. It should also be said that it’s well worth putting on a sweater and hat to bring COVID cases and deaths down. 

And if you can’t get enough of all of this, my final statement to you is:  forest kindergartens 

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​At this point, there’s more or less consensus that if you have to be around other people during this pandemic, the best place to be is outside. Ergo countless ad hoc outdoor spaces for dining, working, and just hanging out. You know who’s really great at creating outdoor spaces that aren’t ad hoc, ones that actually work well? You, the landscape architect. This is your moment.

Before the list, a note: a full-scale professionally designed outdoor space is a major endeavor, taking time, plenty of money, and usually licensed contractors. It’s a lot for a business to take on right now, and of course, we need everything outside right now, not in 6 months or next year. Enter the ad hoc part.

But consider: anyone can carry a folding chair outside. Someone with skill can place that folding chair where it works the best, looks the best, and is the most comfortable. That someone is you. It’s a great moment for minimalist projects using that skill with off-the-rack furnishings, repurposing what’s already at hand, and making the most of what’s already on site. 


Five potential projects from the pandemic

1) Outdoor gyms and workout spaces 
In my town, people are using the area around the high school track for burpees, strength training, agility courses - all the stuff they used to do at the gym. I’ve also seen people doing yoga on mats spread on the gravel parking lot of a local park. Clearly there’s an unfilled need.
 
2) Outdoor meeting spaces, at offices and other businesses
A conference room outside needs what a conference room inside needs, plus shade, shelter from wind, and hopefully at least a little privacy. Bonus points for any kind of calming vegetation. 

3) Outdoor dining, obviously. 
You knew this one, but realize that so much of this is done terribly, even before the pandemic. It needs to be comfortable for the diners and the servers, and right now that means giving waitstaff plenty of space. As customers tiptoe back into eating out, outdoor dining needs to not just be safe, but *look* safe, as well as inviting. Sound challenging? That’s why you hire a pro to design it.

4) Outdoor hair salons/barbershops
The nation is crying out for a haircut, and the safest way to do that is outside. We can do better than a folding chair on the sidewalk next to the parking lot, can’t we?

5) Outdoor school spaces
A big category that’s super-timely, as debate roils about what’s going to happen come fall (fast approaching,  regardless of what the seasons say). We’re familiar with outdoor classrooms, but schools are composed of many different spaces serving different functions: cafeterias, play areas, bus loading, drop off/pick up, staff lounges, gyms, auditoriums, and those classroom spaces. Having at least a few spaces outside could provide vital flexibility for schools navigating the first fall of the pandemic.

​Indianapolis has a Confederate monument? Has anyone told Indy they’re in the north? 

The story gets weirder when you look into it, and ultimately worse. Yes, Indiana was on the side of the Union during the Civil War, despite snark about it being the northernmost southern state today. It was so Union that there was a prison camp in Indianapolis, where a number of Confederate soldiers died. Hence a monument to those dead Confederates, in a cemetery, appropriately enough. But wait: that monument moves out of the cemetery and into a prominent public park in the 1920s, when - here it comes - the Klan more or less ran Indiana. The official reason for moving the monument to the park was to make it more visible to the public. Seems safe to say the real reason was to emphasize the Klan’s power, especially to African-Americans and their other targets. What’s really damning in my view is the century or so that the monument remained in that park. Meanwhile the remains of the dead Confederates were moved to Crown Hill, the city’s most prominent cemetery where all the historic stuff seems to be, and a second marker went up there, making the original monument redundant as well as Klan-tainted.

Monuments speak, often saying things other than what they literally say.

I used to spend a lot of time road biking past historic markers in upstate New York. At the (slow) speed I move, there’s plenty of time to digest what the marker says, and what it leaves out. Or who it leaves out. Like, say, the bronze roadside plaques marking the oldest of old farms on rural roads, established in 17-whatever by some colonial guy - let’s call him Josiah Smith - and celebrated for remaining in the family’s hands to this day, more or less as an operating farm. A couple centuries in farming is an accomplishment, but it’s an accomplishment largely done by people who weren’t Josiah.  When Josiah broke ground on the edge of civilization back when, he was doing the same thing that all his neighbors, assuming there were some, were doing. The farm didn’t become plaque-worthy for a century or two, time when that farm continued to run because of descendants, hired hands (enslaved hands, other places), generations of women… All of whom hide behind that plaque. Nameless.

Last night I learned about the struggle to memorialize the 1887 massacre of black sugarcane workers in Thibodaux, Louisiana, from the current issue of Oxford American. The story mentions historic buildings and plaques around town, and I imagine there’s a few mentions of Confederates among those, but the town scarcely remembers the massacre, even forgetting the mass grave under the American Legion post. (!) 

Compared to a mass grave, what’s a few farm women? What’s history, and what isn’t, is malleable, easy to erase or revise. Set it in stone in a obelisk in the town square, and your version becomes the only version, instantly respectable, still silent about so many things that mattered. 

Also posted on Medium.

From the fire hose of news about the massive wave of protests following the death of George Floyd comes this: more statues and monuments are coming down. Confederate soldiers, even Lee, but also other notable men (so far, all men) from our racist past. Richmond, Birmingham, and Alexandria (VA) join this list, but given the renewed focus on these monuments and the intensity of the protests, other cities are likely to join the club soon. Stay tuned. While you do, revisit these 2017 thoughts about losing statues and what empty pedestals say.

Weeks-long delays, everything out of stock, bizarre substitutions - supermarket deliveries are not meeting this moment. Time to plant a garden. But growing your own takes time: 85 days for a tomato from seed, 66 days for green beans, 60 days for zucchini. Who has that kind of time? 

You need a Fast Garden. That’s: 

Fast crops: The fastest crops are those that just have to produce leaves. Radishes, mustard greens, several of the Asian greens like mizuna, and some salad greens like arugula are the real sprinters. Even more speedy are sprouts and microgreens, which you eat long before they are mature. 

Speedy varieties: You want the fastest of the fast crops, look at days to harvest on packets or descriptions. I’ve got arugula that’s 40 days to harvest and arugula that’s 20 days to harvest. That’s salad in half the time.

No limits: Don’t check your plants’ growth, meaning make sure they have enough of everything they need to grow as fast as possible. Water, light, soil nutrients (aka fertilizer). Don’t forget heat: seeds sprout faster in warm spots (like the top of the fridge) and plants grow faster in the greenhouse-like shelter of a milk jug cloche or other mini-greenhouse-like shelter. Containers get things going earlier in the season because the soil in them warms up much faster than the soil in the ground does. You can also position containers for maximum sun or for warm spots, like next to a south or west facing wall.
But: not too much water - don’t drown those plants! Overwatering and underwatering both kill plants. The soil surface should feel like a wrung-out sponge, more or less all the time. Very important aid in this: any containers need drainage holes. 

Stay inside: Unlike you, your plants are happy to shelter at home, as long as there’s enough light. Your sunniest windowsill might work, if artificial lights aren’t an option. Starting plants indoors, then moving them outdoors as soon as it’s warm enough is a classic fast garden technique. 

Materials Right Now: Since you’re self-isolating at home, a big garden shopping trip  is not on the agenda. The bare essentials you need are soil, containers, and seeds, and they all just need to be good enough for the pandemic moment. Whatever soil you have in your yard is probably fine. Plants that will only be inside for six weeks or so don’t need specialty grow lights - regular fluorescent or LED fixtures are fine for a while. Temporary containers don’t have to be ideal. Even household plastics from the recycling bin will work, as long as you add a hole or two for drainage. 

“But wait,” you say, “Something-something plastics something toxins!” My take on this: if you’re not living on what you grow in that plastic as your main food source for an extended time, don’t worry about it. Whatever might come from that plastic in that short time in the limited quantity that you eat will be very small, as long as it’s food-grade plastic to start with. Also worth considering is the enormous amount of plastic used in the production of the supermarket produce you usually eat, especially if it’s organic, and the various pesticides and herbicides used on it, especially if it’s not.

Some pithy statement about gardening as an intrinsically hopeful and forward-looking activity would be a great way to wrap this up, but who has time for philosophy? There’s a fast garden to plant. 

Also on Medium.

Stop. Listen. Wherever you are right now, can you hear traffic noise? 

While we wait for science to save us from COVID-19, I’m killing some time walking (alone) on a quiet street. All the streets are quiet now, especially in the 38 states (and rising) like this one with “stay at home” orders in place.

COVID-19 has quieted highways across the country, if not the world - temporarily. Fewer cars and more bikes and pedestrians are a sudden glimpse of a future predicted to arrive as soon as 2022, with twice the number of bike commuters in major cities worldwide, and therefore fewer cars on the road. 

Like everything else disrupted by the virus, traffic will be back, at some point. The noise of internal combustion engines is part of daily life, affecting you more than you realize. Today’s silent highways are another preview of a world coming soon, when quiet e-vehicles take over. In my lifetime, silence will fall on the interstates and other major roads, and it will affect all of us.

People don’t like to be next to multi-lane highways, a statement so obvious it’s embarrassing to say out loud. Sometimes the obvious is easy to overlook, though, in its power to shape the world around us. It's too obvious to consider so it doesn’t get considered at all. 

With highways, it’s the noise and the pollution and the trash and the way these massive transportation edifices make it difficult for those immediately adjacent to them to get anywhere, ironically. Don’t underestimate the noise. The US Department of Transportation says, “levels of highway traffic noise typically range from 70 to 80 dB(A) at a distance of 15 meters (50 feet) from the highway. These levels affect a majority of people, interrupting concentration, increasing heart rates, or limiting the ability to carry on a conversation.” Researchers have found links between noise and cardiovascular disease and Type II diabetes, as well as sleep disturbance and depression.

Our aversion to traffic noise and other highway impacts shapes land use and property values around busy roads. We’ve grown used to this, so we see it as natural and neutral, as though it’s always been that way and couldn’t be any other way. Neither of those things are true.

In cities, freeways were often sited as a deliberate strategy to “clear” neighborhoods seen as undesirable by those in the positions of power that mattered. After obliterating those often-Black, sometimes-other-marginalized-group neighborhoods, the highways made it easy for white residents with means to move to the suburbs, further hollowing out the city. There’s a sinister feedback loop that starts here, where the highway is built through the poor/black neighborhood because racism/NIMBYism/inability to resist, and then effects of the highway makes what remains of that same neighborhood have to struggle much harder. Just the presence of a limited access highway next door to a home will depress its property value. That doesn’t count the deleterious effects of disinvestment in neighboring properties as their values decline and as people with options are driven away by the noise and inconvenience. The worse it is, the worse it gets. 

All of this is sad but familiar, a story repeated through cities across the country. A new and different story is being written in Boston and Seattle, among others, where  freeways have been removed from the cityscape, buried or rerouted. In their place are open space and/or new lower-speed smaller surface roads. This realigns land use, property values, and in time, the perceived status of the whole neighborhood. That spiral reverses and suddenly the old neighborhood is a much more desirable place to live. 

We can’t get rid of all the interstates (can we?). Traffic has to go somewhere, plus interstates arguably serve national defense preparedness. But consider: We walk these pandemic-quieted roads in the twilight of the internal combustion engine, with climate change bearing down on us. Lot of plans around for climate action, with a commonality of the strategy of electrifying transportation, because we know how to generate electricity with renewable resources and because transportation and electricity generation are two of the big dogs in US GHG emissions. Solve those, and you’ve solved a lot of our climate issue. And so, EVs are on their way, probably with more mass transit and more getting around under our own power and more micro-mobility. All these modes have in common that they are so much quieter than the traffic roaring by on I-95, and so much cleaner. 

When the big silence falls on the highways near you, how will it change where you live? How will your life be better?

Will you remember the quiet roads of these pandemic days?






 

I’m an old, old hand at working from home. Been doing it at least part-time for almost 20 years. I know this will shock everyone who’s struggling to adjust, but at this point, I much prefer working at home to having an office anywhere.

Useful things I’ve learned:

Get real about your daily cycle. The constant distractions of a workplace make it easy to hide your ups and downs of focus and energy, but in your new workplace of one, there’s no hiding. I do the good creative work in early afternoon, the necessary but unfulfilling in the morning, and brainless stuff after four. It won’t work to browbeat yourself - just find your cycle and work with it.

Your work station can’t suck. Make it as comfortable and pleasant as you can, and not somewhere that requires you to put everything away at night (like the kitchen table). It doesn’t have to be anything like what you have at work, though - use the couch, the deck, move from place to place, as long as…

Don’t ignore pain. Ergonomics matter, and laptops keep physical therapists in business. Even just propping your laptop up on a box and plugging an external keyboard into it can make a huge difference. Easy to let this fall apart at home, especially when you expect it to be short term, but it matters, especially because…

Don’t work round the clock. Keeping a schedule lets you relax into routine without having to create every day’s schedule anew. That schedule includes breaks. You move around a lot less at home, because the bathroom, coffee, etc.  are all closer. Make up for it with a walk around the block or the yard or better yet…

Customize your day. Want to try eating lunch as your biggest meal or exercising  during your midafternoon slump? This is your chance to give it a try, as long as you’ve got the flexibility. I often use exercise as an opportunity to let my mind work on an idea or problem, which means it’s most useful in the middle of the day, not before or after work.

Silence is precious, unless you want noise. Most places I’ve lived while working at home had traffic and neighbor noise around during the day. I need silence to do heavy-duty analytical thinking, but generally I work to music and/or the background hum of laundry or the dishwasher, which provide a nice feeling of busyness. Dull tedious tasks, like updating my website, are sometimes best done in front of the TV, just not the currently-terrifying cable news.    

What no one admits: If everything goes your way, an hour working at home is much better than an hour at the office (with a huge caveat to those with kids and/or pets demanding constant attention). Your mileage may vary here, but for me it’s at least 2 to one, especially for focus-intensive tasks like writing. 

Also posted on Medium

Also posted on Medium.

​Plant a tree, save humanity. Or rather, plant untold millions of trees and give humanity a fighting chance against climate change. That’s the bottom line of a lot of talk lately about a high-profile Science study, which broke the news that massive global reforestation could solve climate change. Many outlets spread the news, providing a glimmer of hope in the ceaseless bad news about climate. 

Despite all the press, the notion of reforestation to fight climate change isn’t particularly ground-breaking. E.O. Wilson had some global-scale thoughts about this “rewilding" some time ago. Data for Progress’s Green New Deal calls for reforesting forty million acres of the US in the next fifteen years. At the city level, making a warmer world more livable involves trees, to reduce heat island and ground-level ozone, make non-car transportation more appealing, and improve resilience to massive rain events. Cities like Los Angeles have new reforestation efforts  - 90,000 trees in two years! - and newly-created positions to oversee these efforts. Lots of people have this “more trees for climate action” idea because it’s a good idea: reforestation is not only effective, but nearly foolproof. An urban tree might die, but it can’t really backfire otherwise, and those trees that live provide a whole host of additional benefits beyond climate. Compared to any kind of new technological solution, planting trees is tried and true, and relatively cheap per tree. 

What does this look like, though?

​What about the people among all those trees? 

A future with a lot more trees could look a bit like the present in in the re-forest that already covers Connecticut, and to some extent, the rest of southern New England, as I mentioned in this previous post. As a refresher, European settlement and its attendant clear-cutting began in the 1630s in Connecticut. By 1820, only about 25% of Connecticut was still forested, but due to the opening of much more fertile farmland further west, Connecticut’s farm fields and pastures began to revert to forest starting around 1870. This tiny state is now around 60% forested. Yet with 3.6 million people, it’s certainly not wilderness - Connecticut is one of the most densely populated states. Lots of people, but also lots of trees. If you want to know about living alongside trees, this is the place to learn. 

This brings us to some math helpfully provided by the state of Vermont. They reckon an average acre of forest stores 107 metric tonnes of carbon (MtC). That’s pure carbon, not carbon dioxide, and not emissions like your car creates. By that more real-world measure, an average forested acre stores 393 MtCO2e, which is the annual emissions from 83 cars. 

One acre = 83 cars isn’t bad, but it’s also really simplistic. A forest isn’t just a forest - the kind of trees growing in the forest matters, as well as how old they are, how large they are, and most particularly, what’s in the soil around them. Generally, the best trees for storing carbon are those with heavy, dense wood, like oaks, for example. Just as logically, the larger the tree, the more carbon it stores, giving older, larger trunk-diameter (aka caliper) trees the edge as well as those with a larger ultimate size. In measures of annual carbon storage, the growth rate of trees matters, which is a little contradictory, since softer-wooded trees often grow more quickly. Confused yet?

Consider this, too: the management of the forest matters quite a bit, too, maybe as much as what’s growing there, because carbon remains stored in fallen leaves and branches, too. Organic matter in the soil may be the largest carbon sink in our hypothetical acre of forest, but to get that organic matter, the branches, leaves, and other tree detritus must be allowed to accumulate and decay naturally, not raked or removed. Fallen trees contribute to this total, too. 

The trees matter. The soil matters. What’s under the trees matters. The management (or lack of it) of the forest matters. And all these things matter tremendously, because climate change is a real, present, existential threat to humanity. 

As we dig into it, the details of our forest acre end up making all the difference in terms of its climate action benefit. There’s plenty of unanswered questions about the forest itself, but those questions multiply when we add people into the mix and start asking about what, if any, benefit we get from the trees in places closer to us - not an acre of forest, but a single red maple in the yard or a lone honey locust along the street. 

Can we fit some of this needed reforestation into places people live?

What’s the best way to do that, for climate and for those of us living in the Re-Forest?

What can we learn from the reforested places, like Connecticut, we already have?