The Ferris Files

I live across the street from one of the neighborhood’s grocery stores, a Food Emporium. Every midnight after the place closes, a pile of retired produce and collapsed cardboard boxes four feet tall is left at the curb. Garbage trucks come and take it away, and in the morning delivery trucks arrive with new produce and new boxes.

New York is just too crowded for trash to be hidden the way it is in other American cities. In the suburbs, the rejecta leaves the house in bins once a week; in less dense cities it might end up in a Dumpster; in New York the black Hefty bags wind up on the curb, three days each week and more often at grocery stores. There’s nowhere else to put it.

I haven’t been here for one of the dreaded garbage strikes and so haven’t smelled the garbage pickle to the point of offense (though one hot September day I saw a doorman wince as he sprayed his building’s pile with perfume.) Nonetheless, the connection between waste and the people who produce it is more visible in New York than anywhere I’ve lived.

Pass any apartment building and observe the mountain of trash. Look up at the building. The bigger the building, the larger the mountain. Building, trash mound, building, trash mound, up and down every street and avenue from Battery Park to Inwood Park, across five boroughs. What a load of stuff we throw away.

The chore I most enjoy in my New York apartment is carrying the trash across the hallway to the refuse room. I drop the bag down the trash chute, and instead of walking away, I hold the door open and listen.

The bag bangs and rattles down the chute in a loud and satisfying way. It is a journey of only five floors but seems to take forever, long enough for me to reflect what makes this chute so much better than the trash cans I have known.

With my chute, I don’t have to carry my waste out to the side yard, or haul the bin to the curb each week, or worry about the trash can overflowing. Instead, I simply enjoy the sound of the bag arriving in the basement Dumpster with a soggy, feathery crash. Gone!

The chute works because of invisible elves. Every trash system relies on elves, of course – the Garbage Truck Elves who whisk the garbage cans off the curb, and the Dump Elves that store our nasties someplace we can’t see them, and sometimes Recycling Elves, the most magical of all, who transform empty cans of Campbell’s soup into the chassis of a Ford Focus.

The trash-chute system employs even more elves, including the Dumpster Removal Elf, the Refuse Room Cleaning Elf, and the occasional services of the Clogged Garbage Chute Elf. It’s like Santa’s Workshop around here.

Not to say that trash chutes are always problem-free. There are unspoken rules, rules so memorable when broken that one rarely makes the same mistake twice. Take the Bag Your Trash rule. I discovered it when I shook the contents of my vacuum-cleaner tube down the chute.Who knew there’s an updraft?

Handfuls of dust blew into my face, and suddenly the air of the refuse room was filled with lint. I beat a quick retreat and left one more chore for the Dustpan Elf.

In a few weeks I move out of this apartment building and return to the horizontal world of the trash can. I will miss the trash chute, its dramatic noises and the magical elves.

I will save my pennies for the day when, shopping at Target, I spy my first garbage robot.

My current reading is “Climate Change as a Security Risk,” a sort of threat dossier on a warming world. Amid mountains of dry data, the authors take a few imaginative leaps to picture how the world looks if we start preparing now, and what happens if we don’t.

Scenario: In 2038, a series of strong cyclones strike Bangladesh, permanently spoiling farmland and turning millions of farmers into refugees.

Worst case: Masses move to inland to live hopeless lives in refugee camps, while millions of others flock across the border to India. Hindu-Muslim tensions in India inflame anew, and the militaries of India and Bangladesh clash.

Best case: The world’s most-developed countries pay into a fund to help erect coastal defenses that blunt the worst effects of the storms. India’s and Bangladesh’s governments work together, reducing tensions and developing a strong working relationship.

Scenario: Rising oceans cause Alexandria and other cities of Egypt’s Nile Delta to collapse. At the same time, areas of sub-Saharan Africa suffer permanent drought, spurring a mass migration of refugees.

Worst case: Millions of unemployed, dispossessed young men from North Africa and the Sahel press toward Europe. Europe cracks down and ghettoizes North African migrants; Egypt and Ethiopia go to war over the Nile headwaters.

Best case: The international community helps Egypt and other African nations fend off the spread of deserts through water conservation and irrigation. Nations of the Sahel profit from mining and use the proceeds to support their people; Europe establishes migration quotas that everyone can live with.

Scenario: Rivers dwindle in Peru, the result of shrinking glaciers, and Peru’s hydroelectric power and water supply steadily decline.

Worst Case: The population suffers high electricity bills and blackouts, on one hand, and high water bills and shortages on the other. Corruption and crime are rife. The government buckles under the strain and Peru descends into civil war.

Best Case: The government sees what’s coming and does meticulous planning. With international help, it builds reservoirs, water-conservation systems and desalination plants. The ride is bumpy, but order is maintained and people mostly get what they need.

These scenarios address some of climate change’s worst conundrums: Poor, agricultural countries will most likely be hardest hit by climate change, but have the fewest resources to prepare. This is not a situation the neighbors can ignore: Chaos in one country can easily spill over a border. In other words, each country has a stake in solving the problem, even if is own citizens are unaffected.

Each of best-case results assume that governments of poor nations will plan years and decades ahead and keep in mind the welfare of all citizens. Furthermore, they bank on wealthy countries spending trillions of aid out of enlightened self-interest.

I am not optimistic things will work out so well.

On the other hand, do we have any other choice? Any general, president or congresswoman need only think through the consequences of shrinking glaciers, rising oceans, failing crops to realize no nation can go it alone.

This book impressed upon me is that if we are to survive climate change, we’ll need a level of cooperation an order of magnitude greater than any the world has ever seen.  We either make it through together, or we all go down.

I just finished reading “The Long Summer,” a book by archaeology writer Brian Fagan about how climate change has affected the course of human history.  With my home state of California heading into a serious summer drought, a long view of the weather seemed wise.

Fagan’s “long summer” is the Holocene Period, the almost 12,000 years of relatively warm, stable climate in which human civilization began, and that continues to this day. But even a stable climate has hiccups. It’s those odd events that Fagan digs from the records of prehistory.

Three things struck me most of all. The first is how a sudden event on one side of the planet can change weather patterns far away, sometimes for an awfully long time. Take Lake Agassiz, the biggest body of water I’d never heard of. In 11,500 B.C., this vast body of glacial meltwater spanned much of the center of North America, from Manitoba to South Dakota. At some point Agassiz topped its basin and carved a channel into the St. Lawrence River. Within a few months, the lake basin spilled most of its contents into Hudson Bay. This deluge of freshwater into the Atlantic started a chain reaction that led to a thousand-year drought in Mesopotamia and wrote a death sentence for some of the Fertile Crescent’s first cities.

The second was the unpredictable consequences that even semi-regular events, like an El Nino, can have on civilizations. I was a cub reporter in California during the El Nino event of 1998, writing about hillsides that collapsed due to rain. This seemed catastrophic at the time, but it was chump change compared to the havoc that El Ninos once wreaked in ancient Egypt. As surface temperatures shift in the Pacific Ocean, the monsoon can fail over East Africa, drying up the Nile. Fagan described how between 3,000 and 1,200 B.C., El Ninos caused Egyptian grain crops to fail and empires to crumble, not once but several times.

The third is how similar our similar our situation today is to those of villagers in Mesopotamia or the Nile farmers of Egypt. Even with our digital thermometers, ice-core samples from Greenland and weather satellites, we have no idea how much rain will fall in Iowa next year. Yes, we can make a better guess, but trend reports can’t subdue the spirits of a farmer who gazes at the sky and hopes that next year will be better. We’re hard-wired to look toward a brighter future, whether that optimism is warranted or not.

The battle for New York City’s green future arrived in my mailbox last week. It took the form of a fundraising appeal from MillionTreesNYC, a campaign to plant 100,000 trees every year for a decade. It bore the signature of that eminent environmentalist, Bette Midler.

Which immediately brought questions to mind. Who made the star of “Kiss My Brass” the voice of the city’s greenery? And since when do trees need a publicist?

I grew up in the California suburbs, where the trees grew thick and strong without the application of a single press release. No one needed to explain that the mulberry in the front yard was better than pavement, and this held true everywhere I looked: Trees were beloved, from the stoutest Sierra conifer to the most down-and-out palm in Beverly Hills.

In New York, however, MillionTreesNYC has declared trees as the biggest new sensation since Hannah Montana. Banners on the subway inform riders that trees provide shade, filter stormwater, clean pollution, and are quite nice to look at, too. Are New Yorkers such a bunch of Gollums that they need this spin?

Apparently they do. I did some research and found that if you’re a young tree, you might be better off in a logging camp. A 2004 study in Baltimore discovered that 325,000 of the city’s 2.5 million trees died each year, especially the saplings near big apartment buildings. Who could have guessed that a diet of urine, spilled Pepsi, and the occasional bodycheck by a car bumper isn’t the most nurturing environment?

Now I began to understand the logic behind the Million-Tree March. Flood the streets with a 100,000 saplings. Shake head regretfully as reports arrive of mysterious deaths near neighborhood taverns – somehow right around 2 a.m. – and knife attacks by deranged initial-carving lovers. The next year, send out 100,000 more.

One could draw a comparison between the MillionTreesNYC campaign and the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy: In the role of the slavering orc hordes, eight million New Yorkers; as the hapless, wide-eyed hobbits, a million tender saplings.

This puts Bette Midler in the awkward role of Gandalf, which might best be achieved by transferring that helmet of curls to her chin. We can at least be thankful these trees are deaf.

The battle will last a decade or longer, and the bodycount will be high. The gutters will run with fertilizer. If enough greenhorns are thrown in the trenches, a battalion of gnarled veterans will achieve the thick bark of maturity. The Big Apple might emerge a cooler, shadier Eden, where the maples stand tall and New Yorkers are saved from themselves.

Truly, those million trees are the seed that with the sun’s love, in the spring, becomes the rose – uh, I mean the redbud.

A closeup of Stuart Haygarth's "Spectacle" chandelier, made entirely from used eyeglasses. Photo credit: Jeff J. Mitchell / Getty Images.

Last year New York’s Museum of Arts and Design moved into a gleaming white cube on Columbus Circle,  giving no hint of its former identity as the American Craft Museum. But this popsicle-stick-and-glitter past helped me make sense of the current exhibit called “Second Lives.”

It demonstrates new uses for everyday things, and had me look at the rummage pile anew. (The exhibit continues through April 19. No photos were allowed; to see the best images, see the site here.)

The delight at MAD was in sighting an item that looked like your typical modern-art installation and, upon a closer look, finding it composed of things that might reside in my apartment: a tapestry made from high-end clothing labels, miniature trees cut from paper shopping bags, a chaise lounge soldered from quarters, a portrait assembled from standard black hair combs.

Many of these projects were so attractive and easily reproduced that they could easily be commercialized. Why couldn’t IKEA sell chandeliers made from old eyeglasses?  Or Target sell Buddha statuettes sculpted from phone books?

The exhibit asks, Why dig up new stuff from the ground? The material you need is right here!

As I left I brainstormed what art I could make out of the items that collect in the apartment no matter what I do. Light covers from plastic Food Emporium bags? Light fixtures from 7-Up cans? What could I confect from all my old MetroCards?

In winter the New York streets are a gray asphalt tundra. Then one day in April…Daffodils! They nod at you on the sidewalk, bright as sunlight, gentle as Easter. Surrounding them is a tiny, valiant iron fence.

I saw a woman on 65th Street reach past the fence with one hand – the other held a cellphone to her ear –  and grab two stems with her fingers. A gardener had nurtured those shoots, someone else had trucked them into the city, and yet another person did the planting. The result: yellow florets of gentility amid the concrete and exhaust.

I heard the roots rip from the soil. The woman carried them off to adorn a cubicle or kitchen table. Two freebies for her, two less breaths of fresh air for the rest of us.

Early this morning a congregation of about 150 Jews stood by the United Nations building and did something that seemed almost pagan: They blessed the rising sun.

I braved the chill and dark to join this event because it combined two rarities. Jews are everywhere in New York, but if one’s not Jewish it’s unusual to see them worship. And no one goes out of their way to celebrate Apollo in Manhattan. Dionysus maybe, but not Apollo.

The event, called a Birkat Hachamah, comes only once every 28 years, when the sun rises in the same position it did on the week the Earth began. That’s approximate, of course; to learn how the rabbis arrived at this date, read this informative New York Times story.

As the sun peeked out over the East River, a trio played music. The congregants sang along with “Dayenu,” a hymn of thanks that Jews will sing again tonight during Passover. Among the men in yarmulkes, a black man in long dreadlocks mouthed the words with tears streaming down his face. The rabbi Joshua Metzger spoke over the roar of construction trucks roaring across 1st Avenue.

The ancient tradition of Birkat Hachamah is more relevant than ever because, Metzger said, “These days, natural processes are seen to be as magnificent as the splitting of the Red Sea.”

I squinted at the sun rising up from Queens and said, Amen.

LEDs at Greenhouse go easy on the eye, and the electricity.

The other night I attended a fundraiser at Greenhouse, the SoHo club that claims to be New York’s first eco-disco. The rumors said Stevie Nicks would be there. Even more than her purring vocals, I sought a bigger hit:  Can a hipster nightclub really be “sustainable,” or is it an illusion?

Since it opened in December in West Chelsea, Greenhouse has sought two stamps of approval. One is LEED status from the U.S. Green Building Council, to prove wise use of resources.  The club claims to have installed low-flow toilets, swanky waterless urinals, high-efficiency ventilation systems and bamboo paneling. It bought wind-energy credits to supply the power for the speakers, which tonight played (you guessed it) Stevie Nicks.

The second and more important stamp of approval is, of course, the clientele’s. A “green” nightclub must walk an uneasy line: kind to the Earth, yes, but without denying patrons the sense of luxury that they expect. No one wants to party with Dudley Do-Right.

The magic bullet? LEDs!

LEDs are the no-brainer of eco-chic. They use one-thirtieth the power of incandescent bulbs, going easy on the power grid, but they are twinkly and pretty and still novel enough to be hip. As an environmental gesture they are easily and immediately understood. I can’t confirm of Greenhouse’s other environmental claims without examining the water bill or drilling a sample of the bamboo siding. LEDs, we get.

Selso, Tim and Bobbi keep it chic at a corner table.

Greenhouse lays them on thick. Thousands of them twinkle from every wall. Alongside them climb ivylike leaves. Greenhouse says these are real plants, treated with fireproofing material, but between my fingers they felt like plastic. Hundreds of crystals hung from the ceiling.

I found my friend Bobbi and her friend Tim at a corner table. Under the transparent tabletop sprouted an arrangement of pinecones. In a moment we met Bobbi’s friend Selso, who wore a black cloth over her eyes and was, as the song goes, too sexy for this club.

Since this was a benefit the drinks were free. I was so bowled over by this fact that I neglected to notice if my martini was made with Vodka 360, the eco-brand that Greenhouse promotes as its house spirit.

Then Stevie Nicks arrived and proved a big disappointment. She walked with her entourage straight through to the VIP area, said she was delighted to see us all, then surrendered the mike without singing a note. Half an hour later she left. I found it much more enjoyable to talk with Selso, who commented how handsome I was before she sashayed away for a drink. I asked Tim, “So how do you know her?”

“Oh, Selso’s not a her,” Tim said. “Selso is a man.”

My jaw dropped. I watched Selso turn heads as he swung his hips and showed just a glimpse of corset. Which just goes to show that in New York, the women, and the clubs, are not necessarily to be trusted. The sparkly things can deceive you.

Today I visited Washington, D.C. to cover the Blue Vision Summit, a gathering of ocean scientists and ocean activists, and rarely have I been so depressed and inspired in the space of a single speech.

Roger Payne addresses the Blue Vision conference.

That speech was the keynote by Roger Payne, the biologist who discovered in the 1970s that humpback whales have songs, and who has done hard-hitting research since. He hit the crowd with a dreadful five-minute litany of the ocean’s problems that aren’t global warming: rainforest destruction, cyanide poisoning by the aquarium fish trade, pollution by undersea oil wells, the slaughter of bycatch, sewage entering the ocean and coral reef deaths, to name a few.

He went on to talk about his signature species, whales, and his most passionate topic, whaling. He detailed how Norway, Japan and Iceland continue to kill thousands of whales each year despite international treaties. Even worse, he went on, harpoons are no longer the biggest whale killers. Rather it is suffocation in abandoned nets and poisoning of the whales’ food, tainted by the toxins humans have poured into the sea. Payne gripped the lectern so hard it shook.

Where’s that “inspiring” part, you might wonder?  It came at the end. Payne concluded with something that everyone knew but needed to hear: “The chance to make a giant change has never been better than at this moment.”

That opportunity for change, embodied by our new president, is why 400 or so people crowded into a hall at George Washington University on a Sunday morning, after losing an hour of sleep to the beginning of Daylight Savings Time.

Barack Obama is, as one speaker put it, “the first bodysurfing president” and the first to grow up in the Hawaiian Islands. Following the Bush years, he’s a manta ray of hope for those who want the oceans treated more kindly. No one knows for sure whether he or Congress will champion the oceans or not. However, many attendees put their names to the sign-up sheets to meet Congressional delegations later in the week.

The conference was a clear sign that the ocean lobby enters the Obama era with a wind at its back.