Press Clips: Sustainable Cities, Public Health, and Climate Change

15 Most Sustainable Cities in the U.S.
Grist.org
July 16, 2009

“Seattle is the most sustainable big city in the nation, according to a list compiled by Smarter Cities, an NRDC project that looks at the progress American cities are making toward going green. Not surprisingly, San Francisco and Portland are the runners-up.”

Using data from the EPA and the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as some voluntary survey responses from city governments, the project identified the top 15 large, medium, and small cities according to 10 different environmental criteria, from air quality to recycling to transportation.

Here’s a look the top 15 large cities (population of 250,000 or more):

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-07-16-sustainable-green-us-cities/

Where's the path to fitness? And can the government help us find it?
USA TODAY
July 23, 2009

You drive to the office, sit at a computer all day, drive home and then park yourself on the couch.

If that's your life, leading obesity experts say, the government should be changing your environment and making it possible for you to become more active.

There has been a big reduction in "muscle-power transportation," such as walking or biking to work or to the store, says Russell Pate, an exercise researcher at the University of South Carolina-Columbia. This is partly because of sprawling communities and long commutes, but he says it's also because people don't have safe places to walk.

http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/life/20090723/fedsfightfat23_st.art.htm


Building ‘Climate Positive’ Communities
Green, Inc.: Energy, the Environment, and the Bottom Line
May 26, 2009

Bloomberg News Former President Bill Clinton’s Climate Initiative is teaming up with the U.S. Green Building Council to help support the creation of more than a dozen energy-efficient communities on six continents.

It’s one thing to put up a LEED-certified building, but quite another to develop an entire urban community with enough energy-efficient bells and whistles that its on-site emissions are actually less than zero.

That’s the ambitious objective of the new Climate Positive Development Program, a joint venture between the Clinton Climate Initiative and the U.S. Green Building Council, unveiled at the C-40 Cities Climate Leader Group summit in Seoul, South Korea.

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/building-climate-positive-communities/?scp=4&sq=climate%20change&st=cse