Even a brief visit to Davenport's Nahant Marsh will show something unusual: a wetland habitat nestled in an area that includes an interstate highway, a railroad, and various agricultural and industrial uses. You'll likely see plants and animals that you won't find anywhere else in the Quad Cities area, just a few minutes' drive from the Rockingham Road exit of Interstate 280 in the southwestern part of the city.

Sandra Steingraber. Photo by Dede Hatch.

Sandra Steingraber has bachelor and doctorate degrees in biology and a master's in creative writing. "I had long been a biologist by day and poet by night," she said in a phone interview earlier this month. "I kind of kept my writing world and my science world separate."

And that was her intention when she set out to write the book that would become Living Downstream. "It was going to represent my best attempt as a biologist to summarize the links between cancer and the environment," she said.

But the poet in her ended up transforming the project into something unusual: a deeply personal story intertwined with a scientific one, as Steingraber discusses her own cancer in the context of the troubling relationship between chemical pollution and the disease. The hook of the book, she said, is "the life behind one of the data points in the cancer registry, namely my own."

Steingraber will be speaking at St. Ambrose University on October 22 as part of the school's Sustainability Project, which includes events throughout the academic year. Her lecture, she said, will apply the "conceptual theme" of Living Downstream (originally published in 1997, with a second edition and film adaptation released in 2010) to fracking - induced hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas and petroleum.

Design of the demonstration green home

In March, the Quad Cities Homebuilders & Remodelers Association began construction of a demonstration "green" home. Scheduled to be completed by September, the house is intended to illustrate that environmentally friendly homebuilding does not have to be costly or showy.

Homes represent 22 percent of our country's energy use -- only 6 percentage points fewer than the transportation industry, according to the Energy Information Administration. In recent years, green builders have emerged to reduce residential energy usage.

Green building isn't necessarily about solar panels, green roofs, wind turbines, and other expensive features. Double-paned windows, recycled cabinet materials, better insulation, erosion control, and efficient appliances might not be as glamorous, but they constitute green building, too.

"Green is a wave of the future," said Dave Burrows, executive vice president of the Quad Cities Homebuilders. "Our industry has to adapt."

A 2006 study by McGraw-Hill Construction predicted that green homes will make up about 10 percent of new-home construction by 2010, up from 2 percent in 2005.

"It's coming," said Burrows.

 

Biodynamic farming is an organic-farming method originated by the early 20th Century Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (founder of Waldorf schools) in an attempt to balance the nature of growing without the use of chemical or artificial means. The goal of biodynamic wine-making is to view the vineyard as a complete living system. These methods help preserve the purity and character of the fruit, leading to fantastic wines that reflect an authentic sense of place. It is a viticultural method slowly gaining strength worldwide in response to the unsustainable practice of "manufacturing wine" that has exploded over the past 60 years.

Reader issue #677 When the City of Rock Island created its "Green Team" last year, one thing it did was initiate an in-house recycling program.

 

Yes, the City of Rock Island - which likes to consider itself progressive - had no recycling program within city buildings.

 

Some recycling was done, said Tim Ridder, assistant to the public works director, the city's environmental-services coordinator, and the staff person who leads Green Team efforts. "It just wasn't uniform throughout the city," he said, and it wasn't being collected as a function of city government.

 

This isn't offered as proof that Rock Island is out-of-step. Rather, it shows how far the Quad Cities have come in the past year. Environmental initiatives range from obvious little things to multi-million-dollar projects, and it's evident that municipal government has gone green.

 

 

 

Reader issue #616Buildings are definitely energy hogs. The SUV is the environmental bad-boy symbol, but buildings consume more energy than cars and trucks. It's estimated that commercial and residential buildings in the U.S. consume 65 percent of all electricity, as well as 12 percent of drinkable water and 40 percent of all raw materials, according to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, an international organization that is expected in early 2008 to release a report evaluating green building in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

For the new Davenport police headquarters, building green is a simple matter of economics. "Saving money was the main motivation," said Charles Heston, a project manager in the city's Community & Economic Development Department.

Among its features, the under-construction building will be heated with geothermal energy; some lighting will be automatically adjusted based on daylight; other lighting will be controlled by occupancy censors; and a "green roof" with soil and plants will prevent rainwater from running off into storm sewers and provide additional insulation.

Issue #590 coverThis spring, the Iowa legislature passed new subsidies for each gas station that features 85-percent ethanol fuel - 25 cents for each gallon sold in 2006, 2007, and 2008, and then smaller amounts through 2020. Governor Tom Vilsack signed the bill, House File 2754, on May 30.

The reasons offered are straightforward. Corn is a resource we have. Why import oil from far away? Plus, this helps farmers market their corn at a better price.

I would like to put these ideas in a broader context, hoping to better understand what is happening around us here in the heartland.

E-85 Ethanol The article this sidebar accompanies is less about ethanol than it is about government encouraging agricultural practices that aren't sustainable and do more harm than good to communities. Author Kamyar Enshayan argues that the federal government, in particular, should divert some agricultural subsidies into re-building sustainable local economies. Championing ethanol as the savior of the Midwestern farm, he claims, is a losing proposition.

To be clear, Enshayan said that ethanol is superior to gasoline in terms of its desirability as a source of energy. "Gasoline is terrible," he said. But he added that conservation and other options aren't being considered as alternatives to ethanol and gasoline. "We're in an addictive situation," he said of the United States' energy consumption. "What do we do to get out of it?"

In the wake of the Katrina disaster, anybody who uses petroleum has had to rethink their family budgets. All of a sudden those Prius hybrids are starting to look pretty cool. And I'm once again getting a lot of e-mail about my Grease Car.