Let’s Celebrate Climate-Forward Success Stories So We Can Smile For A Change – CleanTechnica

---

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

---

We find ourselves at a moment in time in which our dinner conversations, news broadcasts, social media feeds, and grocery store headlines are filled with darkness. Yes, democracy in the United States is under threat, and progress to mitigate climate change has been caught up in the regressive Trump policies. Yet not all is lost, for many people and communities believe that they can act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s talk about a few of these climate-forward initiatives and take a moment to breathe in hope for a healthy and sustainable planet.

From Trash to Public Park — A Renaissance

Remember the trips to the dump when you were a little kid? It seemed so cool to watch the seagulls float on the warm currents and imagine uses for the variety of items sticking up through the heaps. What wasn’t evident to us as tykes is how dangerous the landfill leachate is. It’s a highly polluted wastewater resulting from the decomposition of organic waste in landfills. It contains high levels of organic matter, nitrogen, phosphorus, heavy metals, and other contaminants of environmental and health concerns.

In Lynn, Massachusetts, such a landfill and the detritus of closed industry around it blocked local citizens from accessing and enjoying their own coastline.

But the Lynn landfill is a thing of the past. Today you can visit the brand new Lynn Harbor Park.

What was needed for such a climate-forward change to occur? What does a community do with a landfill that obstructs views and presents an environmental hazard? The answer to that question typically is to cap the area with tons and tons of soil, then cordon it off to the public.

As related by the Boston Globe, Charter Development was brought to remediate the failing landfill and mitigate its numerous environmental concerns, which were compounded due to its proximity to the ocean. Bob Delhome, Charter’s founder, suggested a different approach. Rather than capping and fencing, why not recreate the area as a park? The city agreed and hired Brown, Richardson + Rowe, the landscape architects who designed Spectacle Island.

Located four miles from downtown Boston, Spectacle Island is a trash-to-treasure story. From 1935 to 1959, Spectacle Island was the city’s dump, bringing 350 tons of waste to the island daily. Over the years, the island grew by almost 36 acres. The dump sat exposed and leached into the harbor. After tons of added sentiment and landscaping with trees and shrubs, Spectacle Island today features five miles of trails and panoramic views of the harbor.

Lynn brought together city and state agencies and, after years of work, last month the city hosted an official ribbon-cutting for the 30-acre park. An adjacent parcel will be a mixed-use development project that will include 850 housing units and 26,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space. An eight-acre public park will link to Lynn Harbor Park.

The plan is to create an ocean promenade that will eventually extend link the area from the Saugus River to the causeway that leads to Nahant and Lynn’s beaches. “To come down here and see all those families, all those kids playing, it’s hard to describe what that means,” Councilor Fred Hogan, a Lynn native who represents the waterfront area, told the Globe. “I get goosebumps when I think about what we’ve started here.”

An Urban Forest Oasis

South Providence, Rhode Island, is a melange of immigrant and working class families, lively restaurants, social service agencies, bus stops, and multi-family homes — some rentals, some owner-occupied. It’s usually an asphalt existence. But on one street, nearly 270 trees are packed into a 1,000-square-foot lot. The Pearl Street Garden is an urban forest oasis.

Designed by Groundwork Rhode Island and the Pearl Street Garden Collective, 185 trees and 80 shrubs are set 2 to 3 feet apart in a 1,000-square-foot corner. The method is named after Akira Miyawaki, a Japanese botanist and ecologist who specialized in natural vegetation restoration of degraded land. His method has been implemented worldwide.

Urban forestry and micro-forests are an opportunity to introduce restorative and instorative nature beneficial to human well-being and health in the contemporary city. Studies indicate that microforests boost physical activity and social interaction when residents participate in their care, thereby creating community engagement and bonding. Being more connected to nature through eco-education opens up other possibilities to access nature, clearing our minds and strengthening our immune systems.

The city’s second microforest rose from the ground on an overcast and drizzly Saturday morning. “People are really showing up. It’s amazing,” Currie Touloumtzis, Groundwork Rhode Island’s urban tree program manager, told EcoRI.

The Pearl Street Garden Collective champions regenerative land-based practices as a way to restore ecosystems, strengthen communities, and reconnect people with the practice of land stewardship. The collective focuses on creating vibrant, ecologically resilient gardens that nurture soil, water, and wildlife while implementing and connecting patches of regeneration across Providence and beyond. Through collaboration with clients and partners, they aim to foster a network of thriving landscapes that inspire a deeper relationship with the land and make regenerative gardening accessible and impactful for all. Their approach emphasizes:

• reimagining landscaping and urban gardening as tools for ecological regeneration;
• community building and personal empowerment;
• building interdependence with living spaces;
• engaging in stewardship; and,
• encouraging questioning and reinvention.

“This isn’t habitat restoration on the scale that is needed in terms of the world,” said Jacq Hall, director of special projects at Groundwork Rhode Island. “But it is a really great way, especially in a city, for people to become very in close touch with biodiversity and why it’s important — and why it’s also beautiful.”

Final Thoughts: Coming Together to Respect Legacy Culture

A professor of mine, Donald Murray, told students that, as soon as you learn a new word or phrase, the world bombards you with information about it.

Similarly, I came across two stories within a 24-hour period that quietly demonstrated cultural respect about the same icon.

First, a childhood pal of mine shared efforts to stand up against nationalism in her own small New England town. Numerous shoppers had complained about frozen shrimp labels bearing the federally-mandated “Gulf of America” place name in LaBonne’s Markets. Rob LaBonne III, president of the four-location grocery store chain, told the Lakeville Journal that the label alteration had actually been ordered long before complaints began in town.

“As a grocery store, we have to be everything to everybody,” LaBonne said. “We have people from all walks of life and political backgrounds who work for us, shop with us.”

Language manipulation has been rife in the Trump White House, which ordered the “Gulf of Mexico” — a name used for more than 400 years — to be changed to the “Gulf of America.” The shrimp label resulted from the distributor following Google Maps’ usage of the title as well as an effort to signify the domestic origin of the shrimp.

My pal and Salisbury resident Amy Lake expressed how surprised that nationalist overreach appeared at LaBonne’s, which is a cherished community business. Lake said that she was “kind of shaken by what [she] saw as jingoism in the aisle” and was moved to act. She emphasized that residential voice and consumer choice are the “tools of democracy.”

Second, on the same day, a newsletter from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography shared research into how “an international expedition is uncovering the rich acoustic ecology of the Gulf of Mexico.” Describing how “the Gulf of Mexico has long been a crossroads of biodiversity and culture, a region shaped by mighty rivers and powerful hurricanes, oil platforms, and vibrant coral reefs,” the article went on to discuss the resonant songs of whales beneath the Gulf’s surface.

The Gulf of Mexico geographic marker was consistent throughout the article. Instead of succumbing to Trump’s linguistic discrimination, Katrina Johnson focused on ways the team was drawing upon “long-term acoustic datasets for predictive habitat modeling and to monitor changes in marine mammal abundance and distribution across seasonal and interannual timescales.”

Ah, climate data. Facts. Evidence. How refreshing.