Cleggy.

The type of Change that Obama is talking about is just this. The awareness that the world is not the playground of the wealthy, to extract resources destructively on whim with no accountability.

The Bush administration could till it’s last dying days never admit to making any errors. This pervasive attitude needs to change throughout government and throughout society in general. It is just this attitude that gets in the way of creating both space and systems which carry the present solutions readily available. The solutions are present and visible. Open your eyes.

The Friends of the High Line can send out a loud message that they committed a grave error in their use of the tropical wood known as Ipe. They could become heros and champions to a greater cause.

As a life time new yorker, I love my public space and the idea that the High Line delivers.
100 years of industrial destruction is enough. Let us do things, and let us do things right.

My firm’s folks are really surprised at the destructive material choice.

I think DS+R could have a taken a page from FOA in Barcelona on how to make long-lasting public spaces in a 24hour city.

We’ll see how it long the ipe lasts – tagging and vandalism will hit it sooner or later.

FSC has repeatedly certified wood gutted from ancient, virgin rainforests across the globe, including South America and Africa.

In addition, the FSC has repeatedly turned a blind eye to human rights atrocities associated with forestry operations that they certify. One of the most recent examples occurred this year in Brazil when a nonviolent, popular movement of indigenous people and campesinos rose up against an FSC-certified plantation, which they rightly referred to as a “green desert” because of the way it “destroys local people’s livelihoods and environments.” Despite a violent eviction by military forces these affected communities continue to fight for human and environmental rights.

Simon Counsel, a Founding Member of the Forest Stewardship Council in 1993, became so concerned about the constant erosion of the FSC’s reliability that he went on to found http://www.fsc-watch.org, which seeks to watch dog the FSC and encourage debate about its practices. Counsel states that the FSC has created a “‘race to the bottom’ of certification standards”, alleging that the “FSC really has become the ‘Enron of forestry.’”

Counsell believes that many of the FSC’s drawbacks are due to its tendency to look at each individual logging operation as a separate entity while ignoring the big picture of what industrial logging is doing to rainforest ecology. “Whilst a logging concession might appear to be ’sustainable’ at this small-scale level, the whole development model that accompanies industrial logging concessions might be highly non-sustainable and destructive,” Counsell says.

He continues with examples from the Amazon and Indonesia: “Research in the Amazon has shown that, over a period of years, commercial logging greatly increases the overall propensity of the forest to dry out, burn, and disappear. This happens regardless of whether the logged areas are certified or not.”

More Info: http://rainforestsofnewyork.org/alternatives/fsc-wood-guts-rainforests

juts one of many articles that ought to give some pause, or some chagrin.. or are we so far along that this amazon wood is green and this is how we buy politicians?
…
… glad for those protesters bringing these issues up