Raze and Rebuild

What gets built has little to do with the interests of the community and everything to do with what builds more wealth | Originally published at Crisis Palace

The sun is shining, the masks are off, and the sounds of gentrification are ringing in the air.

In any given direction from where I am sitting in my frankly uncomfortably humid apartment office in one of Boston’s outlying neighborhoods I can hear nail guns, power drills, table saws, all grinding away during every waking hour. The hot smell of overpriced lumber is strong, and the streets are lined with blue toilet boxes and dumpsters overflowing with the guts of century-old homes.

The housing market is scorching nationwide, and it is particularly out of control in Boston.

Philanthropy’s Attempts to Remain Above the Fray Are Slowing Progress on Climate Change

Originally published at Inside Philanthropy

In January 2014, a group of youth-led activists publicly turned to foundations and asked them to take a moral stance against the fossil fuel industry.

Yes, there were good strategic and financial reasons for foundations to divest from oil, gas and coal companies. But the movement in large part presented it as a moral imperative. The activists were, in effect, saying to foundations: Tell us that you will turn your back on this industry that for decades has lied, lobbied and worse to continue burning carbon for profit, knowing full well that it would lead to catastrophe. Tell us that you will instead stand with us as we fight for our future.

And what did the philanthropic establishment do in response? Nothing.

How a Project in Boston is Mixing Philanthropy and Investments to Create a New Economy

Originally published at Inside Philanthropy.

For Boston’s working-class communities of color, the city’s economy is not working. That’s evidenced by a shocking racial wealth gap—the median net worth for black households is just $8, compared to $247,500 for white households. As in many cities, when economic development does happen in these neighborhoods, it often displaces, rather than benefits existing residents.

The Boston Ujima Project is a unique initiative posing the question of just what it would take to make a lasting change to that deep inequality—combining philanthropy, investing and organizing to build wealth in a way that benefits and is guided by communities.

“I think we're trying to propose what a new economy could look like,” says Lucas Turner-Owens, fund manager for Boston Ujima Project.

Keeping Pace

How Greater Boston’s Bus System Can Support a Growing and Changing Region | Report by LivableStreets

LivableStreets partnered with Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP) to write this report, which I restructured and edited. “The report outlines an actionable agenda for decision-makers at the state, agency, and local level to enact within the next few years. While the problem may be daunting, the bus system is one of the most flexible and adaptable pieces of the transit system. Dramatic improvement is possible if actors at all levels of government work together to make it a reality”

The Prosthetic Eyeball is a Work of Art

Making a realistic eye takes more than technical skill: an Object Lesson. | Originally published at The Atlantic. 

The eye is about the size of a quarter, resting gently in Kurt Jahrling’s hand as he adds faint washes of yellow and blue to the white surface. The ocularist has already laid tiny, reddish-pink threads of silk over the surface to mimic the curves of blood vessels, tiny rivers winding from either corner toward the iris. A hazel centerpiece surrounds a black dot meant to mimic the pupil; as the finishing touch, he adds the arcus, a grey ring that hugs the outer edge of some aging irises.

In the Garden Cemetery

The Revival of America’s First Urban Parks | Originally published in American Forests Magazine.

In the 1820s, America's cities had a problem: People kept dying, and church burial grounds were filling up. Fortunately, a group of horticulturists in Massachusetts had a solution and, in 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge became the first modern cemetery. Other cities began to follow suit, dedicating rolling, scenic tracts of land on the outskirts of town to honor the deceased. This “rural cemetery,” or “garden cemetery,” movement not only temporarily solved the problem of where to put the dead, but it also gave us the nation’s very first parks.

Over the decades, cemeteries fell out of vogue as cultural centers, but their fall from favor was not to be permanent. Today, the practice of using cemeteries for outdoor recreation is bubbling up once more, as urban dwellers seek out nature in the city.

Washed Away

Beneath the water lie memories of vibrant villages. | Originally published in The Magazine

Sally Norcross stands outside what was once her childhood home, in the heart of Dana, Massachusetts. She and her family left town 76 years ago, but she has clear memories of throwing crabapples into the yard of her grouchy neighbor Mr. Vaughn. Across Main Street is where she used to sit in school and watch out the window as the men dug up all the graves in the cemetery.

The bodies and headstones were relocated and the town of Dana abandoned. Her family’s house is an empty stone cellar overgrown with brush, like the remains of all the other buildings that made up the town. Dana is one of four towns that once lay in the Swift River Valley. All four of them are gone. Dana is unique in that its town common is the only one of the four that’s still above water and accessible.

Mad Scientist Club

In an otherwise unremarkable room at MIT, the published history of science fiction overflows. | Originally published in The Magazine.

Decades before Guy Consolmagno had an asteroid named after him in honor of his contributions to planetary science, he was a directionless history major at Boston College. Then he saw what MIT was keeping in a room of the student center. He knew he had to transfer.

It wasn’t MIT’s research on meteoroids and asteroids, or its contributions to NASA lunar missions, or even the early stages of what would become the Internet, though all of this was happening on the Cambridge campus around 1970. Rather, it was a bunch of novels. Thousands and thousands of science fiction novels.

Eradication Nation

What Boston’s battle with the Asian longhorned beetle can teach us about stopping an invasive pest in its tracks. | Originally published in American Forests Magazine. 

Clint McFarland didn’t want to believe the pictures he was looking at on his smartphone.

Late on a Friday afternoon in July 2010, he was at a gathering in Worcester, Mass., to recognize federal and state staff who had been working long, hard hours for two years to wrangle the city’s runaway Asian longhorned beetle (ALB) infestation, the country’s largest by far. By the time a homeowner reported it in 2008, the invasive beetles had already been boring their way across the heavily forested city in the center of the state, frighteningly close to the edge of contiguous forests that span New England and reach into Canada.

Is There a Punk Aesthetic? 

Originally published in Souciant Magazine. 

The back cover and spine of Punk: An Aesthetic are almost entirely white, with a clean, black typeface. Seen from a distance on a bookshelf, it could be any modern art book. But the front cover — punk cartoonist Gary Panter’s illustration of the singer for The Screamers — is another matter, a large, low-quality print of a black-and-white face fixed in what looks like a scream of rage, befitting the book’s innards.

Look inside and you’ll see a riot of images: hand-scrawled political rants, shredded clothing, swastikas, pornography, violent photomontage and hundreds of others from the 1970s punk movement. That screaming face on the front cover gives you the feeling the content inside doesn’t want to be contained.