Broadcast Dates by Station and Date

THIRTEEN

Saturday May 4 at 1:00 PM
Saturday May 11 at 1:00 PM
Saturday May 18 at 1:00 and 2:00 PM
Saturday May 25 at 1:00 with the 2 hour Town Hall

NJTV

Sunday May 5 at 9:00 PM
Sunday May 12 at 9:00 PM
Sunday May 19 at 9:00 and 10:00 PM
Sunday May 26 at 9:00 with the 2 hour Town Hall

WLIW 21

Sunday May 5 at 5:00 PM
Sunday May 12 at 5:00 PM
Sunday May 19 at 5:00 and 6:00 PM
Sunday May 26 at 5:00 PM with the 2 hour Town Hall

About the Series:

Richard Jackson, MD MPH, is host and narrator of the series, and co-author with Stacy Sinclair of the companion book of the same name, published by Jossey-Bass/Wiley, co- published by the American Public Health Association. For the first time on national television, the rapidly deteriorating public health of our citizens is linked to nearly half a century of bad design decisions, now frozen in concrete. Each hour looks at the different impacts our built environment has on our key public health indices-obesity, diabetes, heart, asthma, cancer and depression. These relationships were never observed or talked about until Dr. Richard Jackson, a pediatrician-turned-public–health officer, began to demonstrate, more than a decade ago, that we are what we build.

Dr. Jackson first connects the dots of bad community design with burgeoning health costs, then analyzes and illustrates what ordinary citizens, including many young people, are trying to do about this urgent crisis, now on the front pages of many newspapers, by looking upstream for innovative solutions. Designing Healthy Communities looks at many places where we live, work, study and play and suggests they look the way they do because we have not assessed in advance the public health consequences of policy decisions. Dr. Jackson’s conclusion: For the first time in our nation’s history, we are subtracting years of life from our children because of the chronic diseases of obesity, asthma, and diabetes.

Dr. Jackson presents best practice design alternatives that can sharpen policy makers thinking in how they look at their communities today. Designing Healthy Communities identifies several common characteristics of unhealthy communities that can be changed, including: reliance on fossil fuel to navigate; limited walking space if no sidewalks at all; lack of access to green parks, trails, and gardens; production of pollution and particulate matter; expanding environmental injustice for millions of residents who cannot afford to move; increase of life-threatening interconnected chronic diseases like asthma, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, particularly among our youngest members of society; lack of socialization; place making and adopting a sense of community. Essential elements of our wellbeing are out of balance. While public health expenditures skyrocket, our physical, psychological, and spiritual health deteriorates, and we as a nation wonder why healthcare reform is so essential. Designing Healthy Communities shows us a way out in four one-hour programs, each addressing different subjects: Retrofitting Suburbia, Rebuilding Places of the Heart, Social Policy in Concrete, and Searching for Shangri-­La. (Episode descriptions and locations are available on request.) Funding was provided for the project by the following foundations: Kresge, Cal Endowment, AIA, W.K.Kellogg, Marisla, Kaiser Permanente, the Gifford and other Syracuse foundations, and Robert Wood Johnson.  For more information, visit the program web page, here: http://designinghealthycommunities.org.

About Dr. Jackson

Richard J. Jackson has done extensive work in the impact of the environment on health, particularly relating to children. Dr. Jackson chaired the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Environmental Health. He did extensive work on pesticides in California, and has also focused on epidemiology, infectious diseases and toxicology. Over the past decade much of his work has focused on how the ‘built environment’ including how architecture and urban planning affect health. He recently served on the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects and has written and spoken extensively in the above areas. Currently, Dr. Jackson has been working on policy analyses of environmental impacts on health ranging from toxicology, chemical body burdens, terrorism, sustainability, climate change, urban design and architecture. In addition, he is developing policy analyses in related areas, such as how farm, education, housing, and transportation policies affect health.

While in California he helped establish the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program and state and national laws to reduce risks from pesticides, especially to farm workers and to children. While at CDC he established the national asthma epidemiology and control program, oversaw the childhood lead poisoning prevention program, and instituted the federal effort to “biomonitor” chemical levels in the US population. In the late 1990s he was the CDC leader in establishing the US National Pharmaceutical Stockpile to prepare for terrorism and other disasters—which was activated on September 11, 2001. He has received the Breast Cancer Fund’s Hero Award, as well as Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Public Health Law Association, and the New Partners for Smart Growth. Dick Jackson lectures and speaks on many issues, particularly those related to built environment and health. He co-authored two Island Press Books: Urban Sprawl and Public Health in 2004 and Making Healthy Places published in August, 2011. He has served on many environmental and health boards, as well as the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects. He was the 2005 UCLA SPH commencement speaker

Scientist and author John Waldman will preview his latest book on the history and fate of diadromous fish, researcher George Jackman will share early results on a current WCS/NOAA Bronx River eel study, the Bronx River Fish Passage plans will be presented and choreographer Paloma McGregor will present a work based on her long term interest in fish and the people who study their behavior.

Reservation required with NYC Parks

Contact Email:uncommonground@parks.nyc.gov

In the spring of 2013, construction is expected to begin on the first of three fish passages on the Bronx River. The “Fish Ladder,” as it is also called, is intended to permit fish migration for alewife for the first time in 330 years, and improve migration of American eels. Both of these species are on the decline worldwide and this small project is part of larger efforts to support biodiversity in the world’s oceans.

This event is the first in a series of four to be  organized by the Bronx River Alliance.Wade into the Bronx River 2013, is a series of lectures, workshops and walks to learn more about the Bronx River

The immediate impact and aftermath of Hurricane Sandy has raised questions about how we can reduce our vulnerability to future storms as well as enhance our adaptation to climate change. The immediate discussion of rebuilding makes clear that there are issues of scientific uncertainty, engineering, planning and policy, economics, and equity to be resolved. In order to help address these questions the panel and subsequent discussion will focus on:

1.     What did Hurricane Sandy tell us about extreme storm events and future climate in our region?  What is still not known?

2.     What did Hurricane Sandy tell us about our vulnerabilities to future extreme events?

3.     What are the key opportunities and challenges of potential adaptation strategies?

 
Images from the event (Scroll down for video and audio of the event.)

Event Program

Introduction: Hurricane Sandy and Challenges to the New York Metropolitan Region

William Solecki, Hunter College – CUNY

Cynthia Rosenzweig, NASA – GISS, Columbia University

Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation

Lessons from the Dutch

Jeroen Aerts, VU University Amsterdam

The Engineering Approach

Klaus Jacob, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University

The Role of Ecosystems and Green Infrastructure

Franco Montalto, Drexel University

Planning and Policy

Rae Zimmerman, New York University

Discussion

Place: Roosevelt House, Hunter College

47-49 East 65th Street (just west of Park Avenue)

Date: Monday December 3, 2012

Time: 2pm – 5pm (registration to start at 2pm; presentations to start at 2:30pm) reception from 5-6pm to follow

Sponsored by

The Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College and

City University of New York, Institute for Sustainable Cities (CISC)

Hosted by

Urban Climate Change Research Network, Consortium for Climate Change in the Urban Northeast, CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities

Video from Hurricane Sandy and Beyond

“Since 2001, when “Climate Change and a Global City” was published, climate scientists have been highlighting the vulnerability of the New York metropolitan region to coastal flooding in light of rising seas. Over the past 100 years, data from the tide gauge at the Battery in Lower Manhattan reveal that the region has already experienced close to a foot (9 to 10 inches) of sea level rise.

“Climate Change Adaptation in New York City: Building a Risk Management Response,” a 2010 report, projected that the sea level would rise two to five feet by the 2080s. The higher projection includes the continuing effects of the rapid ice melt now occurring in polar regions. These projections imply that more frequent and more extensive coastal flooding is in store for the New York area, whatever the strength of any oncoming storms.

Now that New York has experienced devastating coastal flooding, how can we recover and rebuild in a way that will enable infrastructural resilience to inevitable future storms, while minimizing a loss of life and livelihoods? Both “hard” engineering interventions – like sea walls and innovative subway and tunnel closings – and “soft” approaches – like reconstructed wetlands and smart designs for coastal communities – are needed.”

Read the full report and other responses, here.

Cynthia Rosenzweig is a senior research scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. William Solecki is director of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities at Hunter College. They are co-chairmen of the New York City Panel on Climate Change.

A discussion of Eric Sanderson’s Terra Nova: The New World after Oil, Cars and Suburbs
co-sponsored with The Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College

“French filmmaker Mathias Frantz and his crew had spent weeks searching the wilder crannies of New York for the quintessence of nature in the city—material that will be used in the first of four profiles of wildlife in major international cities they are calling “Naturopolis.” The week before I’d accompanied them on a boat on the East River where we angled for striped bass in the riptides of Hell Gate and snuck up on a colony of nesting cormorants on U-Thant Island, situated below the cliff-like UN building that towered as a backdrop. One week later we met at River Park, a pocket of greenery in the West Farms section of the South Bronx that is named after Gotham’s only true freshwater river, the Bronx River.

The Bronx River is an urban flowage that is becoming restored mainly through the efforts of the New York City Department of Parks and the Bronx River Alliance of non-profits. River Park sits just below the lowermost dam on the river, one that prevents typical migratory fish such as alewife from ascending farther upstream to spawn. The river is also home to the American eel, a species that was described in the subtitle of a recent book as the “most mysterious fish in the sea.” And mysterious they are, baby eels, having migrated all the way from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean are slowed down, but not always stopped from passing dams. Our crew of agency and academic biologists and volunteers planned on first electrofishing below the dam and then above it to obtain a sense of the relative abundances of eels on both sides of this barrier.

PHOTO CREDIT: Laura Waldman

Our colleague Chris Bowser of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation wore the backpack electroshocking unit on the first pass. Probing around the rocky shallows with the device’s electrical hoop turned up plenty of eels, together with sunfish, darter fish, and crayfish that were all momentarily stunned while two eager netters tried to gather them before they revived.

On the second pass, my Ph.D. student George Jackman operated the shocker. George has an unusual background for a doctoral student — he is a retired New York City police lieutenant. As such, he sees things that mere civilians miss. As George stepped deeper into the flow to begin “fishing” he eyed a plastic device and reached down and then held up a metal sleeve — the magazine from a handgun. Our crew and the observers who gathered were amazed, making comments about this truly being urban nature. But a minute later the incident became considerably enhanced: George yelled “wow” as he spotted the actual handgun — and then retrieved and held up a 10 mm Glock. The assemblage couldn’t quite believe this, and neither could the French filmmakers who asked whether we’d planted it there for Naturopolis.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ferdie Yau

We hadn’t, of course, but I wondered whether the eventual viewers of Naturopolis would believe that such an iconic urban symbol would have been discovered by accident. The gun’s being found there makes sense, it was located just below the 180th Street Bridge—a perfect place to stop a car and toss a gun into the water. I questioned if its owner threw the gun into the river when it was raging with high water, not knowing that the Bronx River is a “spate” flow that floods quickly when it rains and then drops to low levels, shallow enough to reveal a handgun.

George later gave the weapon to a patrolman, who guessed it was used in a murder and promised to do ballistics tests. The tests showed that the gun was used in a shooting not far from there about a week earlier, and at a time when the river was so high we needed to cancel our fieldwork. This gun had been fired 10 times into the back of its victim. Remarkably, the man survived, this gun is so powerful that it essentially perforated his torso while apparently missing vital organs.

The remainder of the day was less eventful, with many eels surveyed below the dam and only about one-fourth as many above, showing that eels can indeed somehow work their way past the dam. The eel “ladder” we plan to install next year should ease their access to the river’s headwaters as they follow their natural instincts and swim, obliviously, maybe even mysteriously, past whatever unnatural jetsam society leaves along its bottom.”

John Waldman is author of Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life, and Environment of New York Harbor, Revised Edition and Still the Same Hawk: Reflections on Nature and New York (Both forthcoming from Fordham University Press this October).  You can also view Dr. Waldman’s faculty website, with more links to his research, here.