The 130th Sustainability Salon will continue our annual Fall Focus on Air Quality, on November 13th. Since temperatures are (finally) falling, we'll be back on Zoom. Note the new day-of-week! ...I canvassed folks for a non-salon gathering last month, and Sunday was strongly preferred over Saturday. Salons were traditionally on Saturdays because, in their traditional form, they often went quite late. That's not the case for Zoom events -- it's hard to match the dynamic of in-person events. So we're CHANGING TO SUNDAY!
Clairton resident Melanie Meade has lived with, and spoken out about, some of the worst air in the country for decades. She'll share some of her
family's story, and ways she and others are working to address the problems in collaboration with the
Clean Air Council and other organizations. Clairton's long struggle with air quality, dominated by U.S. Steel's Clairton Cokeworks, is a part of its complicated history -- check out this comprehensive
article in PublicSource.
GASP Executive Director
Patrick Campbell will share developments in the group's programs in education, advocacy, watchdog activities, and legal action. From Fresh Voices for Clean Air (a partnership with a different
GASP in Birmingham, Alabama) to our Air Permits Clearinghouse (providing citizens with a window onto the major pollution sources in Southwestern Pennsylvania), to addressing toxic coke oven emissions, GASP works to protect the health of breathers in our region.
Caroline Mitchell is an attorney, an engineer, and a member of the Allegheny County Board of Health. She'll talk about the legal framework within which local and state air-quality regulators operate, and its implication for enforcement actions.
I look forward to seeing folks!
December's Sustainability Salon, on our annual theme of Consumption, will be all about packaging. On Sunday December 18th, in collaboration with Pittsburghers Against Single-Use Plastic (PASUP), we'll have a brainstorming session on ways to avoid single-use packaging for food and other everyday products, and will also feature Larissa Russo of The Refillery sharing what her business is doing about it.
In the meantime, some other items of note:
• Oct 15: Pennsylvania Resources Council's ReuseFest, collecting all sorts of things in North Park. Information and registration here.
• Oct 15: With the threat of nuclear war once again rising up, several local groups have organized a picket of PNC Bank to continue pressuring them to stop investing in nuclear weapons manufacturers. Here's the FB event page.
• Oct 15: The Poor People's Campaign will be on the streets (in the Hill District) with the theme of voting. Here's the FB event page.
• Oct 15: Garfield Community Farm's fall benefit -- FB event page.
• Oct 19: Better Path Presents Unpacking the IRA and the Dirty Deal with Jim Walsh of Food & Water Watch. Register here.
• Oct 20: The Battle of Homestead Foundation is hosting an online panel discussion: Fascism in Today's America: Can It Happen Here? Register here.
• Oct 24: Air Quality Town Hall on the new petrochemical facility just north of Pittsburgh.
• Nov 9-13: The Post-Landfill Action Network (PLAN) will hold a hybrid Students for Zero Waste Conference (online and in Philadelphia).
• Nov 13: Pennsylvania Interfaith Power & Light (PAIPL), a faith-based climate group, hosts its annual conference on Environmental Justice and Human Resilience (regional workshops and an online keynote).
• Nov 15 & 16: The League of Women Voters/Straight Scoop on Shale annual Shale & Public Health Conference.
• Nov 15: Book talk/discussion by recent Salon speaker Shanti Gamper-Rabindran and my mostly-silent Salon co-host (and atmospheric scientist) Neil Donahue, at Riverstone Books.
• Nov 17: Plastic Pollution Coalition webinar on reducing waste associated with holiday gift-giving (more info and registration).
• Dec 9: Physicians for Social Responsibility of Pennsylvania (PSRPA) hosts their annual environmental health conference with a snapshot of local issues, local voices, and recent research.
•. Students at Shaler Area High School have partnered with the Allegheny Land Trust to protect open space in their community and enhance butterfly habitat with native plants. They've put together a fundraiser to help acquire a parcel of former farmland.
•. During the Climate Convergence in June, we placed a countdown Climate Clock in the Pennsylvania Capitol. We want to make this installation permanent! Here's a petition for you to sign, as well as an organizational sign-on letter.
•. The petition we spoke about a couple of months ago is also still relevant: https://www.fixharrisburg.com/• PRC continues to hold online workshops about composting, rainwater harvesting, and waste reduction.
• Did you see the film The Story of Plastic, or the PBS doc Plastic Wars? (and/or join us for Plastic Paradise at a winter film salon six years ago?) ...What if you could bring up imagery of the toxic impacts of plastic production, and commentary by the people and communities living with them, over the world? You can do all that with the interactive Toxic Tours tool. Check it out!
Talks and discussion will run from 4 p.m. to 7 or 7:30 on Zoom (sadly, no potluck supper these days). You're welcome to join the call for informal conversation after 3 p.m., and we aim to start the main program right around 4. If you're new to Zoom, you may find my Zoom Reference Guide helpful. If you RSVP via Eventbrite, you'll receive the Zoom registration link right away. If you're not already on my Eventbrite list, please email me (maren dot cooke at gmail dot com) with salon in the Subject line to be added -- and let me know how you heard about salons! For the uninitiated, a Sustainability Salon is an educational forum; it's a mini-conference; it's a venue for discussion and debate about important environmental issues; it's a house party (if there weren't a pandemic) with an environmental theme. Each month we have featured speakers on various aspects of a particular topic, interspersed with stimulating conversation, lively debate, delectable potluck food and drink, and music-making through the evening. Past topics have included our region's air (part I), activist art and America's Energy Gamble, advocacy opportunities, social justice games, fixing Pennsylvania state government, climate action, forest restoration, the history of American consumerism, regional air quality, preserving Pittsburgh's forests, climate modeling, approaches to pipelines, pipeline hazards, the legacy of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the judiciary and fair elections, consumption, pandemics and air, election law and activism, air quality and environmental justice, social investment, local economies, the economics of energy, mutual aid networks, ocean health, the rise of the radical right, the back end of consumption, approaches to activism on fracking & climate, air quality, technology, and citizen science, single-use plastics, election activism, election law, whether to preserve existing nuclear power plants, advanced nuclear technologies, passenger and freight trains, consumption, plastics, and pollution, air quality, solar power, youth activism, greening business, greenwashing, the petrochemical buildout in our region, climate/nature/people, fracking, health, & action, globalization, ecological ethics, community inclusion, air quality monitoring, informal gatherings that turn out to have lots of speakers, getting STEM into Congress, keeping Pittsburgh's water public, Shell's planned petrochemical plant, visualizing air quality, the City of Pittsburgh's sustainability initiatives, fossil energy infrastructure, getting money out of politics, community solar power and the Solarize Allegheny program, the Paris climate negotiations (before, during, and after), air quality (again, with news on the autism connection), reuse (of things and substances), neighborhood-scale food systems, other forms of green community revitalization, solar power, climate change, environmental art, environmental education (Part I & Part II), community mapping projects, environmental journalism, grassroots action, Marcellus shale development and community rights, green building, air quality, health care, more solar power, trees and park stewardship, alternative energy and climate policy, regional watershed issues, fantastic film screenings and discussions (often led by filmmakers) over the winter with films on Food Systems, Climate Adaptation and Mitigation, Plastic Paradise, Rachel Carson and the Power Of One Voice, Triple Divide on fracking, You've Been Trumped and A Dangerous Game, A Fierce Green Fire, Sustainability Pioneers, films on consumption, Living Downstream, Bidder 70, YERT, Gas Rush Stories, and food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, food, and more food (a recurrent theme; with California running out of water, we'd better gear up to produce a lot more of our own!).
If you haven't been here before, you may enjoy checking out our roof garden and solar installation (and now apiary!) as well as the many other green and interesting things around our place.
And if you like to make music or listen to homemade music, perhaps we can sing and play a bit if the weather's nice!
