Ongoing projects & events :
Photos from the Stone Wall Restoration in our ravineRavine Restoration: 2008 Assessment and Fall '09 Ravine Plantings
2009 AV Reserves Study
NEW! Arlington Village Waste and Recycling Overview
NEW! Village Talk in February: Keep the Heat Inside: Improving the Energy Efficiency of our Homes
HELP HAITI: Resources
Sliding snow from roof after Dec. snow storm
Are you living in a unit with a mansard or a gabled roof? Then chances are that after the recent snow storm you’ll have to struggle with icicles hanging from the roof ridge and gutters. Icicles form when the snow on the roof melts and begins to trickle down. The sunny day after the storm may account for some of the melt, even if air-temperatures have been constantly below freezing. You will observe however that the snow tends to slide away in big blocks .
© UMN.edu
Some neighbors even report ‘avalanches” coming down from their roofs. How does this happen? The answer is that it is the roof that heats and melts the base layer of snow. This causes the snow cover to slide away on the slippery base just like a piece of butter would slide on a hot pan. Icicles and ice dams build up where decades of neglected insulation allow heat to escape and warm-up the slate shingles. Our roofs are simply too warm to hold the snow long enough so that it can melt without the problems we are currently having. It takes a couple of snow storms to actually ”see” the heat -and money- loss through our roofs.
Feb. 06-07 Snow Storm. Click on the image to see photo set.
And a big THANK YOU to our personnel who have been working very hard under the severest weather.
And to all folks who helped to shake the snow from the trees in our Ravine and around the Village during that storm.
The Arlington Village Ravine after a night of snow - click on image for more photos
4 seconds it would take for our Arlington Village Ravine (6 acres aprox.) to completely vanish at the pace tropical forests are currently deforested. Can you imagine the sheer violence of that? More than 250 mature trees completely gone in a blink of an eye together with the entire surrounding habitat?
As AIRE reminds in a recent post: “90 acres of rain forest are cleared every second. 20% of greenhouse emissions are due to reforestation”. Take a look at this video, a part of Maya Lin’s (Vietnam Memorial) project: What is missing.
Last year it looked like we had achieved numbers for the books. In ‘08 we brought 179 tons of trash to the incinerator. 40% less than in ‘07. We also thought that we could show a spectacular shift from trash to recycling. To top it off, all this coincided with a substantial enhancement of single-stream recycling by our hauler. Unfortunately the success story only lasted one year. The ‘09 data give us a different picture. read more…
© wikipedia
I’m aware that that at least half of the electric power needed to post this comes from coal. What I wasn’t so aware of is that I consume 3.8 tons of coal a year (or roughly 2 lbs /h), like the average you. Chances are that a good part of that coal is mined by the method known as “mountaintop removal mining”, just 270 miles SW from home: most probably here. read more…
Wednesday: Full to the brim!
OK it was Wednesday: Recycling Pick-Up Day. And the state of our Recycling-toters was as pictured here. Arlington Village seems to be recycling a lot. In fact, for three years in a row we have been adding more than 10% of additional recycling capacity yearly to absorb the steady growing amounts of recyclable waste.
Yet the “problem” persists. read more…
(OK, let’s take a look on the 2009 media coverage (click to enlarge and try to find the green issues):
While it snows however, somebody is keeping Arlington Village accessible. Our staff is out fighting the severest weather since early this morning. THANK YOU!
Jorge and Gerardo removing snow from sidewalks and stairs at S Edgewood this morning. Representative for our entire Arlington Village staff who are out and working today all over the Village.
Update: Past sunset and our staff is still working!
a fixture in the community | caring | farther along | a&b | temples | light
Jenny Ericson’s thoughts presented at the Arlington County’s Legislator Breakfast today. Jenny is Invasive Species Volunteer Program Coordinator for the National Wildlife Refuge System and our Arlington Village Treasurer.
It’s Election Day in our small Arlington Village Republic. Our well kept but aging community needs now the guidance of us ‘The Villagers’.
The good news is that there are no decisions to take under duress. Other than many of our peer communities we are financially healthy, stable and well protected against imponderable risks. This is not a given and had to be earned with hard work over the years.
Among the most significant contributions of the current board to this community is that it proactively set the stage for discussion about the many important issues a community of our size, age and diversity has. In this year’s budget and “meet the candidates” debates we have experienced a new wave of inputs and ideas that will certainly keep our community creatively active through the next year and beyond. Also, the long way that led to the tough personnel decisions of this Fall revealed a whole agenda of pending assignments that the next Board will have to work on.
The bottom line: There are more solutions emerging from that process than problems.
…. which seems to be more attributable to mass inefficiency of our internet infrastructure than to our intensified digital life.
The Barcelona Climate Talks, the last international climate meeting before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen are concluded. It hasn’t been an smooth ride for sure. This is the final Press Briefing by UNFCCC(*) exec. secretary Ivo de Boer:
(*) UNFCCC: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Indian Summer 2009 in the Village
Another Green Film Night sponsored by ACE. The venue this time will be The Dome in Rosslyn (former Newseum and future Arlington Culture Center) and the Film: Liquid Assets, a documentary that tells the story of essential infrastructure systems: Water, Wastewater and Stormwater.
Screening: Monday, October 19, 7:00 p.m. at the DOME in Rosslyn, 1101 Wilson Blvd, 22209.
Elinor Ostrom [1], Nobel Prize laureate for Economics 2009, gives her take on how to achieve sustainable development and go beyond the tragedy of the commons. Enjoy:
Beautiful Monarch Butterflies, this evening in the Prairie Wildflower circle of the H-Courtyard
“Author Peter Maass has spent eight years trying to understand the politics and economy of oil production across the globe. The result is his new book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, in which Maass tries to explain what we do for oil and what oil does to us. As you’ll hear in his interview with anchor Jeb Sharp, it’s not a pretty picture.”
Listen to a short interview with Maas about the book on PRI’s The World.
takis karantonis
Rodney Olsen
ravinegirl
AV Green Team
