Johnny Depp's Island to be Solar and Hydrogen Powered

I don't spend a lot of time thinking about celebrities. I'm generally more interested in professors at MIT than actors in Hollywood. But every once in a while, our friends at Ecorazzi will post something that catches my eye.

Apparently Johnny Depp bought an island for around $3,000,000 a while back. And, since there aren't exactly power lines running to the tiny island, he had to figure out how to power his (ridiculously posh) home. For the green-minded Depp, diesel generators just weren't an option.

So he turned to Mike Strizki to help him build a system that would produce enough power to quench his celebrity-born thirst for decadence while not throwing off massive amounts of greenhouse gas. The result is a solar system that stores excess energy as hydrogen for use at night, or during cloudy times of day (not too common in the Bahamas, but still.)

The system, to me, seems vastly inefficient. Hydrogen gas is terrible at storing energy in a small space unless it can be compressed a great deal. But Strizki's system uses propane tanks to keep costs low. The result is that 10 thousand-gallon propane tanks are needed to store enough hydrogen to get the island through the night. You can see a video of his less exotic system (in New Jersey) here.

Power storage for renewable systems is a huge deal. But this strikes me as a rather inelegant solution. But a high pressure tank would be costly, and of course require an energy-hungry compressor. So maybe Depp's system is the best we're going to get.

In any case, it's hard to call any of this green when the excesses of owning your own island are so obvious. But I suppose it's better than complete disregard for the environment..

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A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Trevor Paque at work in San Francisco in a garden his company planted in a client’s backyard.

By KIM SEVERSON

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden?

That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.

Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.

Even couples planning a wedding at the Plaza Hotel in New York City can jump on the local food train. For as little as $72 a person, they can offer guests a “100-mile menu” of food from the caterer’s farm and neighboring fields in upstate New York.

“The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other people to grow it for you,” said Corby Kummer, the food columnist and book author. “This has become fashion.”

Locally grown food, even fully cooked meals, can be delivered to your door. A share in a cow raised in a nearby field can be brought to you, ready for the freezer — a phenomenon dubbed cow pooling. There is pork pooling as well. At Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont, the demand for a half or whole rare-breed pig is so great that people will not be seeing pork until the late fall.

Although a completely local diet is out of reach for even the most dedicated, the shift toward it is being driven by the increasingly popular view that fast food is the enemy and that local food tastes better. Depending on the season, local produce can cost an additional $1 a pound or more. But long-distance food, with its attendant petroleum consumption and cheap wages, is harming the planet and does nothing to help build communities, locavores believe.

As a result of interest in local food and rising grocery bills, backyard gardens have been enjoying a renaissance across the country, but what might be called the remote-control backyard garden — no planting, no weeding, no dirt under the fingernails — is a twist. “They want to have a garden, they don’t want to garden,” said the cookbook author Deborah Madison, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.

Her neighbor Chase Ault, a business consultant, recently had a vegetable garden installed with a customized set of plants and a regular service agreement. “I am working 24-7 these days, but I wanted to have something growing in front of me,” Ms. Ault said.

Like organic food, which corporate manufacturers embraced in the 1990s, before it, local food is quickly moving into the mainstream. Last year, the New Oxford American Dictionary picked locavore as its word of the year. A National Restaurant Association survey this year of more than 1,200 chefs, many of whom work for chain restaurants or large food companies, found locally grown produce to be the second-hottest American food trend, just behind bite-size desserts.

For a growing number of diners, a food’s provenance is more important than its brand name, said Michelle Barry, who studies American eating patterns for the Hartman Group, a research firm in Bellevue, Wash. As a result, grocery stores are looking to repackage products like milk and cheese to play up any local angle.

That will be a boon to people who find that shortcuts are necessary if they wish to eat locally. “If you live on East 80th 14 floors up and all you have is a potted plant, it’s tough,” said Lynne Rossetto Kasper, the host of the radio show “The Splendid Table,” who recruited 15 listeners for a study on the subject. Researchers will record their struggles to make 80 percent of their meals from organic or local sources. Spices are the only exemption.

Lazy locavores would never go to such extremes. Rather, they might simply sign up with the FruitGuys. The company, which has offices in San Francisco and Philadelphia, will deliver boxes of local, sustainably raised or organic fruit right to the cubicle.

In the mood for a meal that reeks of community but does not necessitate a communal activity? Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley, Calif., which describes itself as a community supported kitchen, offers its customers the opportunity to make friends while making food from local, sustainable farms, but the worker-owned company also offers online shopping for people who do not have the time to pick up orders or participate in educational activities.

Customers 20 miles away in the affluent community of Mill Valley, for example, can pay $15 to have jars filled with Andalusian stew, made with pasture-raised pork, delivered to their door. The jars, of course, are returnable.

“It’s a very savvy crowd that understands how all the pieces of sustainable farming and nutrition fit together,” said Larry Wisch, one of five worker-owners at Three Stone Hearth. “But they don’t want the headaches of getting here.”

Or you could just have your private chef handle all your local food needs. At their Hamptons summer house, John and Lorna Brett Howard want to eat almost exclusively local, which means that in place of one trip to the grocery store, their chef, Michael Welch, makes several trips to farm stands and the fishmonger.

“What I’m seeing with my clients is not the trendiness or the politics,” Mr. Welch said. “They are looking only at taste.”

Mrs. Howard said she ate local vegetables growing up in northern Michigan and Chicago. But her husband, a private equity fund manager, ate a lot of expensive imported food with little thought about where it came from. But all that has changed.

“It’s like the first time you start drinking good red wine and you realize what you were drinking was so bad you can’t go back to it,” Mrs. Howard said. “It’s that same way with vegetables.”

The author Barbara Kingsolver, whose book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” was a best seller last year, did not have the lazy locavore in mind when she wrote about the implications of making her family spend a year eating local. But she celebrates the trend.

“As a person of rural origin who has lived much of my life in rural places,” she said, “I can’t tell you how joyful it makes me to hear that it’s trendy for people in Manhattan to own a part of a cow.”

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The Real Dangers of Dolly: Rain and Floods

By Andrea Thompson, Senior Writer

A man rides a scooter chair through downtown Brownsville, Texas, as Hurricane Dolly approaches the Rio Grande Valley, Wednesday, July 23, 2008. Hurricane Dolly churned into a Category 2 storm as its eye neared the Texas-Mexico border Wednesday, bringing fierce winds and heavy rains that blew down signs, damaged an apartment complex and knocked out electricity to thousands. Credit: AP Photo/Matt Slocum

As Hurricane Dolly batters the coasts of Texas and Mexico, it's not the whipping winds that residents should be most worried about. It's the water.

Storm surge accounts for the majority of hurricane-related deaths.

As history and studies of severe weather have shown, storm surge and torrential rains can wreak havoc on coastal communities; the power of water, along with the suddenness with which floods can happen, often catches people by surprise, with potentially devastating consequences.

Flooding, which can result from both torrential rains and the ocean surf a storm can push ashore, is what officials in Texas were most concerned about after Dolly made landfall as a Category 2 hurricane at 9 am EDT on Wednesday. Residents of the Rio Grande Valley have been warned of potential severe flooding and possible levee breaks.

The National Hurricane Center predicted that Dolly could drop a total of 6 to 10 inches (15 to 25 centimeters) of rainfall in the next few days, with some isolated spots potentially getting soaked by up to 15 inches.

When an area receives such a large amount of rain in a short period of time, it can cause flash flooding. As the name implies, these floods can happen suddenly, with water rising several feet in a matter of minutes and taking unsuspecting communities by surprise.

On average over the last 30 years, more people have died as a result of flooding than from lightning, tornadoes or hurricanes, according to the National Weather Service. And almost half of all fatalities that result from flash flooding are vehicle-related, as rapidly rising waters can quickly inundate roads. Many drivers try to cross the water, only to be swept away in the current — it only takes about 2 feet of water to float a car, and 500 pounds of force pushes on a car for each foot of water rise, according the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Pedestrians fare no better: Six inches of fast-moving water can knock a person off their feet. Not to mention the debris that can be carried along by the floods, which can often tear down trees and roll boulders.

Flash floods typically occur when a slow-moving thunderstorm or large storms such as a tropical storm or hurricane pelt an area with rain so fast that the ground can't soak all the water up. Flooding can be particularly bad in urban areas, because roads and parking lots don't soak up as much water as soil might, turning streets into rivers. (An intense thunderstorm that dumped 1.5 inches of rain over Manhattan in just one hour in August of 2007 flooded the subway system and several stations, crippling the city for several hours.)

Another watery force, storm surge, is viewed as the most destructive part of a hurricane. Storm surge can build for hours before a hurricane makes landfall as the storm's winds push against the ocean and cause the water to pile up higher than the sea's usual level.

As the hurricane makes landfall, the water is pushed onshore and can quickly wash many miles inland, destroying homes and businesses. The storm surge from Hurricane Katrina, for example, was estimated to have reached heights of 24 to 28 feet (7 to 8.5 meters) along a 20-mile swath of the Gulf Coast and washed up to 12 miles inland, devastating the Mississippi coast.

The National Weather Service warned coastal residents of Texas that storm surges of 4 to 6 feet above normal tide level could inundate the coast north of the center of the storm and that the storm would bring with it "dangerous battering waves."

While Dolly is unlikely to be the disaster that Katrina was, officials are still warning residents of low-lying areas to stay in shelters, out of the way of floods and storm surge.

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