Something that I have been involved with this year is helping to prepare from Charleston Race Week with Clean Regattas. Clean Regattas is an organization that encourages regattas to practice sustainability to protect our oceans. You can register a regatta and form a green team on the Clean Regattas website. I sail for the college, and am a Sustainable Urbanism major with a Sustainability minor, so this event was interesting to me in many ways.

Charleston Race Week is the biggest keelboat regatta in America, hosted here in Charleston, and is sponsored by Sperry. Charleston Race Week is now in its 21st year (the regatta was established in 1996). In 2006, Charleston Race Week drew entries from as far away as England, Canada, Michigan, and California, with more than 70 percent of the competitors arriving from out of town. The story was much the same in 2007 and 2008, with increased numbers of participants each year. The event has grown by an average of 15 percent in recent years and evolved to become the largest keelboat regatta in the Western Hemisphere.

Clean regattas is the world’s only sustainability certification for water-based events.
Over 1,000 regattas, gams, rallies and cruises have registered as Clean Regattas. One part education, two parts activation, the program unites and mobilizes sailors by offering support and resources to help conserve and protect the ocean.

Working with Clean Regattas, you are part of a green team that is dedicated to sustainability. You assess, begin, and follow through on clean regatta initiatives. You then document these initiatives. Some initiatives include:

1. Paperless regattas- going paperless for your regatta registrations and Notice of Race, and prioritizing paper communications.
2. Reduce plastic water bottles- provide or encourage the use of reusable water bottles (On average, Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour and many of them end up in the landfill, or worse, your local waterway.)
3. Responsible dinnerware- most regattas will provide a mean for their participants, and clean regattas encourages regattas to utilize responsible dinnerware that can be composted or recycled.
4. More responsible awards- Regatta trophies can be very energy-intensive to create and often end up sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere, so regattas are encouraged to find alternative trophy options.
5. Good Waste Management- Well-labeled bins and volunteers to help point people in the right direction are paramount to an event having good waste management.
6. Toxic-free Cleaning- You can request all participants limit their impact on local water quality by using “water only washdowns” (“WOW!”) at the end of racing. After most sailboat racing, competitors will wash salty water or other substances off of their boats (its bad for the boat if you leave it on there) and use harsh chemicals that usually run into the water. Hull scrubbing can lead to the build up of toxic chemicals in your local waters as well as the potential introduction of invasive species.
7. Efficient Power Boats- You can request that regattas utilize lightweight, fuel-efficient rigid inflatable boats (RIBs). These boats use carbon fiber and weigh a third of the weight of a normal RIB, while using only 20 percent of the fuel.
8. Trash cleanup- you also can go through the regatta site and clean up trash after the event.

Sailors for the Sea is the world’s leading conservation organization that engages, educates, inspires and activates the sailing and boating community toward healing the ocean. Their global affiliates help expand this mission across the globe. They work in places from Japan, to Portugal, to the US.

Being from West Virginia, we typically expect a harsh winter filled with snow. However, this year my home state was experiencing high temperatures through the winter months. Could this be from climate change? Growing up, winter was a time that had a lot of snow and cold temperatures. This year, I believe it only snowed in my hometown two times. One of those times was a pretty decent snow storm that lasted for only a couple of hours. The other time was a very light snow. There were days this past winter in West Virginia where the temperature would reach the high 60’s and low 70’s. With that in mind, I would say that the effects of global warming and climate change are becoming more clear. It is irregular for my home state to have a warm winter. Unfortunately, most people are not looking at this as an issue. People are happy about not having to deal with the cold weather and snow for a change. We were faced with warm winter days and this summer I am sure we will be faced with unbearable heat. Looking at the bigger picture, this will be bad for West Virginia.

The warmer temperatures will cause many environmental problems. Deer breed when the weather is warm, so the warm weather will allow the deer to reproduce even more. This could turn into a huge problem since deer are already so over populated in the state. You cannot drive anywhere without seeing a deer or two. In my neighborhood, it is not uncommon to see around five deer on your drive home. Another species that would be greatly effected is the state fish, the brook trout. The brook trout lives in cooler waters and if the temperature keeps rising, the water levels in the streams will decline and increase in temperature. This would lead for the brook trout to no longer be supported by the stream anymore. Droughts will increase along with flooding.

I did not start to see the effects of global warming in my home state until these past couple of years. I believe that this issue is only getting worse and our past winter is a great example of that.

Sources:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents/climate-change-wv.pdf

I have never considered myself as the person who has a green thumb. At home I would always get nervous when I was in charge of watering the flowers because I felt like they would always die when I just looked at them. That is why when my friend asked me if I wanted to come with her and check out the MUSC Urban Farm, I king of dragged my feet. Gardening and I were never friends. However, I thought back to everything I learned in this class and remembered thinking how sad it was that people do not know where their food comes from, so how could I not go and check it out?

We drove over to the half-acre garden out on Bee St. and I was amazed. In the middle of a concrete lot, there were rows and rows of plants. We got to work on planting…do not ask what kind. All I remember was basil. All the other names have already left my head. I’ll work on that, I promise. We weeded around some plots, saw some beautiful butterflies, and my highlight was the furry caterpillar that I became friends with.

After going and helping out, I became curious as to what the farm does to help out the community. After some research, I found out that their mission statement is, “The mission of the MUSC Urban Farm is to build a healthier community by growing crops and social connections while educating and inspiring people with local, nutritious, and delicious food.” I found it really cool how they create a real hands on environment where people can become inspired to learn about what they are eating and how to incorporate more vegetables into their every day lives. They offer workshops, seminars, and host school field trips to spread their message as far as they can. I think this hands on approach to education is the key to getting people involved and interested. I know it at least got me interested in attempting to take care of at least one plant over the summer as a summer project. Baby steps.

I attended a Charleston City Board of Zoning Appeals meeting recently. It was held in the public meeting room at the Gaillard Center Municipal Building. There were four board members (Leonard Krawcheck, Michael Robinson, Margaret Smith, John Lester) and three staff members (Lee Batchelder, Pennye Ashby, and Vanessa Ellington) present. The audience consisted of roughly thirty people, a larger meeting than I anticipated it to be. . The agenda consisted on only one point of business concerning a property within the west side of Charleston on 721 King Street. Those applying for the appeal wanted to convert the ground floor of their office building into a restaurant with 1,750sf for inside patron use and 400sf of outside use, without providing required off-street parking spaces.

Discussion of this site took well over an hour. It began with an employee of the applicant business, Urbs LLC, giving a presentation of their plan for the restaurant addition underneath the existing office. In order to conduct this reconstruction, a special exception under Sec. 54-511 would have to be granted. Charleston is full of atypical structures that do not fit the normal standards, and this employee was trying to persuade the council that 721 King was just another case. He brought well thought out presentation boards and wore a nice suit, but his theoretical land use initiative was missing one factor- input from the locals.

This was a major contrast to what came next. After his presentation, community members were asked if they had any comments to add. At least seven people from the audience stood up and voiced their unsupportive opinion of the restaurant addition. The first man, a resident of 1 Race Street, complained that it would negatively impact his community because of the limited parking. A pregnant woman from 9A Race Street also said that this would put a strain on the area. She claimed that she already had to park blocks away from her house due to the congestion in automobile circulation. When carrying groceries and small children home after a long day of work, the last thing anyone wants to do is make a long trek home. The woman talked about her elderly neighbor who rarely leaves her house since she is afraid to have to park her car on a street that isn’t her own. She expressed love for her neighborhood, saying that her family is proud of the build up of businesses and restaurants she has seen over the past five years. There are just practical issues of residents that need to be factored into this now booming area.

The neighborhood association president spoke next, and passionately discussed his interest to preserve the block. He hoped that residents would not lose the sense of contentment and intimacy they feel towards their neighborhood because of Charleston’s obvious gentrification up King Street. It is detrimental to have residents and patrons of these businesses fighting over their claim of the space. Traffic not only blocks in residents, but also the bus stops nearby.

The zoning board members discussed the parking issue amongst themselves. One by one they agreed to disapprove the motion. What stood out to me the most about this meeting was community involvement that comes with projects like this. Businesses want to come in and strictly make money. I mean in our capitalist society, isn’t that all people live for? It is when individual’s lives are negatively altered and inconvenienced that issues arise. This area is not just a developmental gold mine for urban planners; it is where dads teach their kids to ride bikes and the aging live out their last peaceful years. Space has meaning attached to it, and urban planning should heavily involve the people it affects in order to maintain positive social sustainability.

I went to an event hosted by the office of Sustainability. The event was called Clothing Swap. The name of the event pretty much explains exactly what it was about, which is swapping clothes. People including myself brought to the Alumni center clothing that was either new or only worn a few times. The clothes people brought in were put on hangers and hung on racks just like you would find in a clothing store. All anyone had to do was choose which ever clothing piece they wanted. I think this was a great event, not only because I got a few new shirts out of it, but because we all were putting use to the clothes we don’t wear anymore. In a sense it was like we were recycling our clothes because someone else would be putting them to great use. A good number of people came out to the event which was good. At the end they had a lot of left over clothes that I believe they would donate to someplace like goodwill or something. If the Office of Sustaniblilty was to host something like this again I definitely would go again. First off, I love shopping for clothes in the first place so swapping clothes is the next best thing. The main thing I liked about the event was you didn’t have to pay anything because you already paid for the clothes you brought to swap. I also believe that you didn’t even have to bring clothes if you didn’t want to, you could just chose which ones you wanted from the clothes that were already there. Overall in my opinion I think the event was a success.