Green Day: March 20, 2008

Fresh Direct is instituting an educational program at P.S. 27 in Red Hook that "will teach two second grade classrooms about plant lifecycles, healthy, local food choices, and environmental stewardship. FreshDirect's presentation will introduce students to seasonality growth charts and will familiarize them with local produce from New York State." (press release)

Novelist Marc Acito doesn't love seeing his new book released in e-book format for Amazon's paperless book-reader, Kindle, but will admit its environmental salutariness. (Portfolio.com)

Meanwhile, The Strand is one of the New York bookstores participating in the Eco-Libris project, whereby book buyers can purchase a sticker that gets put on their book advertising that 1.3 trees have been planted in "a developing country" for each book they've bought. (press release)

A plan to create 28 acres of new parkland in the Bronx has met cost overruns of almost 50 percent; the replacement parkland is meant to make up for parkland removed to make way for the Yankees' new stadium. Officials say there are no plans to pare down the project. (Newsday.com)

You can read Mayor Michael Bloomberg's remarks about his office's congestion-pricing initiative, delivered at the Crain's Breakfast forum yesterday, here.

Acting in New York City yesterday, New York State's Public Service Commission adopted a plan (which had been an Eliot Spitzer initiative) to reduce power consumption in the state by 15 percent before the year 2015. (timesunion.com)

The city's Office of Emergency Management is organizing a team of local, state and national agencies to come up with a unified response to the possibility of a serious flooding event in New York. In this article, analysis by researcher Klaus Jacob of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory plays a central role in defining the problem. (nysun.com)