Fishtown AC Timmy Goebig, 12, stands in center field on a cinder field at Shissler Recreation Center in Fishtown on Thursday, June 25, 2009. (Yong Kim / Staff Photographer)

Here's one of Dan Geringer's patented heartwarming neighborhood stories - and this one has more than a little to do with the Green theme. Of course turning the city's last cinder-based ballfield into one with grass is in itself a "green" initiative, but it's part of a project to return a vast stretch of  North Philly to a more natural and sustainable environment. Read on right here or click through for the Daily News version that has a complete map of where and how the greening will occur: 

Fishtown's cinder field giving way to grass after generations of scraped knees

After forcing Fishtown kids to play with pain for more than 50 years, Philadelphia's last cinder ballfield is finally going green.

Shissler Rec's grass baseball/soccer field will be the crown jewel in a $1.2 million, six-block "Green Connection: Shissler to the River" plan that the city's newly merged Department of Parks and Recreation unveils today.

"We're living the merger before we actually merge in July," said Michael DiBerardinis, parks and recreation commissioner, announcing that other major improvements include:

* Replacing Shissler Rec's blacktop parking lot - which sends storm-water runoff flooding into Blair Street - with a permeable surface that will prevent those floods.

"All the water will go into the earth in a natural way instead of getting siphoned into sewers that overload, flood and carry all the high-fecal waste into our rivers and streams," DiBerardinis said.

* The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society will plant rain gardens around the rec center and trees all along Columbia Avenue and around Hetzell Field, at Columbia and Thompson.

»  More Field of Green Dreams

This is where you'll find the HYDRA between 10 am and 5 pm Tuesday.

While the water in the gulf continues to be rendered unsuitable for humans and other living things, Earth to Philly continues to remind you that there are other water concerns, some closer to home, others further away.

One concern for people living far from the gulf, or for anyone in the midst of a natural disaster, is clean drinking water, and the lack of same. Worldwide, unsafe drinking water is responsible for the death of 4,000 children a day, according to UNICEF. And while water-purification technology is continually improved, it's generally a matter of large energy-hungry machines housed in metropolitan-area buildings.

On Tuesday, Philadelphia's Waterworks will host a demonstration of a potential solution, the HYDRA, called "the world's first mobile solar hydrogen powered water purification and community energy station system." Before Congressman Chaka Fattah, Councilman Curtis Jones and other city officials, the team from The Essential Element will show how the HYDRA uses solar energy both to run the purification unit and to electrolyze the water to produce excess hyrdogen. This can be stored for additional purifying power after the sun goes down or used as fuel for a stove, for instance.

"The point of this," says spokesperson Rob Stuart, "is to take technology that heretofore was only available in the midst of civilization" and make it available to people in remote areas, those hardest-hit by the lack of clean water - and, of course, a lack of ready energy to run water purifiers. The company, he notes, has already heard from NGOs and disaster-relief agencies interested in checking out the potential of this handy clean-water dynamo.

Stuart stresses that the HYDRA can process 20,000 gallons a day, "physically removing virus and bacteria, rather than just treating it." The Philadelphia Waterworks Interpretive Center staff will be on hand to analyze before-and-after water samples.

The Waterworks site was chosen specifically because "Philadelphia's waterworks made history in the 1850s, and this is set to make history as well." With a working prototype and scalable production plans, the Pennsylvania-based company is looking to manufacture the HYDRA locally.

The demonstration for elected officials (and the public) will be at 11 am. There will be an additional demonstration at 2 p.m. The HYDRA and The Essential Element team will be at the Waterworks (that building on the river behind the Art Museum) throughout the day. Stop by and see if it's true that, as Rob Stuart says, "it really is possible to bottle sunshine."

Maybe you're going to see The A-Team this weekend, and maybe not. It's certainly getting what might be called mixed reviews. But you can't go wrong with the Green Team.

Specifically, the Bright Green Clean Team, an initiative sponsored by Safeway enlisting volunteers to clean up key areas in various towns using green home-care products. They'll be at Reading Terminal Market on Saturday (yes, tomrorrow) from 9 am to 6 pm, and at the Camden Aquarium on Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm. This will be the second of their 7-city "clean-up campaign."

The folks behind this did a similar campaign last year, but this year the tour has expanded to include a special drawing for a comprehensive clean-up day for a local school in each of the seven markets. You can readthe rules for this drawing here. The press release assures us that "All on-site participants will receive free samples of BRIGHT GREEN™ cleaning products," so if helping to get parts of Philly (OK, the Greater Philly Metropolitan Area) cleaned up isn't enough incentive, maybe the free stuff will be.

Either way, it should be a fine weekend. Blogging will be light - if not necessarily Bright - next week.

Hey jackass, get off the sidewalk!

Today there's another skirmish in the Great War between Stu Bykofsky and the Bicycle Coalition of Philadelphia. As you may recall, the last was capped with a live chat where Stu debated Alex Doty on the need for bike lanes and/or the need for bike enthusiasts to sit down and shut up, depending on who you asked.

Earth to Philly won't pretend to be any kind of ultimate arbiter. I think I can speak for the whole Earth to Philly team in saying we're pro-bike, pro-bike-lane, and pro-Stu. But a couple of different observations are in order.

In the chat, Stu dismissed Alex's reference to Bicycle Ambassadors, saying he'd never seen a single one. That could be sample bias, given that Stu's not a big bike-rider. Neither am I, but I've seen them before at green-related outdoor events and especially last weekend at the bike race. It just seems logical that if you're trying to educate bicyclists you would put your ambassadors where people interested in bicycling would be likely to be, no?

Meanwhile, though, Stu did get a statistician at Temple to go over the sidewalk-riding numbers the coalition had put out and that expert called the coalition's methodology "invalid." Stu challenged the Coalition to find a credible stats expert who would say the opposite. So far this challenge does not seem to have been met, nor has the Coalition explicitly debunked the Temple prof's assessment. Dodging this issue only helps give credence to Stu's charge that the city should not be accepting coalition numbers at face value.

As for sidewalk-riding in and of itself, I can see both sides - kind of. There are spots in Center City where passing through them, it's pretty dangerous to stay on the street and simple and easy to pop up on the sidewalk to get around that danger spot. But that doesn't change the fact that doing so is illegal. If you feel the need to go onto the sidewalk, try getting off and walking your bike for that stretch. At the very least, recognize that you do not have right of way. Along with Stu, I'm sick and tired of having to get out of the way of a scofflaw barrelling towards me on the sidewalk.

»  More Notes on the Great War (Stu v. Bikes)

Trouble may be lurking beneath traditional pastoral scenes.

Last fall, the Daily News and Earth to Philly were among the first outlets to tip everyone to Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, which wound up creating quite a mainstream-media stir over the winter.

Foer's key point was that 99% of the animal products Americans eat comes from factory farms, through processes none of us would condone, so if we want to act according to our own values we would either stop eating animals or carefully seek out smaller family farms to source our meat and dairy.

You gotta wonder what Foer, who not only accepted but actively championed more "traditional" farming of animals, would think of the latest news from our neck of the woods, courtesy of the New York Times: Lancaster County, the bastion of traditional Amish farming, is polluting the Chesapeake Bay with manure runoff far more than any other surrounding county - six times as much as the norm, in fact. The EPA visited 23 "plain-sect" farms and found that the vast majority were "managing their manure inadequately."

There are ways to improve manure-handling to mitigate the pollution, but Donald Kraybill, a professor at Elizabethtown College who studies the Amish, puts the basic problem succinctly in the Times piece: “We have too many animals here per square acre — too many cows for too few acres.”

And that large number of animals is going to be a problem, no matter how you, um, slice it. The massive amount of animal products Americans consume inevitably generates a huge amount of manure as well as many other problems for animals and people alike.

Lately "factory farms" have become a useful, trendy scapegoat, as if these institutions operations were uniquely evil and could be changed to an idyllic alternative. The pollution problem, though, is not on surface particulars but at the core: It's a matter of volume, and we need to turn it down. Way down.

What a blast it was to hang out yesterday with the awesome members of the West Philly Hybrid X Team, whom I wrote about in today’s Daily News and have written about in the past. The kids are all students in West Philadelphia High School’s Academy of Automotive and Mechanical Engineering, and they have a real shot at winning the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize – a contest aimed at spurring new green automotive technology.

The $10 million international competition invites teams to design and build an affordable, alternative-energy car that gets 100 miles per gallon and can be mass-produced. Entrants must also must submit a business plan detailing where and how the car will be made and marketed.

The competition will award $5 million for the best four-door economy car; $2.5 million each will go to two winners in a two-seater category. West Philly submitted applications in both classes.

While 111 hopeful teams entered the competition, only 22 remain after a series of grueling elimination rounds. The West Philly Hybrid X Team is one of them.

To meet some of the team members and their Pied Piper-esque founder, the amazing Simon Hauger, click on the video below.

You heard it here first: These people are going to change the way we drive.

Here's today's Editorial from the Daily News. Read it here or in the newspaper section of philly.com.

Congress may mandate dirtier air

NEWS PHOTOS of oil-covered pelicans off the coast of Louisiana drives home the damage being done by the BP oil catastrophe. And evidence continues to gush out that the disaster could have been avoided if environmental regulations already on the books had been enforced.

No wonder a growing number of Americans scream at their televisions - and their government -that more must be done to prevent unnatural disasters like these from happening again.

So it is downright surreal that the U.S. Senate will vote Thursday on a measure that would gut the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate other dangers to the environment caused by the "dirty energy" - in this case, greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Invoking a little-used law, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and 39 co-sponsors are pushing such a resolution, written in large part by energy-industry lobbyists. It needs only 51 votes to pass.

Pennsylvania Sens. Arlen Specter and Bob Casey are on record opposing the Murkowski resolution, but even with the terrible consequences of weak regulations staring us in the face, it's possible that the Senate and then the House, which introduced a companion bill, could approve it.

Some background: In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with 12 states, three cities and several environmental groups to rule that the Clean Air Act requires the EPA to determine if greenhouse gases endanger public health and, if so, to regulate them. (The Bush administration's EPA had argued it didn't have this authority.) In December, the EPA ruled that six gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, pose a danger to the environment and public health, and that the agency would craft regulations to reduce them. Most agreed, then and now, that it would be better policy if Congress adopted a comprehensive climate- change law instead; the "endangerment finding" served as leverage to get Congress moving.

»  More Stop the 'Dirty Air Act'

Look familiar?

So the latest attempt (I've kinda lost count but I think it's around the 327th) to stop the BP oil spill has resulted in failure like all the others, and the devasatation this disaster is causing in the Gulf of Mexico (and, very soon, elsewhere) has now progressed beyond the "epic" stage to... whatever comes after "epic."

Twenty-two million gallons and counting. It's so big and so awful it's hard to get your mind around it. But there are other water woes closer to home, so if you're feeling powerless in the face of the problem down south, take a look in your backyard. As CNN reports today

A U.S. conservation group released a list Wednesday of what it says are America's 10 most endangered rivers, which face man-made threats from gas drilling and new dams to outdated flood management. The list and accompanying report from American Rivers highlights the threats facing each waterway and urges the public to act to protect them.

And again we have a dubious distinction at #1: The most threatened of all Rivers in the country is the Upper Delaware River, which provides drinking water for 17 million people. "Natural gas drilling in the area threatens the river as a clean water source," the folks at American Rivers note in the article.

This concept, in general, is nothing new to Earth to Philly readers. Still, the #1 status brings something of an increased urgency to our regional issues, and if you care about clean water you may want to act while there is still time to do something about it. The American Rivers site has a handy page where you can contact "decision-makers" - in this case Carol Collier, Executive Director of the Delaware River Basin Commission, and make your voice heard. But in the interest of clean water for the future you should also educate yourself about where our drinking water is going and the most effective ways to reduce your water footprint.

Whether or not we arrive soon at a point where clean drinking water is as scarce in North America as it is in some impverished areas of the globe, it's clear that we need to start protecting it. Come on - water we waiting for?

An oil-covered pelican flaps its wings on an island in Barataria Bay off the coast of Louisiana, Sunday, May 23, 2010.

Among the bits of conventional wisdom with which I am at odds (see: William Hung was perfectly in tune) is the concept that Donald Rumsfeld was speaking gobbledygook when he referenced "unknown unknowns - things we do not know we don’t know."

The phrase makes perfect sense, grammatically, syntactically and conceptually. And as word comes that the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is now officially the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history (we're #1!), it's an important concept to bear in mind. Because it's now clear "we" did not know how little "we" knew about what to do when the unthinkable happens.

What's clear is that industries' assurances to our government, and the latter's assurances to the public, about the failsafe nature of a huge, potentially dangerous and landscape-altering form of energy generation are no longer to be taken without several million grains of salt.

And yes, I'm looking at you, nuclear power. As Obama says he was wrong in his belief that "the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios," why would we now grant such a a benefit of the doubt to those in charge of an even more potentially devastating industry?

To date I still have heard no satisfactory explanation of how, even in the best-case scenario, we're supposed to permanently store or eliminate the burgeoning tons of nuclear waste generated by this technology. And in any scenario less than the best-case, if anything goes wrong, we could be talking about an unstoppable amount of contamination of our environment and our children's bodies that would easily outpace this current record-holder.

»  More UPDATED: Worst worst-case scenario ever?