Sonia Owens cooked the perfect s’more using a solar powered pizza box as a stove.

The 5-year-old was one of hundreds learning how to reduce their environmental footprints at the GetGreen: South Bronx Earth Fest. The event, held at St. Mary’s Park in Mott Haven, aimed to promote green lifestyles among neighborhood residents.

“We hope to stir up an internal desire to conserve,” said Miquela Craytor, deputy director of the Sustainable South Bronx, one of more than 30 community organizations, businesses and city agencies represented at the April 19 Earth Day event. More »

The city is giving the concrete jungle a makeover: Some 1,000,000 trees are slated to be planted across the five boroughs over the next nine years.

Officials say the Million Tree NYC campaign will boost the number of trees in the city by 20%. The city has raised some $600 million in seed money to fund the greening effort.

The organic food market is a small but fast-growing segment of the food industry with sales up more than 20 percent last year, despite rising costs.

Some Fairway shoppers said it was well worth budgeting the extra bucks to keep organic foods on the table.

DUMBO’S got a brand new bag.

The DUMBO Business Improvement District is handing out free reusable canvas bags to the neighborhood’s 1,300 households - and some storeowners are offering shoppers incentives to use the environmentally-friendly sacks.

“The plastic bag situation is terrible for the environment, and we know that paper bags are equally as taxing,” said Anna Castellani, owner of Foragers Market on Adams St., where shoppers who bring a reusable bag now get 10 cents off their bill.

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The Wishing Well community garden in the South Bronx soon will install a new toilet friendly to the environment but with a twist - the waste will be composted, and will end up a few feet away in plant and vegetable beds tended by students from nearby Public School 333.

Not everyone is thrilled about the cutting-edge composting toilet planned for Rev. James A. Polite Ave.: One garden volunteer doesn’t want schoolchildren using “human manure” - and some scientists say the fertilizer could be deadly.

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Maria Torres recalled the day 10 years ago, when she and a few others she called “on-water thrill-seekers” paddled in kayaks from Hunts Point to a little, tree-filled island in the East River.

Then Torres, the president of The Point Community Development Corporation, dipped a quill pen in ink and added her signature to a document that made the island she rediscovered that day a city park.

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The battle to redevelop Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal has been going on since the 1960’s. By then, the canal, once one of the state’s busiest waterways, had fallen largely into disuse. Many of the warehouses, factories and other industrial sites that lined the canal’s shores were abandoned.

Now, with residential real estate booming and the city’s population expanding, the area is on the verge of a new era of residential development. But as development plans go forward, every step requires a delicate balance of the city’s enormous need for housing, the environmental cleanup required on a century-old industrial waterway, and the ongoing needs of the businesses that remain in the area.

Click here for Matthew Sollars’ multi-media report.

Efforts to turn the embattled Brigham Street lot in Sheepshead Bay into a green space began to bear fruit as the district’s first community-born park project got a crucial boost.

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Long-time allies in the effort to clean up pollution in Hunts Point have fallen out over the fate of the 28-acre corner of the Oak Point rail yard where the city wants to build a jail.

Congressman Jose Serrano has denounced Sustainable South Bronx’s longstanding plan to create an industrial park devoted to remanufacturing discarded construction material there.

In an open letter to the Hunts Point community, Serrano contends the proposal would merely add another dumping ground to a neighborhood already overburdened with waste.

“We’ve had enough,” said the Democrat, who represents New York’s 16th Congressional District in the South Bronx. “I can’t support the idea we’ll be putting a lot of fanfare behind a project where some people will be sorting other people’s garbage.”
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Joseph Wroblowski was thrilled when T-Mobile offered to pay him more than $1,000 a month in exchange for putting a 27-foot cell phone antenna - disguised as a flagpole - on the roof of his Maspeth home.

After being criticized by his neighbors and learning more details about the project, Wroblowski decided the star-spangled headache is not worth the money. However, T-Mobile is not going to let him off the hook.
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For a map of cell phone towers in New York City, click here.