Fountain Square Goes Green!
In 1871 a butcher’s market located in the center of Cincinnati was closed. In it’s place The Genus of Water was erected, creating our city’s iconic heart, Fountain Square. This year a market returns. Strauss and Troy’s Market on Fountain Square is a farmers market featuring home grown and locally made vegetables, flowers and food. Each Tuesday from 11-2 pm, June 2 – September 29 vendors will set up their goods on the square. One local, family owned food stand hopes to bring Cincinnati’s unprecedented role in the green movement to light.
In June 2008, the Office of Environmental Quality along with members of City Council drafted our city’s Climate Protection Plan, known as The Green Cincinnati Plan. The plan was created with specific greenhouse gas reduction goals in mind for the purpose of reducing our collective planetary impact. Along with 80 points of emphasis on what citizens can do to green their lifestyle, one point stands out as being scientifically proven to be the most effective, and yet no other city in the U.S. had yet formalized it’s recommendation.
A quote that is sometimes attributed to Mark Twain says “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always twenty years behind the times.” And while we don’t know the historical accuracy of the quote, one thing we do know is that Cincinnati has become a bold and trendsetting example on the most important issue of our time, with other cities such as Akron, and Vancouver to follow.
Climate change will continue to be the topic on everyone’s mind this summer, as we head into the warmest months in the year with the least polar ice measured on record. Local farmers have been adjusting to increasingly longer and drier growing seasons and we all remember last years damaging wind-storms, an unexpected backlash from the Gulf’s hurricane Ike. All in all, however, Cincinnati has remained an environmentally peaceful and functional place. We have not yet seen the ecological strains that have effectively altered daily life for many Americans. Califonia’s droughts, increasingly violent hurricanes in the Gulf states, record breaking Mid-Western floods, more frequent tornados along the Plains and in the Southern states can all be attributed to global warming; our planet’s natural reaction to “human activity” or what can be better desribed as “massive-scale thoughtlessness.”
The Green Cincinnati Plan addresses the most fundamental aspect of this thoughtlessness with it’s recommendation to citizens to eat less or completely stop eating animals and animal products. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC’s) Dr. Rajendra Pachari, animal agriculture is responsible for a conservative estimate of up to 50% of total greenhouse gas effect. The gases emitted from millions of tons of untreated animal waste may be less than carbon in quantity but far surpass CO2 in climate warming quality. The two biggest offenders are methane and nitrous oxide which are 32 and 298 times respectively more potent than carbon in heating the Earth. The good news is that while carbon lingers in the atmosphere for 100 or more years, nitrous oxide and methane dissipate relatively quickly, only 8 years or so. This means that cutting out animal agriculture, the number one cause of climate change, would bring, almost immediately, cooling results.
This year at Strauss and Troy’s Market on Fountain Square, Cincinnatian’s can stop by the Green Earth Grill to enjoy a tasty, animal free and Earth friendly lunch on the go. Green Earth Grill was created in response to the Green Cincinnati Plan and will be serving on Fountain Square every Tuesday through the summer and at other local events in the Tri-State area. Green Earth Grill hopes to provide patrons not only the opportunity to enjoy a sustainable, healthy lunch but also the support to incorporate the animal-free diet into their lives.
Convenience is a matter of importance for many considering a lifestyle change, and Cincinnati is becomming better equipped to handle this change for the better. Pleasant Ridge has welcomed a new vegan eatery, Loving Cafe which gains popularity daily! Even radio ads for our hometown favorite Skyline Chili have announced that they have many menu items for those who are “thinking about going vegetarian.”
Perhaps one day Cincinnati can look upon the closing of a meat-market in exchange for the birth of it’s communal heart as a prophetic incident pointing to a future of personal and collective transformation.
written by: Eve
www.evesecopinions.com
