Bike, walk or skate a three mile course on vehicle free streets – from Roland Park to Druid Hill Park from noon to 4 p.m. on May 5.  It’s Baltimore’s fifth Ciclovía.  Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake kicks off the festivities at noon at the Roland Park Shopping Center. Ride with her southbound down Roland Avenue and West University Parkway, turn right at Tudor Arms Avenue to Beech Avenue, then take Wyman Park Drive to Druid Hill Park. Or ride from DH Park north to Roland Avenue.

Along the way check out Bike Maryland’s bike safety rodeos, stop by Tunes @ The Tower for some delicious food,  and look for the Yellow Crested Night Herons that are nesting along the Wyman Park Bridge. Local bike shops will also be on hand to tune bikes along the course and instruct children on bicycling safety.

The Roland Park Civic League, Keswick Multi Care Center and Baltimore City BMore Streets for People Program are organizer/hosts of this first multi-neighborhood Ciclovía. Collaborators include  Friends of Druid Hill Park; the Rolden, Hoes Heights, Wyman Park, Hampden and Remington neighborhood associations; the City of Baltimore; and Johns Hopkins University.

Baltimore Green Week Happenings

Baltimore Green Week is approaching. Officially it starts with EcoFest in Druid Hill Park on April 21st but there are also some great activities the preceding week.  Once again, Baltimore Green Map has collaborated with Baltimore Green Works to create a picture of the diversity of activities and to help you find their locations on a map. Click on this image to connect with the interactive map.  Then click on any icon and it will tell you the date, time and details of the event.

Green Map System has introduced its 2012 International Green
Mapmakers Advisory Council.  As Director of Baltimore Green Map, I’m pleased to be representing the USA,  and always interested  expanding the international collaborative possibilities. Here’s the group:

Janet Felsten, PlaceWise, Baltimore, Maryland USA

Ciprian Samoila, Harta Verde Romania, Bistrita Romania

Marco Kusumawijaya, Rujak, Jakarta, Indonesia

Arne Purves, City of Cape Town, South Africa

Nicola Furey, Earth Focus, Geneva, Switzerland

Maeve Lydon, Common Ground & University of Victoria, Victoria, BC Canada

Keiko Nakagawa, Chubu Recycle Citizens’ Organization, Nagoya, Japan

Ben Andersen, EkoBlekinge, Blekinge, Sweden

André Guilherme, Mapa Verde – Sorocaba, Soracabo SP, Brazil

Baltimore Green Map has had maps online for several years now.  Over 60 site nominations have come from map users suggesting other places that should be on the map.  And we have attracted some useful and lovely comments about sites mapped.   Each is found on the comments tab on the site’s more info listing. We hope many more people will add relevant comments! Here’s a recent sampling – nostalgic, informative, practical:

Passing on this message from Food and Faith’s Angela Smith:

It is the great pleasure of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future to be able to welcome Mr. Will Allen to Baltimore on Wednesday, March 7th at 12:15 PM in Sommer Hall (E2014) at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, 615 N. Wolfe Street, Baltimore, MD 21205.
Mr. Allen, a McArthur Genius award winner , is the founder of Growing Power in Milwaukee. Several years ago Mr. Allen took over some abandoned land in urban Milwaukee and has since created a small thriving farm that produces vegetables, fish, worm compost, and perhaps most importantly, a place for the community to learn how to “grow, process, market, and distribute food in a sustainable manner.”  Mr. Allen will be talking “On the Future of Food” and will stick around after the talk for a book signing.

A flyer with additional information, including how to RSVP, can be found here.

Anticipating Spring?  Feeling that there’s too much truth in this Horsey cartoon from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer?

The annual Greater Baltimore Children and Nature Conference is coming soon and can help turn your energy toward productive connections and strategies to fulfill the No Child Left Inside goal we Marylanders have adopted along with the new Environmental Literacy standards from our Department of Education.

by David Horsey, cartoonist, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

February 23, 2012
8:30 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. + networking opportunities after
Cylburn Arboretum
4915 Greenspring Ave.
Baltimore, MD 21209

Learn about local resources and initiatives, enjoy Cylburn’s magnificent grounds, get hands-on with a service project or simply confer with like-minded folks to provide more opportunities for our children to interact with natural environments.  The Collaborative has had a productive past 12 months thanks to a dynamic steering committee and a dedicated coordinator, Michael Dorsey.

This just in from Baltimore Free Store:
“In this season which for many results in over-consuming and overspending, Baltimore Free Store continues to promote reuse and redistribution with a Free Market give-away.

Sunday December 18th Free Market
2640 St. Paul Street
Baltimore, MD 21218

Accepting donations 10am – 11:45am
Redistributing donations 12:15pm – 3pm
(unless we run out sooner)

We will be accepting gently used non-furniture items and redistributing them to the community at this Free Market event.  All donations are tax-deductible and given away completely for free!  Anyone and everyone is encouraged to shop & donate at this event – there are no qualifications!  If you would like to volunteer, email VolunteerBFS@gmail.com.

www.baltimorefreestore.org”

Catch up on Baltimore Green Map’s 2011 activities as the year draws to an end.

Click on the image below to access the full newsletter.

Illustrating OGM Use

Baltimore Green Map was invited to present Green Mapping as an example of “How Communities are Using Mapping Tools” at Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond’s October 13, 2011 Unleashing the Power of Local Data conference. Participants had their laptops open for the interactive element, time to explore Open Green Map. We combined information from our own archives, Open Green Map screen grabs and the Green Map System’s Resources to put together a presentation that illustrated a diversity of map scales and strategies to collect information. We also wanted to demonstrate full utilization of the OGM features More info, Comments, Multimedia, Impacts before turning participants loose to browse maps on their own. Those user input features are where “the power” and potential of Green Mapping resides. Besides Baltimore’s four OGM maps, we directed participants to VCU Richmond, Brooklyn’s Red Hook, NYC Green Apple, San Francisco and Capetown and also included DC Green as an example of a government using internal GIS mapping with GMS icons to display City sustainability initiatives.  If you want to view it, here is the link!

Tuesday, July 19th offers hard choices:

At 7:00 PM the 2011 Food & Faith Summer Film Series  will be showing Dirt! The Movie, a film about Earth’s most valuable and under-appreciated source of fertility from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation. Dirt feeds us and gives us shelter. Dirt holds and cleans our water. Dirt heals us and makes us beautiful. Dirt regulates the earth’s climate. Dirt is the ultimate natural resource for all life on earth. It also makes for a surprisingly interesting and entertaining subject.

“Please join us as we enjoy some locally grown popcorn while we watch the film and discuss as a group
how we can better value our dirt. Cheryl Carmona, urban farmer, Master Gardener, and soil scientist  will be on hand to help answer questions during the discussion. (No cost or reservations required.)”

7-9 pm at Stony Run Friends Meeting House, 5116 North Charles, Sponsored by the Baltimore Food and Faith Project, a project of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.

or , alas, same time frame, 7 p.m. on the 19th, The Big Uneasy is screening at The Charles Theater. Director Harry Shearer will be there in person.

” ‘The Big Uneasy’ is the first documentary by long-time “mockumentarian” Harry Shearer (of “Spinal Tap” and “The Simpsons”). The film follows three remarkable people–the leaders of two scientific investigation teams, and one whistleblower–as they reveal the true story of why New Orleans flooded, and why it could happen in other cities across America. Shearer speaks to the tireless investigators and experts who poked through the muck as the water receded, and uncovers a courageous whistle-blower from the Army Corps of Engineers. His dogged pursuit of facts reveals that some of the same flawed methods responsible for levee failure during Hurricane Katrina are being used to rebuild the system expected to protect the “new” New Orleans from future peril.”

You can learn more about the film and watch the trailer at The Big Uneasy.