Search Results for: Meadow Dr

Albany Solid Waste Problem Still Not Addressed Openly

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by Tim Truscott   The month of June turned out to have some news related to the City of Albany’s solid waste disposal plans. It became known that the Mayor had created a Solid Waste Planning Committee which included her office, the landfill manager (Joe Giebelhaus), the Recycling Director (Frank Zeoli), a couple of the mayor’s friends on the Common Council and a representative of the City’s solid waste consultant (Barton & Loguidice). The committee had been meeting monthly for…

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Dr. George Robinson Sheds Light on Landfills, their Possibilities and Problems Post-closure.

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by Grace Nichols Dr. George Robinson is a professor in the Biodiversity and Conservation Policy graduate program at the University at Albany. He is very knowledgeable about landfills, as much of his work has involved transforming old landfills into positive open spaces which can meet the needs of local wildlife and local communities. Dr. Robinson’s students have traditionally used the Pine Bush as a place to conduct studies; Dr. Robinson maintains a good relationship with the Pine Bush Commission which…

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Integrating the Landfill into the Pine Bush or What do you do with a Landfill?

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by Lynne Jackson ALBANY: Dr. George Robinson gave an excellent succinct speech about landfill reclamation at the January Save the Pine Bush dinner at the First Presbyterian Church. Dr. Robinson, an associate professor of biology at the University of Albany, started by talking about the history of landfills. He mentioned many historic buildings, such as the Imperial Palace in Peking, are built on landfills. Landfills, explained Dr. Robinson, are land forms. They are highly engineered, and have about a 25-year…

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Save the Pine Bush

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"Man has disrupted the natural order in the Pine Bush with roads, developments and suppression of fires," said Stephanie Gebauer at the December Save the Pine Bush dinner. Ms. Gebauer, the first director of the Albany Pine Bush Preserve Research and Management of the Eastern New York Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, went on to describe how fires benefit the Pine Bush. Fires used to occur in the Pine Bush every five to ten to fifteen years. Particularly since the…

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Save the Pine Bush

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For Immediate Release: December 10, 2002 For Further Information: Contact Lynne Jackson at 434-1954 or 366-7324 ALBANY, NY: Save the Pine Bush volunteers demonstrated today over the destruction of the Pine Bush for the building of Avila House. Avila House is proposed to be built in the rare Pine Bush ecosystem. The Pine Bush is home to the Karner Blue butterfly, a federally-listed endangered species. The Federal Government has stated that the decline in the population of Karner Blues is…

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Karner blue to get habitat in Saratoga Spa State Park

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By Stephen Williams   Reporters who devote more than a semicolon and three dashes to environmental coverage find their inboxes full on Earth Day. The delete button and recycling bin are wonderful things, but a few items seem worth passing on. First, the state Department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation is creating new Karner blue butterfly habitat at Saratoga Spa State Park. That’s nice. The dime-size blue butterflies are pretty, and outside of a handful of places in the…

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Saratoga County’s Wilton preserve helps Karner blue

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  Wilton: More land at the Wilton Wildlife Preserve and Park in Saratoga County is being restored to sand dunes, scrub trees, prairie grasses and lupines needed to support growing numbers of endangered Karner blue butterflies. This winter, the state Department of Environmental Conservation will clear trees from about 20 acres near Ruggles Road, east of Route 50, to restore it to meadow suitable for growth of wild lupines, the sole food for Karner blue butterfly larvae. About 145 acres of the…

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Roger Downs: The State of Fracking

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by Tom Ellis ALBANY, NY: Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter Conservation Director Roger Downs spoke at the October 16 Save the Pine Bush dinner about where Governor Cuomo may be heading with his fracking policies.  Roger said NYS has been in “fracking limbo” since February with no established deadlines as of now.  He said natural gas prices are so low now, that fracking, were it to be approved, would be uneconomical.  Of late, Cuomo has been promoting tourism upstate, so it is possible he is…

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Surveys seek to define status of night birds

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ALBANY – On a warm, moonlit night in the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, a group of biologists listened at the foot of a grassy dune for the lilting, three-note song of a once-common nightbird that has now become rare. “We were pretty excited to hear the whippoorwill here again,” said Neil Gifford, conservation director of the preserve. “It had been 13 years since it was last heard around here.” Gifford believes intensive work in recent years to restore the rare…

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Albany Pine Bush Preserve Commission Proposes a New Plan – Mark October 18 to Attend Hearing

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ALBANY, NY: Save the Pine Bush filed suit in New York State Supreme Court over the Albany City Planning BoardÕs approval of the Roman Catholic Diocese senior housing project in the Pine Bush. The Planning Board violated the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) in approving this project on an essential Karner Blue Butterfly migration corridor. Lewis B. Oliver, Jr. filed the suit on behalf of Save the Pine Bush. “The population of Karner Blue butterflies has dropped drastically in…

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Bats in the Unprotected Pine Bush of Guilderland

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By Grace Nichols Albany County is home to many bats, from the rare Myotis genus species, so vulnerable to White-nose syndrome for which we were a ground zero, to the more common Large Brown Bat, Hoary Bats, Red bats, Silver-haired Bats and Tri-colored bats. They come in a variety of sizes and colors and they are agile flyers, plucking insects from the air, hunting with both eyesight and special echolocation, using calls far above the frequency of sounds audible to…

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Save the Pine Bush Comments on the Rapp Road Residential/Western Avenue Mixed used DEIS

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Christopher M. Walker, Legal Intern for the The Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic wrote comments for the proposed project. Here is an excerpt from his comments sent to the Guilderland Planning Board. You can view the complete comments and the appendicies online at: http://www.savethepinebush.org/Cases/Crossgates_Expansion/index.html The Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic submits the following comments on behalf of our client, Save the Pine Bush, in response to the proposed Draft Environmental Impact Statement (“EIS”) on the Rapp Road Residential/Western Avenue Mixed Use Redevelopment…

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