Some of the roads in Quincy look different lately – they are decked out with green paint and green posts. What’s going on? The answer is that Quincy streets are slowly becoming more complete. A “Complete Street” is one that provides safe and accessible options for all travel modes – foot, bicycle, public transit, and vehicles – to people of all ages and abilities. If a street has bike lanes like the ones newly installed in Quincy, biking is the fun choice to get where you’re going – as well as the environmentally friendly one! 

In 2018 Quincy adopted a new Complete Streets policy, and in 2019 the Commonwealth awarded Quincy over $300,000 of Complete Streets Grant Funding. The locations redesigned with that funding include:

The QCAN political committee has gotten off to a strong start in 2021. We’ve outlined our goals, including: 

• Try to meet with every Quincy elected official or environmental policymaker and begin a dialogue about collaborating on our shared goals. 
• Alert our network to important climate legislation and the opportunities to contact legislators to ask them to act in favor of our climate.
• Hold community forums to highlight opportunities for positive mitigations for the environment.
• Be a resource to the community, leaders, and other environmental groups.

A forest ecologist who grew up in the logging area of British Columbia, Dr. Suzanne Simard has found that forest trees share carbon and nutrients, and even communicate, via a network of underground fungi. In Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest – an extension of her well-loved TED talk – Simard chronicles her journey of discovery, where she begins to see trees as interdependent, cooperative creatures rather than solely a source of timber and pulp. 

QCAN members enjoyed the chance to gather together in person at in two local cleanups this month. We joined Quincy Tree Alliance members to gather litter along Fenno Street and neighboring marshes as part of Greener, Cleaner Quincy on May 1. Members of QYouth Climate Movement (our youth chapter) joined Quincy High School’s Green Team and Science National Honors Society to clean up Nickerson Beach in Squantum on May 15.

QYouth Climate Movement, QCAN’s youth chapter, has been working to bring more vegetarian and vegan lunch options into QPS schools. More than a third of the world’s greenhouse gases come from food production, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Beef has by far the largest carbon footprint, followed by lamb, mutton, and dairy. Scientists say that a shift in our diets is necessary if we hope to keep global warming under 1.5ºC.

Thanks to heartbreaking images of seals caught in abandoned fishing nets, turtles with straws stuck in their noses, and seabirds with bellies full of litter, most of us are aware of the effects of discarded plastic on animal life. But not everyone realizes how much plastic contributes to climate change throughout its life cycle, from the extraction and transportation of the fossil fuels used to create it to the management of plastic waste and its ongoing impact as it degrades. The World Economic Forum estimates that 4-8% of annual global oil consumption is related to plastics, and if current trends continue this could rise to 20% of oil consumption by 2050.

QCAN member Jon Gorey shared this post from his House & Hammer blog to give us some ideas how to reduce our plastic use at home:

Please join the Quincy Climate Action Network on Wednesday, May 19, 7–8pm, for an online discussion with Ian Coghill and Grace Li of Conservation Law Foundation about Sprague Energy’s apparent violations of its environmental permit at its terminal at 740 Washington Street, Quincy. 

Sprague Energy is required to use good engineering practices to assess risks from climate change and to pro-actively prepare for extreme weather events, which as we know are becoming ever more frequent. Conservation Law Foundation has found that the earthen berms around Sprague’s terminal – which were designed to contain an oil spill caused by a leak or storm event – appear to be improperly maintained and are eroding away into the Town River. CLF and QCAN would like to inform local residents who might be affected by an oil spill to see if we might work together to pressure Sprague to address the situation.