- Let's say you sit down, you have a big meal, it's so big that you have some food scraps left over, so you take 'em, you throw 'em in the trash, well, that goes to a landfill, and when it breaks down, it creates a gas called methane.

Methane is a greenhouse gas that's 20 times more harmful to the planet than CO2, so in a weird way, you could say that your food scraps are more harmful to the planet than your car's exhaust.

Well, what if there was a very simple solution to this problem?

There is, and on this episode of "Rolling Thru," we're going to find out.

We'll also explore climate threats to one of the oldest neighborhoods in the entire United States, and we'll arrive to the capital of New York and meet a few new friends.

That's all on deck right now.

This is "Rolling Thru," a bicycle travel show.

(upbeat rock music) We actually begin this episode a day before, on our rest day.

Believe it or not, this show is really hard to film, so by day six, Greg and I decided we'd earned a day just to ride, take in the view and be tourists for a change.

- [Greg] This is where cyclists come.

(relaxed guitar music) - We enjoyed everything the Mohawk Valley had to offer, and that ride carried us from Utica to Amsterdam, about 65 miles on the day.

♪ Tie your shoes, quit smoking ♪ So on day seven, we're up early to admire this stretch of the canal, knowing it's our last day riding the Erie Canal.

By afternoon, we'll reach the Hudson, and we've spent this entire journey on the Erie Canal, so it's hard to imagine leaving it behind, but in this stretch, we've kind of been on and off of it.

It's here that the canal and the Mohawk River become one and the same, and as we follow the Mohawk River east, it's worth remembering that this valley was shaped by a warming planet once before.

At the end of the last ice age, melting glaciers sent enormous flows of water through here, carving the valley we're cycling today.

Now, with the planet warming once again because of human carbon emissions, the river is shaping the region in a new way.

This street behind me is in one of the oldest residential neighborhoods in the country.

Some of the houses date back to a time before the United States even existed, and what's even wilder, not many people know about this neighborhood.

We're in the Stockade neighborhood of Schenectady, New York, This neighborhood still follows the footprint of a small 17th century village once surrounded by a wooden defensive wall, the stockade that gave the area its name.

At the time, this was a tense frontier between European trading settlements and the Haudenosaunee world that had long shaped the Mohawk Valley.

The Stockade looks like it's from another time and place, it's survived many threats over the centuries, but now, it's facing a new threat, a changing climate.

Let's find out what some people are doing to prepare for it.

(relaxed guitar music) - I think people need to, you know, be totally prepared at any point in time, know that you have your go-bag ready to just grab it and go, with your pertinent information in it or whatever.

With the awareness of flooding, people have a lot... A lot of studies have gone into play, one of the key things in the wintertime is they place two tugboats down at the Vischer Ferry Dam at lock seven.

Behind the dam is a huge flat, and it develops this huge sheet of ice, so one tug, Margot, literally goes... Sets out on a daily trek, and she zigzags her way up the Mohawk, breaking up the ice, and then, when we do have warmer weather, or the water raises a little, she helps the ice flush out over the dam.

- Because if it was a solid patch, and then, it thawed quickly, it would flood the neighborhood, it comes here... - It comes here, and when it starts backing up, then the ice rises, the water rises, and it will fill the park, and it then will eventually fill homes.

- It takes a lot more strategy on different groups and organizations to help protect this neighborhood.

- Strategy and communication are key, they've also put things into play where, west of here, where you have the movable dams and the gates that you see they put in across the locks... And then, they come in in the spring and they put the gates down and the river slowly fills up, and, you know... And when they anticipate a storm coming, they are able to better control it.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so... - I've heard that phrase a lot on this tour from different people, and it's true, I feel like a lot of these weather events require a lot of prevention.

Can you tell me why is a place like this worth preserving?

- I think we learned from our past, I think it helps us psychologically appreciate what we have, to me, that's a really important thing.

It also gives us the ability to just share with what's going on.

You can't build them nowadays the way they did back then, everything's unique, you know, all the front doors are different, all the windows are different, you know, it was... It's just exciting to me, to have that differential.

There's no right angles, it's cool to me that everything doesn't come to a right angle, or that the corner over there is that much lower, it's just... There's something cool about it, you know?

- The imperfections make it perfect.

- The imperfections do make it perfect.

- The rich stories here, the history, it's a powerful reminder of just what we have to lose, and it also shows us what we have to protect, otherwise, all of our period-piece movies and TV shows are going to have to be green-screened, and nobody wants that.

All jokes aside, these are people's lives, and flooding along the Mohawk affects more than just the Stockade.

Numerous neighborhoods and villages stand in harm's way if another major flood hits.

The Mohawk River and its valley form a vast watershed fed by a network of tributaries stretching across the region, and with the weather becoming more unpredictable, awareness alone isn't enough.

Fortunately, a team of scientists is working to protect and manage this vital watershed, so I'm stopping by Cohoes Falls, where the river puts on quite a show, to talk with Britt Westergard from the Mohawk River Basin Program.

These folks know how just important this river is to the communities that depend on it.

- It's the largest tributary to the Hudson, it's almost a quarter of the Hudson River's drainage area.

The Mohawk River, the reservoirs and the aquifer that are part of it are a major source of drinking water for folks upstate.

- So it's a pretty important body of water then.

- It really is, the Mohawk River Basin Program was formed in 2009 to preserve, conserve, and protect the environmental resources in the Mohawk River Basin.

- [Patrick] Can you express why this work matters?

- With climate change, precipitation events are only going to get more frequent and more intense, and we're seeing that from storm water runoff and also from flooding issues.

2011, Irene, and then, the follow-on, the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee really showed us how vulnerable the watershed can be to the effects of intense rainfall, that was sort of where... That got our attention, so there was significant flooding in the western portions of the Mohawk watershed, and as a result of that, the DEC actually commissioned flood studies for 13 tributaries to the Mohawk, and those flood studies provided communities along the creeks with information about their flood vulnerability, but not just information, they also provided potential engineering solutions for that flood vulnerability.

I mean, I have a dozen of the success... Dozens of success stories from the... Those flood studies that... Where they were able to remove dozens of homes from the floodplain, they were able to remove bridges that didn't... That were impeding flood flow, they were impeding ice jams.

Mohawk River Basin Program helps support a river... A realtime monitoring system for ice jams through Schenectady, and that's in partnership with the U.S.

Geological Survey, and what that basically is a series of webcams and also river level monitoring stations, and together, those form sort of a dashboard where emergency management can take a look and see what the status is of ice jams at any time, day or night.

I think the secret sauce of the Mohawk Basin Program is really that... The collaboration portion of it, the bringing together of stakeholders as we offer assistance in putting together goals and deciding how we all as a community want to work together and towards what goals we want to work for conservation, I think that part is really key to be able to affect change.

(upbeat rock music) - Leaving Cohoes Falls, we coast along until we meet the Hudson River.

From here on out, our journey turns south instead of east, and we'll follow the Hudson all the way downstate.

(upbeat rock music) Sitting at the crossroads of the Hudson and the Mohawk River, this was the only easy passage through the Appalachian barrier back in the day, and that made this region a natural hub for trade and travel, it's one of the reasons Albany became New York's capital.

♪ Mother's mother says I'm tall ♪ ♪ Sister knows I'm sick ♪ ♪ I was nimble, I was quick ♪ For over 225 years, this city has been home to the state legislature.

What gets voted on here becomes law across the state.

Ideas that flow through here affect millions, so in the race to solve the climate crisis, maybe the next big ideas could come from this city, and maybe it's time lawmakers saw those solutions in action.

Our next stop might be the most important, because sometimes, the simplest solutions can also be the most impactful.

Do you ever feel guilty about throwing away your food waste?

Do you even think about it?

What if you could do something with it that was good for the planet?

Well, I'm at the Radix environmental center to show how this team is tackling food waste one E-bike at a time.

You're kidding.

- And we've... Yeah.

- This was all a parking lot.

- This was all a parking lot, right?

And over the years, we've just gone about the work of ripping up the asphalt and building up soil, planting gardens, planting fruit trees, you know, transforming what had been just a lot strewn with abandoned cars and trash into a thriving center, you know, an educational center, showing folks how to do that, right?

So... - Like, standing right here, you wouldn't even know we were in downtown Albany.

- Right?

And significant temperature differences as well, right?

Really just being, one, under the shade of trees, but the constant evapotranspiration is happening under the leaves of trees, makes it literally a much cooler environment.

- [Patrick] And you have chickens.

- Yeah, so they're a big part of our system, right?

All these food scraps, and wood chips, and brown leaves, grass clippings, all the stuff that's getting thrown in the dump every day where it's turning into methane, the stuff we want to be intercepting, composting on the surface of the planet, turning into soil to grow nutrient-dense food for people, particularly in food desert communities such as this, and there's a lot of ways to make compost and we do a lot of ways, but one of the ways is what we call chicken composting, which is, you know, what our friends here help us out with, you know, there's, yeah, a lot of food waste that's generated in the city, but stuff that's too mushy and too rotten, which a lot of it is, can go to these guys who are happy to eat it, and they up-cycle those nutrients into eggs and lay eggs, and that goes out into our farm shares as a way to get food back into the community, and then, as this material accumulates, we'll dig it out and we bring it down here, put it into piles, what we call windrows, or sometimes, it's a compost pile, the stuff heats up.

I mean, this actually at one point was as high as 160 degrees, starting to cool off, right?

- [Patrick] And it just gives off heat.

- Yeah, that heat is being generated by the microorganisms, primarily bacteria, right?

Who are eating all that residual food in the chicken manure and generating heat in the process, which literally cooks the compost pile, and then, when it's all finally broken down, I mean, this is the end product right here, you know, finished, really beautiful compost, and you can see it's teaming with worms, teaming with insect life... - [Patrick] Yep, and a little buggy right there.

- Literally billions of microorganisms, so I mean, this is what really healthy living soil looks like and smells like, right?

This is how to regenerate the health of soils in urban environments where they are non-existent, degraded or contaminated.

- (laughs) Re-wilding cities.

- Yeah, the fascinating thing is, right, towns and cities everywhere are trying to figure out how to do this, but we got to get it to the point where it's just this ingrained in practice, just one of the easiest things that we can do that's going to actually be gaining some ground against a warming planet is to decouple ourselves from methane production in landfills.

- [Patrick] So you might be thinking, "What about winter?"

Good question.

- Here, this is our solar greenhouse where we're able to keep plants alive and growing throughout the year.

You can come in here in the middle of the winter, and if the sun is shining, it'll be 75, 80 degrees in here, pretty amazing, we've got an aquaponics system here, which is a way to raise fish and plants together, they make ammonia as a byproduct, which is just a type of nitrogen, right?

So instead of just collecting it with a plastic filter and throwing it out, we have it flow through the roots of this right here, which is watercress, which is a spicy edible green, you can eat it.

It's kind of, like, arugula a little bit, but, I mean, you can see the water flowing through its roots right here.

By the time it's passed all the way through, it goes back into the fish tank, it's been purified, and the bacteria living on the roots of the plants convert it into a form of nitrogen that they can use as a fertilizer, so this keeps going about in a cycle.

These are shiitake mushroom logs down here, right?

We're big advocates of growing mushrooms in the city as well, because mushrooms, unlike plants, don't need sunlight for photosynthesis, right?

And there's a lot of vacant lots that might be too shady to grow plants, but are fine places for growing mushrooms, and when we want to get these mushrooms to produce, we'll pull 'em off this rack, soak 'em in the fish tank overnight, and then, a couple days later, we've got mushrooms growing out of it 'cause the mushroom thinks, "Oh, there's been a rainstorm," when it's wet and it thinks, "This is a good time to produce mushrooms," so yeah, works out pretty good.

- That's genius.

- [Scott] Works out good.

This is a little heavy, but if... - [Patrick] Yeah, I can help.

- You and I lift it together, we can show what roots - [Patrick] Ooh, that is heavy.

- Look like underneath here, get a good visual on that.

This is an artificial floating wetland and we deploy these in the Hudson River, kind of like an aquaponic system, but it's, in this case, the entire Hudson River and we deploy them near where there are combined sewage overflow discharge pipes, and so, when we get a heavy rain event and we get sewage overflows, the sewage flows through those roots right there and like the aquaponic system, bacteria break down the sewage and clean the water, and here, we're just, yeah, again, using nothing but plants and bacteria to address these persistent environmental pollution issues in a simple and in an affordable manner.

- [Patrick] This is all so simple, but so genius.

- Well, you know, simplicity is a key design component that you want to take into place, right?

Because if you really want it to go broad scale, it's got to be simple enough and affordable enough that a great number of people are going to be able to replicate it without needing a ton of resources, and if not everybody in the backyard, but at least on the neighborhood scale, right?

(gentle piano music) De-carbonization is going to necessitate a re-localization of food production, and I don't know if we have to grow 100% of our food for everybody who lives in the city, and we're always going to have a close relationship with the farms in the near vicinity of the city, right?

But 20%, I think we can do that, and really importantly, you know, it connects people, particularly kids, with their food, knowing where it comes from and how to actually grow it is an important knowledge to have.

- [Patrick] And if sustainability through cyclical systems by way of chickens, and fish, and plants, and mushrooms wasn't enough, they also have a complete solar station, a fleet of cargo bikes and a fully electric mini-truck that take Radix to the streets collecting food scraps from homes and restaurants around the neighborhood, but why stop at composting?

Radix is already onto the next solution.

They're out there planting and watering new trees.

- We fill up the back of that with water jugs that we bring to newly-planted trees throughout the city, so we have communities in the south end of Albany that have asthma rates approaching 30% largely due to exposure from particularly emissions from diesel trucks and buses, and Interstate 787 right there, right?

So we don't want to contribute to those ills while we're trying to go about doing the work of remedying them, right?

And trees play a huge role in air purification as well in addition to shading, right?

Those leaves filter out air pollutants.

- [Patrick] It's time to see it in action.

- Yeah, we do collection on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so the trikes and the mini-service are... Mini-truck are in service on those days, and then, we do street tree water, these are actually some of the trees that we planted right here, on currently Fridays.

The advantage of doing it in a place like Albany, right?

Is that it shares a lot in common, environmentally, socially, economically, with a lot of the other upstate cities and, you know, kind of proverbial rust belt towns, right?

That... We come with a model that works here, there's a good chance that aspects of it are going to be replicable in other communities.

- Yeah, I feel like you're kind of showing a model for what the rest of the state could do.

I think.

- Trying, you know, that's part of it, that it can be done, can make... Take that leap from kind of abstract notions, vague notions of what sustainability is to seeing it operationalized, what does it look like on the ground?

What does it taste like?

Smell like?

How does this actually work, right?

(upbeat rock music) - This is a great example of a simple idea making a big impact.

If there was a Radix center on every block in every neighborhood, who knows what our cities could achieve?

When you sit right next to the seat of power, you have to act accordingly.

For the folks at Radix, they let action speak loudly.

They take theory and put it into practice, and teach others how to do the same.

These simple, scalable solutions are exactly the kind of ideas that can get through to lawmakers, and in a city like this, that's key, but Radix isn't alone.

There are other groups working to show state legislators what the rest of our cities could look like.

Capital Streets is a new advocacy organization geared towards transportation only about two-and-a-half years old.

When they first started, they acted as a kind of vox populi, explaining complicated street plans to the people most affected by them, but now, they're shifting gears and advocating for projects of their own.

The most ambitious so far?

A plan to connect U Albany with RPI, two of the largest colleges in the Capital Region, and around here, that's no small task.

So I met up with James Rath, the executive director, to ride around and see how this young group is trying to make the Capital easier to get around without a car, but first, I had a delivery to make.

Scott from Radix sent me with a gift for James.

- Hell yeah.

- To give you a paw-paw.

- That's awesome.

- [Patrick] So yeah, he said it's the first paw-paw of the season, so... - Custard-y.

(Patrick laughing) - [Greg] That's what he said it would taste like, so... (Patrick laughing) - [Patrick] Okay, and now for the bikes.

- We don't have one big centric city, here in the Capital Region, we're more of this constellation of small cities, as some people put it, it means that we... You know, we have a lot of different municipalities making different decisions that really heavily impact people even on, like, a short commute.

- So this involves... This is really, like, a Herculean effort to get multiple, yeah, municipal governments to get on board to bridge these things.

- Yeah, I mean, you start looking at all the local municipalities, and then, you get involved with DOT and our NPO, the Capital Region Transportation Council, our transportation authority, CDTA, then trying to work with state legislature and all that other stuff, I mean, it's a... It's certainly a full-time effort for an organization.

- Being at the seat of the New York government, do you think that there's a model you guys can bring to other places to kind of, like, roll this out across the state?

- I think more than that, we've been learning from peer organizations across the state, like, being that we're two-and-a-half years old, you know, our counterparts in Buffalo and Rochester, you know, Go Bike Buffalo, Reconnect Rochester, Transportation Alternatives, Riders Alliance, those folks down in New York City that you're probably familiar with, because every region is a little bit different, but we do... We are affected by similar problems, you know, these small cities in upstate New York, like, we're all kind of on the edge of this rust belt and we're trying to, you know, figure out what we're going to do post-pandemic, Albany and Troy, they need to become social centers, right?

They need to become these places where people want to be for social connection, for having experiences, for going to events.

I think we have also a unique opportunity being here in Albany in that legislators from all over the state are coming here for a good chunk of their year, you know, they're coming here for the budget and the legislative sessions, they have offices, you know, we can almost see the capitol from here, and if we can show what Albany can do, I know that we can also inspire legislators to bring those things back to their districts and do them really well elsewhere.

(upbeat guitar music) - [Patrick] The work that Capital Streets does can seem daunting.

It involves coordination with city agencies, planning with regulators and authorities, and trying to build a model legislators could eventually roll out across the entire state, but taking it one pedal stroke at a time, James doesn't lose sight of what's most important.

- One thing that comes to mind is just, like, who benefits from our work?

And, you know, sometimes, people will see me on a bike and they'll... With my helmet clipped to my backpack or something like that, and they'll think that, you know, the advocacy work that we're doing is for people like me to be able to, like, ride more, or, like, more places or something like that, and I think it's important to point out that, like, this is the kind of work that benefits everybody, you know, unless you're someone who really enjoys speeding through, like, a school zone... (James laughing) - Which some do.

- (laughs) Yeah.

Then the work of Capital Streets is for you, you know, it's the kind of thing that makes it safer, easier, less stressful to live in Albany and Troy and the surrounding area, you know, I think a lot about, like, young families and people who can't allow their kids to go out in the street and play like I got to when I was a kid, and, you know, I think about that as a... Those people, how they would benefit from having safer, better, more intentionally-designed streets in their neighborhood.

(James laughing) - I think that's an hopeful goal.

Who would be against that?

(James laughing) People who speed in school zones.

- (laughs) Yeah.

Come talk to me.

(people laughing) - If you speed in the school zone, go talk to James.

- Yeah, yeah, we'll have a face-to-face, we'll... A heart-to-heart, we can hook you up with, like, a therapist or something, I don't know.

(laughs) - James, thank you for riding with me, thanks for talking to me, this has been a pleasure.

- (laughs) Yeah.

- [Patrick] As the sun sets over Albany, we join Albany Social Cycling for one more ride through the capitol.

This weekly group ride is fun first, a chance to explore the city together and end the night with some music and drinks, but going beyond that, it also serves as a visual signal to the people who make the laws here that our cities are meant for people.

We've seen how planning shapes the places we live, from groups and scientists working to protect communities from the unexpected to organizations building new systems and thinking smarter and simpler about sustainability, and advocates pushing for streets that make room for a new way forward.

In a lot of ways, Albany is becoming an incubator for what a greener city can look like, and maybe one day, that ripples out across the rest of the state, because sometimes, ideas start with something as simple as getting people together and going for a ride.

(people cheering) On the next episode of "Rolling Thru," it's rain and some more rain, but I'll also get to touch some prehistoric remains and find a friend while I learn about the future of wildfires.

♪ And I keep playing the same song because it moves me ♪ (upbeat guitar music) ♪ Sometimes, I feel the way I light the room ♪ (upbeat guitar music) ♪ As warm as any sun that shines ♪ ♪ like only can the moon ♪ ♪ Yet for all that I can be ♪ ♪ I am more when I can see how bad he wants to be my fool ♪ (upbeat guitar music) ♪ And I'm learning to get over feeling small ♪ ♪ Yeah, most people, when they meet me now ♪ ♪ They treat me really tall ♪ ♪ Yet for all that I may be ♪ ♪ I have nothing so quickly when he don't call ♪ (faint speaking)