Environmentalism for the Twenty–First Century

This is a good article.

Quote :

A Brighter Shade of Green:
Rebooting Environmentalism for the Twenty–First Century

Environmentalists have long seen the march of human progress as the source of our planet’s ecological woes. But is Mother Nature really better off without us? Meet the heralds of the next great environmental revolution, who dare to say that the brightest promise for a radically sustainable future lies in harnessing the power of human creativity—and technology—to remake the world.

by Ross Robertson

Excerpt...
“Within environmentalists and environmentalism reside both a love for and a hatred of humanity,” one of my generation’s more controversial environmental heroes said in a now-famous speech at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in 2004. His name is Adam Werbach, and he was describing what my own experience tells me is the most difficult underside of the green mind—the “misanthropic nostalgia” for a time before modern society crashed nature’s party and ruined everything. “Because misanthropy at a political level is suicidal,” he went on, “it merits remaining private. But over the years, ordinary Americans have sensed it, the media have magnified it, and during the springtime of the environmental movement, the keenest conservatives saw an opportunity to exploit it. Ayn Rand, for one, saw environmentalists’ ‘ultimate motive [as a] hatred for achievement, for reason, for man, for life.’” I met Werbach once in Washington, DC, in 1995, not long before he was elected the youngest-ever president of the Sierra Club at age twenty-three. And I can’t help but wonder if his assessment of the current state of things would make the Sierra Club’s founding father, the great Scottish naturalist John Muir, turn over in his grave.

Around a hundred years before I did, Muir fell in love with the glades and glaciers of Yosemite and began to articulate the wilderness ethic that helped shape the birth of the American conservation movement. “In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world,” he wrote, “the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware.” As environmental historian Andrew Kirk explains it, Muir and other early conservationists constructed rigid dichotomies between nature and human civilization, between the utopian purity of the wilderness and the polluted blight of industrial society. From their perspective, the essential flaw of modern humanity was to set ourselves above and outside the natural world, harnessing its energies to our own ends through the machinery of technological enterprise. In so doing, we stepped outside the delicate ecologies of nature, risking the health and survival of species and ecosystems, including our own. What brought us down that road was the hubris of seeing ourselves as separate from nature, and the only way back was to become part of it again. Yet the irony of their position was that it defined nature in terms that made such a reunion impossible: The natural was all that was untouched by the human; the human, in turn, was nature’s erratic antithesis...

Read on here...
http://www.wie.org/j38/bright-green.asp

I've always had an interest in urban planning and design even before I went to school. They were talking about this type of thing in my landscape architecture classes 15 years ago. It's good to see it finally getting some legs.

I've long maintained we need a completely new paradigm 'bout this kind of stuff.

We could remake our world into a paradise starting tomorrow if we threw away the shackles of our outmoded thinkiing.

For instance, some suggestions.

USe the roads for bike paths.

Use a portion of backyards or even balconies for home grown vegetagbles.

Intesify urban existence so we can walk, bike take public transit.

When there's a snow storm. Shut the city down. Why spend three hours getting to work, only to work a couple of soft hours before they decide to send people home.

Shut the city down if there's a heat wave. Take siestas. Follow nature's cycle.

Understand the ramifications of all the products and services we use, and if their use is hurting people or our environment, lessen or devolve usuage.

Spread the circle of care until everyone is within the circle.

Etc, etc.

Also, it may help to have the water that runs down our gutters to go into the water supply instead of just running into the yard.

Aaron wrote:

I've always had an interest in urban planning and design even before I went to school. They were talking about this type of thing in my landscape architecture classes 15 years ago. It's good to see it finally getting some legs.

In my Architectural Design studios (during the 70s) we learned how to design "Planned Unit Developments". At that time we carefully segregated SF housing from multi-family housing, and retail from industrial.

The New Urbanism is much more integrated in theory, but the actual developments that are springing-up all around here are still inherently segregated by economic classes. Time will tell, if these new towns eventually succumb to de-gentrification, deterioration, and then re-gentrification.

All things considered, I think it's a positive move toward a more sustainable lifestyle. Some residents even drive two-seat electric cars to town, just like they did a hundred years ago.

Gnomon wrote:

The New Urbanism is much more integrated in theory, but the actual developments that are springing-up all around here are still inherently segregated by economic classes. Time will tell, if these new towns eventually succumb to de-gentrification, deterioration, and then re-gentrification.

All things considered, I think it's a positive move toward a more sustainable lifestyle. Some residents even drive two-seat electric cars to town, just like they did a hundred years ago.

Yes I agree. And the same is mostly true around me as well. "New-Urbanism" does seem to be starting to catch on however. Connecticut is planning a new commuter rail service between New Haven, Hartford and Springfield MA with several new stops in between. They plan on zoning the areas around these new stops using "new urbanisms" guidelines.

The town next to where I live is also planing a huge mixed use subdivision called "Renaissance Place" in a current brownfield area adjacent to downtown. They are planning the community to be completely self sustaining through the use of solar, geothermal and wind power among other technologies. It's exciting stuff but I remain skeptical that they will actually be able to pull it off. I guess time will tell.

BTW, did you go to school for Architecture?

I don't admit this in mixed company, but I was part of the City Planning Department in Los Angeles in the 60's. If you've ever been to LA, you might think there was no planning!

In 1986, I was recruited by the City of Phoenix Planning Department, and I saw it as an opportunity to avoid the mistakes that were made in California. Unfortunately, the majority were determined to build another megalopolis. They succeeded. I resigned in disgust.

Chaotic growth and expansion is the rule in the west, where land is plentiful. The result is people driving 50 miles or more to work every day because they don't want to live where they work. (Or they can't afford to - the further out you go, the lower the cost of land and therefore the lower the cost of housing). No one is going to ride a bicycle 50 miles each way to work and back. And in the Phoenix area, no one in his right mind would rely upon a bike when the temperature is 115.

But the real mystery is why some people will live at point A and work at point B, while others live at point B and work at point A! Public transportation isn't effective unless the majority are traveling in the same direction. More importantly, there must be a fairly well-defined employment center as a destination for public transportation to be practical. Western cities aren't as densely organized as cities in New England (where I was born). We tried something we called "Urban Villages", with employment centers mixed with residential areas, but most people prefer to live in strictly residential suburbs.

People get what they demand, then complain when they got what they asked for.

It's amazing how wasteful and inefficient urban sprawl is.

They seem to be having a bit more luck in the northwest in places like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco with the whole "smart growth" movement. I don't know if it'll ever completely catch on in the southwest.

The West has been completely mismanaged, and Phoenix - that great smog belching, golden idol to man's blind attempts at conquering nature is a prime example of everything that is wrong with the way America chose to inhabit the Intermountain West.

Instead of getting to know the character of the land, and fitting our lifestyle to that, the West was subdued by deluded Eastern mercantilists who sought to make the desert "bloom like a rose". The ways in which water rights have been dealt with are obscene, and pump agriculture is drying up (in mere decades) aquifers it took nature millions of years to fill.

Civilization won't last in the West. There's absolutely no way it can. It was unsustainable from the beginning.

I don't like how cities expand outwards. I grew up on the edge of Indianapolis. In between Indianapolis and the next town Avon was all just cornfields and woods. It was the same between Avon and Danville. I lived at the border between the city and the country. Today most of those woods and cornfields are all inhabited. So, the city and those two towns seem to be fused together as one big city. When I was a child Indianapolis had an obvious end to it but now the city keeps going and going and going... Indianapolis has ate Avon and Danville!

At this rate of growth I can see the United States being one big city from coast to coast in maybe a hundred years. I don't want my great grandchildren eating soylent green!!! I think a good solution is to have more growth going up like having more skyscrapers.

Also, another solution could be more growth going down like making cities under the ground and nature on top. I always wanted to live in a bomb shelter. So, I wouldn't mind living in an underground city. It could work just as well if only the buildings were underground but still have the roads on top. If people's homes were underground then they could have smaller yards because their houses wouldn't be taking up any space. If peoples yards are smaller then the neighborhood is smaller.

In my ideal version of Indianapolis, all the big buildings like skyscrapers would be above ground and all the little buildings would be underground. If I was to drive to a store all I would see is a parking lot and in the middle of it there would be an entrance that goes in the ground. So, in a way the parking lot would be on the stores roof. If I was to drive to a neighborhood all I would see is small house less yards with driveways going into the ground. A neighborhood being viewed from a helicopter would look like a field with roads and fences. Indianapolis would have just as many people but using up less space. It would be a city that looks like the country. Flying over it in a plane would look like nature surrounding a few skyscrapers.

In my ideal world every city would be like this and the earth would look almost untouched by Man. I believe this would be good for us and the environment.

You wouldn't happen to be part Hobbit would you?

Aaron wrote:

BTW, did you go to school for Architecture?

No, I went to school for the beer and women. The Architecture just sorta happened along the way.

Aaron wrote:

You wouldn't happen to be part Hobbit would you?

That actually reminds me of a school design project set in Arizona. The concept was shady concrete caves covered with earth and vegetation. And this was long before "green roofs" became popular. The concept was inspired by the Arcosanti apses. My college Student Center design was not nearly so quaint and picturesque though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti

Gnomon wrote:

Aaron wrote:

BTW, did you go to school for Architecture?

No, I went to school for the beer and women. The Architecture just sorta happened along the way.

I see we have more in common then just Deism then...

Gnomon wrote:

That actually reminds me of a school design project set in Arizona. The concept was shady concrete caves covered with earth and vegetation. And this was long before "green roofs" became popular. The concept was inspired by the Arcosanti apses. My college Student Center design was not nearly so quaint and picturesque though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti

Interesting.

Quote :

The West has been completely mismanaged, and Phoenix - that great smog belching, golden idol to man's blind attempts at conquering nature is a prime example of everything that is wrong with the way America chose to inhabit the Intermountain West.

Instead of getting to know the character of the land, and fitting our lifestyle to that, the West was subdued by deluded Eastern mercantilists who sought to make the desert "bloom like a rose". The ways in which water rights have been dealt with are obscene, and pump agriculture is drying up (in mere decades) aquifers it took nature millions of years to fill.

Ooops hold on a bit now. Analyze your logic. It was the same folks that turned the east into a cesspool that did the same to the west. Why do you think they shoulda stopped at Chicago? Any particular reason?

And with regards to my country, I assume you're not turning down natural gas and gas from Alberta. I assume you don't mind the intrusion of Canada's west for energy.

Helium wrote:

Ooops hold on a bit now. Analyze your logic. It was the same folks that turned the east into a cesspool that did the same to the west. Why do you think they shoulda stopped at Chicago? Any particular reason?

There is no doubt that any human interaction with the land will affect it - no matter how benign. However, the character of the land in the East was very similar to Europe (England, specifically) and thusly, once the European crops began to take hold, and once the Colonies had been remade into a new English countryside, the Colonists didn't have to really adapt their lifestyle at all from what they were traditionally used to.
However, the Intermountain West - not just the areas occupying the western portion of the North American continent, but the extremely large, extremely dry, area that stretches from northern Mexico to the southern part of Idaho, and from Rockies to the Sierras. The desert is it's own thing, dominated by two completely alien concepts to the early American mindset, and which still penetrate very little of our governmental policy or social design.
Those two aspects, as were pointed out by "The Dean of Western Writers" Wallace Stegner, are space and aridity.
Essentially, civilization as was developed in the East and in Old Europe is an unsustainable proposition in the West.

Helium wrote:

And with regards to my country, I assume you're not turning down natural gas and gas from Alberta. I assume you don't mind the intrusion of Canada's west for energy.

Canada can sell their gas to whomever they want, it makes absolutely no difference to me. To be honest I don't really understand your point.

Are you saying that I can't defend the environment of my home if I'm not willing to defend Canada's?

Well, I'm not Canadian. And I don't live there. Each human can only truly be responsible for the space they occupy. You should be the one working toward protecting the Canadian West, or Western Canadians should be anyway.

Quote :

To be honest I don't really understand your point.

My point is, come to Hamilton Ont. and I will show you the rape of Lake Ontario. For miles and miles, big stacks smoking fire, like Mordor in Lord of the Rings. THAT IS THE RAPE OF THE EAST. You seem shocked the west was raped.

I simply am shocked, that you are shocked that the west was raped after the east was raped. What did ya think. They'd have a change of heart after they destroyed the east to the mercantile God.

I'm not shocked, I'm disgusted - By the way Man has treated all parts of the earth, I just happen to be a Westerner and this area is the one closest to my heart.

Gnomon wrote:

Aaron wrote:

You wouldn't happen to be part Hobbit would you?

That actually reminds me of a school design project set in Arizona. The concept was shady concrete caves covered with earth and vegetation. And this was long before "green roofs" became popular. The concept was inspired by the Arcosanti apses. My college Student Center design was not nearly so quaint and picturesque though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti

No, I would just feel more safe and secure in a bomb shelter. I feel the opposite of claustrophobia above ground.

Also, a hobbit house wouldn't do it for me because too much of it is above ground. My ideal house would only have a bullet proof door showing.

Schizophretard wrote:

No, I would just feel more safe and secure in a bomb shelter. I feel the opposite of claustrophobia above ground.

Also, a hobbit house wouldn't do it for me because too much of it is above ground. My ideal house would only have a bullet proof door showing.

I'll have to put that on my to do list: design a house for an agoraphobic hobbit.

Gnomon wrote:

Schizophretard wrote:

No, I would just feel more safe and secure in a bomb shelter. I feel the opposite of claustrophobia above ground.

Also, a hobbit house wouldn't do it for me because too much of it is above ground. My ideal house would only have a bullet proof door showing.

I'll have to put that on my to do list: design a house for an agoraphobic hobbit.

How much do you want for one?

As environmental historian Andrew Kirk explains it, Muir and other early conservationists constructed rigid dichotomies between nature and human civilization, between the utopian purity of the wilderness and the polluted blight of industrial society. From their perspective, the essential flaw of modern humanity was to set ourselves above and outside the natural world, harnessing its energies to our own ends through the machinery of technological enterprise. In so doing, we stepped outside the delicate ecologies of nature, risking the health and survival of species and ecosystems, including our own. What brought us down that road was the hubris of seeing ourselves as separate from nature, and the only way back was to become part of it again. Yet the irony of their position was that it defined nature in terms that made such a reunion impossible: The natural was all that was untouched by the human; the human, in turn, was nature’s erratic antithesis...

To respond to the original article: The strict dichotomy between Nature/Culture is a "western" phenomena. It long predates the environmental movement -- some try to trace it to the ancient Greeks (I think that's pushing it, but the argument is out there). Seeing the world as divided into nature/culture is itself culturally determined, and not shared by many people in the world.

Our ideas about "virgin" nature are predicated on ignoring the interactions that other people have had with the environment, either because they were decimated (and thus we are ignorant of how they lived), or because we tend to view them as "natural" lesser-humans. We have inflicted this conceit on Native Americans and other groups, ignoring the facts that there were, for example, large urban settlements in the Amazon before 1492, etc etc etc.

In short, I think humans can live in harmony with their environment, and should for their own survival. But to do that we have to think seriously about how we live, not just remove ourselves from a few acres of land.

Sorry to get academic, this is my area, so... well, ignore at will.[/i]

No need to apologize, Sam, a little academic intelligence would do all of us some good!

I admit to being annoyed by environmentalists who take things to extremes, just as I am annoyed by anyone who takes anything to extremes - extreme Liberals, extreme Evangelicals, extreme Muslims....

A young woman at the local UU church was telling me that we need to get everyone to change their light bulbs "to save the planet". I explained that I had switched to fluorescent lighting about 8 years ago, and suggested she might have more luck telling people that it will save them money. She was aghast that I would cheapen her mission by making it about money. Apparently it doesn't count unless you do it for the "right" reasons!

Paul Anthony wrote:

I explained that I had switched to fluorescent lighting about 8 years ago, and suggested she might have more luck telling people that it will save them money. She was aghast that I would cheapen her mission by making it about money. Apparently it doesn't count unless you do it for the "right" reasons!

This makes me laugh! It seems that environmentalism ONLY works if it saves people money -- even if it's so little that they don't realize notice. I think that's in part because in the U.S. everything important is valued in money (look at the feminist-mothers movement, that objects to the fact that stay-at-home mothers are not monetarily valued with salaries or social security benefits, and is always trying to put a "salary" on that kind of work). Environmentalism is supposed to reduce consumption -- so that should cost less, right? Makes sense to me...

Sam Borchon wrote:

This makes me laugh! It seems that environmentalism ONLY works if it saves people money -- even if it's so little that they don't realize notice. I think that's in part because in the U.S. everything important is valued in money ...

I'm confused. So, are you saying I was wrong to replace my incandescent bulbs to save money? Is the proper motivation more important than results?